Bermuda’s insurance industry is making steady progress in diversity, equity and inclusion, but consultant Rachel Field feels there is still more work to be done.

“What we are really talking about is culture change, and culture change takes time,” Ms Field said. “I see the needle moving. I see more opportunity and I feel a level of optimism.”

Ms Field splits her time between Bermuda and New York, and is the founder of R K Field Ltd, a New York-based company that develops diversity, equity and inclusion programmes for organisations. She offers her services on the island through Bermuda company Expertise.

Last month she gave a virtual training workshop for Biltir members on rooting out unconscious bias.

“Rooting out unconscious bias is a good first step to understanding how some of our subjective decision-making could be unintentionally excluding people,” Ms Field said. “We are all human beings and human beings are fallible decision makers.”

She said becoming more aware of how our own lenses and experiences influence our decisions, and looking at ways to mitigate that, can help us, individually, move our own “needles”.

But Ms Field said unconscious bias training can not be the only step a company takes.

She recommended that organisations take a systems approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.

“If you look at the employee life cycle, at every part there is an opportunity to ask, are we being inclusive and have we created any barriers to inclusion?” she said. “How do you source potential candidates to come and work for you, and then once you source them, what happens during that interview process?

“How are they on boarded and brought into the organisation? Once they are in the organisation, what is their experience in terms of opportunity for development and growth, and ultimately promotion? It is about looking at the entirety of the life cycle and always asking the questions what are we doing to be more inclusive? What are we doing to make sure that opportunity in our organisation is equitable and fair?”

Ms Field said it is also important to closely examine the inclusivity training that organisational leaders receive.

“If you define what inclusive leadership looks like, and then you include that in how you evaluate people’s leadership, that is one way to create accountability,” she said.

And diversity and inclusion pays off, financially. A 2015 study by McKinsey and Company found that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity were more likely to have financial returns above the national industry medians.

But Ms Field said diverse teams also have to be managed well.

“It is a lot easier when you have a room full of people making a decision when everyone thinks alike,” she said. “You can move to things more rapidly, but you are not necessarily getting the best decision because you have limited the number of perspectives that go into making that decision. There is a tie to innovation, and a tie to employee engagement. People who feel engaged are more productive.”

She remembered talking to one woman in the insurance field, who, for a long time, hid her sexual orientation at work.

The woman told her that for years she felt like she could not bring her whole self to work.

“She said now that I see the commitment of my organisation to diversity, I feel like I can be fully present,” Ms Field said.

Ms Field said it is rewarding to watch an organisation shift so that people in it can feel comfortable being who they really are.

She finds the conversations she has with the leaders that she coaches endlessly fascinating and interesting.

“I am working with several clients now, where I am doing a full systems audit,” she said. “I love digging through all of their information to understand the big picture and plan a way forward. It is like a puzzle. The challenges we are all experiencing now as a society, those challenges are the same in organisations, because organisations are made up of people. So I think all of us, as a society, are still wrestling with how to be truly inclusive.”

Ms Field has been working on diversity, equity and inclusion for two decades. She started the first office of diversity and inclusion at Axa Equitable in New York, and has since worked for different organisations on everything from diversity, equity and inclusion to leadership work.

She started R K Field two and a half years ago.

For more information see www.rkfield.com or e-mail rachel@rkfield.com.