How inclusive is your brand?
Winitha works with fashion brands and retailers to make DEI your DNA - embedding inclusion and belonging into all facets of your business, brand identity, customer experience, and culture.
More and more, consumers and employees are looking to see:
a more accurate representation of society in a company’s marketing materials;
an inclusive and welcoming in-store experience, regardless of identity; and
that a company’s commitment to diversity goes beyond marketing and is reflected throughout the organisation internally and externally through deep work over the long-term.
Fashion brands and retailers who are not proactive about leading the way on inclusion, are likely to experience severe impacts to their business via digital consumer commentary in the public sphere (i.e cancel culture), through word of mouth within communities as well as expose their business to risk and reputation damage.
Once consumer and employee trust is lost, it is hard to get it back.
The future for fashion brands and retailers is brand empathy and conscious capitalism.
Winitha works with fashion brands and retailers to transform their businesses at every level so that inclusion and belonging are integrated into brand identity, organisational culture, and the consumer experience.
Ways we can work together
Psychological Safety
Psychosocial hazards, respect at work, speak up cultures and psychological safety: The role and responsibility of leaders, people managers and people.
Research shows time and time again that psychological safety is the biggest driver of high-performing teams and individuals and the foundation, the absolute bedrock of inclusive teams and cultures. It's also the number one driver to produce creativity and innovation that stands out from the crowded marketplace.
In this session, we unpack what it is, what it isn't, what microaggressions are and how they differ from person to person and impacts a teams performance. We also get clear on what psychological safety looks like in the workplace and amongst teams, and together we unpack basic steps to create it for yourself and others on a daily basis consistently as we journey towards inclusion in our business. Importantly, we will also look at how psychological safety links to respect at work, psychosocial hazards and speak up cultures. This is an interactive session and there will be time at the end of the session for Q&A.
This program can be tailored for the audiences below and is necessary training for all senior leaders and people managers.
Learning Outcomes
Learn why psychological safety is important to your, your team and the business, in particular in the context of psychosocial hazards (work health and safety)
Understand the connection between psychological safety and performance
Get clear on what psychological safety is and isn't
Understand what psychological safety looks like in a team environment and organisational culture
Get clear on your role and responsibilities in creating psychological safety
Learn tools and systems to create psychological safety in your teams and organisational cultures
Get clear on respect at work
Get clear on speak up cultures
Get clear on belonging, diversity, equity and inclusion
Learn the tension of standing out Vs. fitting, 'bringing your authentic self to work' and emotional and behavioral regulation
Understand the connection between psychological safety, respect at work, belonging, diversity equity and inclusion and speak up cultures in driving performance, well-being and engagement
Learn
Leave with a roadmap to create psychological safety in your team/organisation
Perfect for:
Boards
Executive Leadership Teams
Senior Leadership Teams
People Managers
Teams
Whole of organisation
People and Culture teams
Investment
The Psychological Safety program can be run as a 1hour session, series of masterclasses, half-day workshop or as a 3/6/12 month deep dive program.
It can be run virtually, in-person or hybrid. It can also be implemented as an e-module and uploaded to your LMS.
Contact Winitha to discuss how you can customise this workshop to your team’s needs.
Inclusive Marketing and Communications
Are you scared of consumers telling you to ‘stay out of politics and stick to selling’?, Accusing you of being ‘divisive’ or ‘causing segregation’? Fearful of being publicly cancelled, called out and/or boycotted by consumers? Worried about damaging your brand’s reputation, creating risk for the business and breaking consumer trust?
Consumers are shifting from transactional buying to transformational - that is buying from (responsible) brands that have integrated inclusion, sustainability and empathy into their business and brand identity. With cancel culture on the rise, consumers are ready to boycott brands that are not explicitly communicating this identity through truly inclusive creative, marketing and communication efforts. Businesses and teams are under increasing pressure to stay ‘woke’ and ‘politically correct’ without offending or polarising anyone.
Earning trust is the key to consumer attraction, retention and engagement. To do this, we need to look holistically at marketing and communications.
In this workshop, teams will be supported to move from confused, overwhelmed and frustrated to confident and capable of integrating inclusion into the brand’s identity and marketing.
Through an immersive and interactive half-day workshop, Winitha will:
guide teams to understand where their brand identity sits on the inclusion spectrum, i.e., activist to ‘business only’
detail the steps teams can take to make inclusion part of their identity
provide the tools and strategies teams need to create more inclusive campaigns, creative, marketing, visual merchandising and communications that connects with all consumers, earns trust and builds consumer attraction, retention and engagement.
Learning Outcomes
Learn about where your brand sits on the brand inclusion spectrum and the components of an inclusive brand built on inclusion, sustainability, empathy, belonging, trust, responsibility and consciousness
Develop awareness, empathy and understanding towards the experiences of historically marginalised and excluded groups.
