Electrical retailer

Taran Ozagir is a Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing Manager who has a track record working with government bodies and large retail firms. Toby and Taran first worked together when Taran was looking after D&I and wellbeing for a large electronics retailer. Toby delivered some structured strategy workshops to his senior management team before creating a report to present back to Taran and his manager.

Taran Ozagir is a Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing Manager who has a track record working with government bodies and large retail firms. Toby and Taran first worked together when Taran was looking after D&I and wellbeing for a large electronics retailer. Toby delivered some structured strategy workshops to his senior management team before creating a report to present back to Taran and his manager.

 

Engaging leaders

Taran’s impression of the workshop was that it wasn’t just a knowledge dump. Instead, Toby got inside the leaders’ heads to explore what was wanted out of the inclusion programme, combining this with expert guidance.

As part of the session, participants captured obstacles and challenges and related D&I back to the company’s mission, vision, and values. Taran felt he left the session with good insight into people’s mindsets.

Taran felt what was especially useful was utilising the Inclusive Growth model for the maturity assessment. He said ‘This particularly resonated since people could clearly see what path they were on. It helped them envisage where to plot themselves currently as well as where they could end up and what they could achieve. The scorecard made it a tangible session which was digestible by the company.’

Toby had planned the session to shift the conversation about diversity and inclusion and engage leaders around its strategic importance to the organisation. Bringing in the Inclusive Growth framework was about how can diversity and inclusion help a retail business grow. In this case, the firm also wanted to ensure that the workforce represented its diverse customer base.

 

Key themes

After the workshop, Toby reported back on the key themes. These helped to shape the existing strategy by looking for areas where it could be updated and given some final polish.

Taran said of the report, ‘The findings were tangible and clear. We drew from that for our strategy and planning for the next steps. The transcripts and the session recordings were shared with the wider management teams so that was useful for keeping them involved too.’

Reflecting on the impact of the work Taran believes it fostered a sense of collective leadership around diversity and inclusion. He said ‘It’s easy for an inclusion manager [like me] to tell a company what they should do. The session with Toby got everybody into this collective place where they agreed on what they should do. The report informed that too.’

 

Working with Toby

When planning to work with a consultant it’s important to assess what’s out there and whether their skill set is the right fit for the organisation.

Taran’s experience of working with Toby is that he keeps it ‘simple’. This ability is important when people are navigating the potentially complex issues that can arise. Taran’s feedback about Toby was that his approach to inclusion is pragmatic and very agile.

Taran summarised his experience working with Toby. ‘I think that he is really personable and easy to get on with and that is so helpful. I’ve worked with Toby a couple of times and on this project, he worked well to engage quite a complex leadership team. What you tend to find in very large organisations is good intentions here and pockets of good stuff there What’s difficult is to pull that all together to speak to one narrative that delivers against the strategic goals of the business, but Toby does that.’