Overseas housing

Housing: The future is inclusive

By Taylor Skirda, Culture, Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator, Ottawa Community Housing Corporation

Working in community housing, you quickly realise it’s all about the people.

It’s about the employees within our organisations who want to make a difference in the communities they work in, and it’s about the tenants who live in those communities. Innovation happens when the two align.

For us as organisations, we must be representative of the diversity present within the communities we serve in order to better understand and serve their needs.

From a corporate performance lens, there’s a plethora of research demonstrating the positive correlation between diversity in the workplace and the benefits to decisionmaking, productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and employee performance.

With an aging workforce, the sector is going through a talent replenishment. This is a unique opportunity to look at different ways to build a workforce that reflects the communities that we serve.

Within our organisations, we need to look at diversity, equity and inclusion as a priority and competitive advantage, with strategies and metrics that promote accountability. It’s time to evolve the discussion into tangible change with concrete tools.

To begin, there’s a lack of research and quantitative employment data within the sector of all job levels (not just at the leadership and board level) that could help us to understand the lack of progression to leadership roles and other gaps we face.

As a sector, we should partner with a global diversity, equity and inclusion organisation to create a standard for the industry, to provide a social network and resource hub for housing organisations to tap into and share.

This global housing DE&I network would also provide a framework with an overall strategy (that would, of course, be flexible based on the tenant population of the region), and progress evaluation on how each involved organisation is doing regarding tracking progress and the development of strategies and tools to address DE&I needs. Best practices can then be trained out, shared and centrally administered through the DE&I partner organisation.

A deep sense of community and purpose is a major driver for the new generations of employees – and as a sector it’s a unique advantage we have, as we have a direct impact on people who really need it.

Given the nature of our work, we naturally attract people who want to make a difference in their communities. But we also need to provide them with a corporate culture where their diversity can thrive, be acknowledged, celebrated and promoted.

We need to create a culture of inclusivity and belonging, where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work, and provide an environment where they have the capacity to work their best.

Many tenant-facing positions deal with people of various cultures, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious backgrounds, and different perspectives and mental health.

Providing the necessary tools to our employees – such as cross-cultural competency training, employee resource groups, trauma-informed intervention, mental health first aid, unconscious bias training, to name just a small few – can better prepare them to service our communities.

Creating an inclusive culture will impact not only our organisations but also impact the communities in which we work. As a sector, we have the potential to make a difference by prioritising DE&I efforts, continuously discussing ways to provide equity, and break down systemic barriers.

This looks like engaging our employees, our leadership, our communities, and integrating DE&I into everything that we do.