Learn how to balance awareness, appropriation, artistic expression and inclusion
Use design thinking to understand the psychological needs of historically marginalised and excluded groups.
Learn how to integrate inclusion, sustainability, empathy, belonging, trust, responsibility and consciousness into your brand identity from creative to the in-store experience.
Learn and develop practical solutions, tools and strategies to create inclusive creative, campaigns, marketing and communications that truly connect with and engage all consumers and build trust.
Unpack the steps required to get your brand from where you are to where you want to be and create a practical and strategic brand identity plan to close the gap.
Perfect for:
Marketing, Creative and Design teams
Digital and Social Media teams
Visual Merchandising teams
Communications teams
Creative and advertising agencies, Creatives
Investment
This Inclusive Marketing and Communications workshop can be run as a half-day workshop or a 3–12 month program. It can be run virtually, in-person or hybrid.
Contact Winitha to discuss how you can customise this workshop to your brand’s needs.
Inclusive customer experience
Racial profiling and transphobia are, unfortunately, some of the experiences many consumers have when shopping in-store and online. From Starbucks to Topshop, brands have been publicly criticised, even boycotted, due to discriminatory behaviour from in-store and customer service team members. These actions by team members, whether standard policy or not, broke consumer trust and damaged the brand’s reputation.
In-store and customer service teams focus on general customer service and selling (versus CX (the customer experience)) and conform to standard operating policies and procedures that lack an inclusion and belonging lens.
With the fast-paced nature of stores and e-commerce, team members often fail to consider a customer’s unique needs and experiences, not to mention how these standard approaches to the customer experience could discriminate and exclude some consumers.
When it comes to brand attraction, engagement and retention, in-store and customer service team members are an important brand touchpoint.
Consumers want to know that a brand’s images and words match their actions and vice versa. A brand can go to extensive efforts to integrate inclusion into its identity but it is the in-store and customer service teams that truly do (or don’t) bring the brand identity to life.
In this cultural climate, the education of all in-store and customer service team members on how to think, behave and communicate in an inclusive manner to create belonging is a must-have, not a nice to have. Team members’ inclusion and customer experience training and experience should be mapped out and executed logically to set a baseline from which to measure and track customer success.
To truly integrate inclusion into your brand, in-store and customer service team members need training that educates, equips and empowers them with the nuanced skills required to create an inclusive in-store and e-commerce customer experience.
In this half-day workshop, Winitha supports in-store teams to understand the different experiences and needs of historically marginalised and excluded groups when shopping (in store and online), and empowers and equips teams with practical solutions, actions, tools, and strategies to deliver an inclusive customer experience to all customers.
Inclusive Styling module add-on for fashion brands
Fashion brands can add the inclusive styling module to support in-store team members to cultivate an inclusive in-store styling experience for all customers. The module steps through the experiences and needs of historically marginalised and excluded groups and offers guidance on how to empower, elevate and support them with styling through a process that is respectful and creates inclusion, belonging, safety and trust for all customers.
Learning Outcomes
Learn the fundamentals of diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion in a retail and/or fashion context.
Develop awareness, empathy and understanding towards the experiences of historically marginalised and excluded groups.
Learn how to balance awareness, appropriation, artistic expression and inclusion
Use design thinking to deeply understand the psychological needs and experiences of historically marginalised and excluded groups both in stores and in the community.
Learn how to utilise and engage inclusive mindsets, communication and behaviour with customers and between team members.
Develop skills in dealing with discriminatory customers, aggression and difficult conversations.
Learn how to contribute towards creating a culturally and psychologically safe in-store and online environment for all customers.
Learn how to adopt standard operating policies and procedures to prevent and minimise exclusion and discrimination.
Perfect for:
Area/Business Managers
Store Managers and Assistant Store Managers
Store teams (casual, part-time and full-time staff)
E-commerce teams
Customer Experience teams
Customer Service and Support teams
Investment
The Inclusive Customer Experience workshop can be run as a half-day workshop or as a 3/6/12 month deep dive program.
It can be run virtually, in-person or hybrid. It can also be implemented as an e-module and uploaded to your LMS.
Contact Winitha to discuss how you can customise this workshop to your team’s needs.
Inclusive leadership
Do your leaders understand their responsibility in leading inclusion in your organisation?
There are numerous legal, ethical and moral obligations on leaders to proactively create safe workplaces.
In this immersive and interactive program, Winitha educates, empowers and equips leaders to develop their practice with actionable and practical tools and strategies to embed inclusive leadership into how they lead and do business.
