“Leave No One Behind” It is the central and transformative promise of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is about ending discrimination and exclusion, reducing inequalities and vulnerabilities that do not allow people to fulfill their potential, which ends up harming humanity as a whole. Changing this reality is everyone’s task, because many of these barriers that limit the personal development of some groups are the result of social customs or discriminatory practices, which are generally based on ignorance and prejudice or unconscious bias.
Under the three components that guide our company: diversity, equity and inclusion, we implemented five years ago in Argentina a program that the bank had been developing globally to employ neurodiverse talents, seeking to continue incorporating new profiles in our areas of technology, operations and finance.
The challenge was great, because there was a lot to learn. We partner with experts in the field and adapt our selection processes to replace traditional face-to-face interviews with other types of evaluations that account for the aptitudes of each profile, we train our leaders with tools to interact and provide feedback on the performance of new team members and we implement mentoring and support processes within the company to be able to respond to the different needs of each one.
From the experience of these years, we can say today that the benefit was enormous and had “Collateral damage” unexpected and extremely positive. Not only are there people in our team who found the opportunity to develop in a market that presented them with barriers, but also all those involved obtained invaluable learning, broke down prejudices and even improved their ways of working based on the experience.
Having them in our day to day work taught us that diversity is much more than the sum of individuals “different”because it also means more enriching exchanges and an impact that ends up benefiting the company in general, adding value to the business and improving the service we provide to our clients.
Equity is that, even if we start from different places or have different needs when we start, we can all enjoy the same opportunities. If as a society we want to contribute to a more diverse world, it is mandatory to put aside prejudices and adapt to others. This means not only facilitating access to work but also accompanying growth every day, in a natural way, so that each person challenges their own limits and manages to develop. Experience shows us that, in the end, much less effort is required than one imagines, because when we open ourselves up to meet people, we discover everything they are capable of doing if we give them the opportunity. With diverse teams, we improve both the human quality of our people and our results as a company. A perfect combination.
Source: Ambito
