METRO AG is a multinational wholesale company headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. METRO employs over 90,000 employees serving 17 million customers in over 600 locations around the world. In 2023, METRO commissioned Global Diversity Practice (GDP) to embark on a program of raising awareness on the topic of Unconscious Bias, which had been identified as a focus area under the ‘ONE METRO’ pillar of the recently launched METRO Fundamentals, and as a priority of the METRO ESG Strategy.
Key Deliverables
METRO had already taken initial steps towards improving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and were committed both to the UN Sustainable Development Goals around reducing inequality and promoting gender equality, as well as being benchmarked against the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index. METRO had invited a guest speaker to deliver a keynote on the topic of Unconscious Bias at a leadership conference. This keynote served as a catalyst for addressing Unconscious Bias across METRO, and METRO identified a key deliverable of rolling out a series of workshops to their top 3000+ leaders across the world, as well as deploying Conscious Inclusion training and resources to all employees across the organisation.
Our initial diagnostic focused on creating a compelling business case for DEI at METRO, through connecting inclusion with the key business priorities, ESG progress, a more inclusive workplace culture, and key METRO competencies and leadership training material. Our diagnostic included interviews with METRO leaders from different regions, which helped us to uncover that there were many examples of DEI good practice at METRO; for example, many of METRO’s regions had already engaged with this topic, through creating training resources and embedding the principles of inclusion into hiring practices. METRO’s leadership were also supportive of this topic, and participated in a video that was used in internal communications to outline how unconscious bias could get in the way of their future success.
The diagnostic was critical to understand the stage of maturity that METRO was at, and to establish a baseline from which to build further awareness and embed inclusive behaviours into everyday working practices. One of the first outcomes of our work was an intentional shift from focussing on the topic of unconscious bias onto conscious inclusion. By putting inclusion at the core of METRO’s efforts, we can achieve a greater shift in mindset, and focus on what we can practically do in terms of our everyday behaviours. We collaborated with key METRO stakeholders to define conscious inclusion in a simple and easy-to-understand way; conscious inclusion means actively taking steps to be more inclusive in the way we think, speak, and behave with one another.
This model was used as the framework for an eLearning module which we created on the topic of Conscious Inclusion for all METRO employees. The module served as a 30-minute introduction to the topic area, structured over four sections. It was created and launched across METRO in November 2023 in both English and German, and the resources for the module were made available to other METRO regions to translate and deploy as needed.
In parallel with the deployment of the eLearning module, GDP collaborated with METRO on creating a 3-hour Conscious Inclusion workshop for METRO leaders. This was first piloted with the METRO board, who actively participated and endorsed the program, before being cascaded to METRO’s top 3000 leaders across the globe. GDP tapped into our extensive trainer network across Europe and Asia-Pacific to facilitate this global roll-out, which included over 50 workshops in total across Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Czechia, Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, Croatia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India, Turkey, and Hong Kong.
Impact
As of July 2024, the program has been cascaded to the vast majority of the top 3000 leaders across METRO, and in many regions a further cascade is underway to reach manager populations. Feedback from the workshops has been overwhelmingly positive, including training evaluation scores that exceed METRO’s high benchmark for training excellence.
METRO countries are now building on the action plans they developed as part of the Conscious Inclusion program to further embed the principles of Conscious Inclusion into their regional people strategies and everyday practices.
