Published works

Having effective diversity and inclusion (D&I) in emergency management organisations (EMOs) can improve their internal performance, and contribute to organisational and community capacities to manage disaster risk and resilience building. A diverse workforce provides a broad range of perspectives, experiences and skills. An inclusively-managed diverse workforce can support better decision making. It can also support better management of the increasingly unfamiliar risks that society is experiencing. Inclusion is also central to building productive working relationships and trust with the community. However, the benefits of D&I are poorly understood, and are often overlooked because they are hard to measure and account for.

This paper summarises the main concepts, findings and the framework that has been developed to support more effective management and measurement of D&I in EMOs.

Key findings in relation to D&I in the emergency management sector (EMS) are:

• Inclusion plays a pivotal role in the management of human and social risk associated with natural hazards for EMOs and communities. How people are included needs to be determined from their perspective and not imposed.
• Considerable work is needed to improve the measurement of D&I and its impacts on organisations and communities by developing appropriate performance metrics, data collection methods, data analysis and support tools.
• Management of D&I has, to date, been largely implicit – pockets of skills and capabilities can be found in all organisations. These tend to be less formally acknowledged, rewarded or valued than conventional technical skills and capabilities.
• D&I capability and skills need to be developed as part of strategic workforce management and integrated into organisational strategic, transformational change and risk management frameworks.
• Where implementation has been managed and measured appropriately, economic benefits were found for organisations and communities. Data paucity and a lack of appropriate economic models in relation to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities present considerable challenges to effectively calculating return on investment of some D&I programs. Overall benefits to the community are also hard to measure.
• Although diverse communities are recognised as having specific capabilities and skills important for building resilience and inclusion, gaps in relationships limit the community’s ability to engage effectively in response and resilience-building activities. Further work is needed to identify these more fully.