The Inclusive Leadership Training program integrates recent evidence-based research from McKinsey to substantially increase outcomes in leadership development and overall organisational health and performance. Specifically, we:
Learn how to balance awareness, appropriation, artistic expression and inclusion
Focus on a specific taxonomy of skills and behaviours.
Integrate training within a broader emotional and sensory learning system to create breakthroughs in underlying beliefs, behaviours and assumptions via behavioural reinforcements and accountability.
Build mechanisms to galvanise inclusive leadership development to make it part of leaders’ day-to-day work.
Empower leaders to move from retention to the application of their knowledge; overcome obstacles to success through executive coaching, inclusive leadership mentoring and DEI advisory support between training sessions.
Learning Outcomes
Understand the wider business and leadership opportunity when we lead with inclusion.
Unpack what inclusive leadership looks like - and what it doesn't.
Develop the 6 capabilities and skills of inclusive leadership.
Develop sponsorship and mentoring skills to enable others’ success ahead of one’s own.
Develop conscious leadership understanding and capability
Cultivate psychological and cultural awareness and safety skills.
Develop situational humility and awareness skills.
Increase personal-growth mindset, mindful listening and curiosity.
Identify the deep internal barriers preventing people with lived experience of marginalisation from entering mid-senior level roles within the business; and the external systemic and structural barriers preventing people with lived experience of marginalisation from entering mid-senior level roles within the business.
Identify, design, implement and lead a change-management process to increase the number of people with lived experience of marginalisation in mid-senior roles.
Cultivate a life-long practice of inclusive leadership by taking agency over one’s journey.
Investment
This program can be run as a 4x half-day workshops or as a 3/6/12 month deep dive program with an option for 1:1 executive coaching to embed learning into one’s leadership practice.
This program can be run virtually, in-person or hybrid. It can also be implemented as an e-module and uploaded to your LMS.
Contact Winitha to discuss how you can customise this program to your leadership team’s needs.
THE DEEP DIVE: 6-12 month DEI expert in residency program (Chief Diversity Officer)
The fast-paced nature of businesses and everyday priorities often distracts leaders from delivering effective diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work. This can result in a crisis that neither the brand nor leaders are prepared for, leading to risk and reputational damage.
A brand’s proactiveness in creating inclusive employee and consumer spaces and experiences is becoming increasingly scrutinised and legislated; a lack of evidence to demonstrate actions towards creating safety and inclusive work and consumer experiences puts brands at risk.
Most companies have an internal DEI Manager to action this work; however, their role is a flawed and ineffective model for change for several reasons:
it silos the responsibility for DEI with one individual
the individual lacks engagement and support among team members and leaders
DEI Managers take a generalist approach as project managers rather than impact makers
DEI managers experience isolation often feeling like ‘the only’ in organisations resulting in a lack of engagement and retention
the individual is up against institutional baggage while navigating the space as a person with lived experience of marginalisation.
Leaders are confused, overwhelmed and frustrated about what to do, when and how. They lack the internal capability not just to do this work but to do it effectively.
A more effective and impactful model is to hire an external expert to work with leaders to lift inclusion capacity and capability across the organisation; whereby responsibility sits with everyone regardless of role or department.
In this program, you’ll have access to Winitha as an In-House DEI Expert in Residence over 6–12 months. She will work intimately with your organisation and leadership team to build your brand's capability and capacity for inclusion, as well as support leaders to integrate inclusion into how they lead and do business.
Backed by the latest research and science, Winitha brings a fresh perspective and invigorating approach to ignite your inclusion and diversity efforts with deep intention and meaning, giving you an innovative and competitive advantage to make DEI part of your brand’s DNA.
Inclusions
Diagnostic to identify brand’s inclusion gaps and needs.
A 6-12-month strategy and action plan nuanced to the needs of your business and brand.
Advice and support to implement your 6-12-month DEI strategy and action plan.
Learn how to balance awareness, appropriation, artistic expression and inclusion
Real-life case studies to bring learnings to life.
1:1 support for leaders to build inclusive leadership skills, DEI capacity and capability in their departments/portfolios.
Dedicated support for
Marketing, Communications teams and agencies to ensure representation and inclusion in campaigns, marketing and communications;
Retail teams to ensure inclusive in-store and digital/virtual consumer experiences;
Recruitment, People and Culture teams to ensure inclusive employee experiences and organisational culture.
Crisis support and management.
Investment
Contact Winitha to discuss your organisation’s needs.
Inclusion Training & Executive Support
Winitha offers tailored and nuanced inclusion support and solutions;
Recruitment, People and Culture teams (programs and training)
Leaders (inclusive leadership training and programs)
Whole of organisation (inclusion, equity, belonging and diversity training and programs)
Women and People of Colour (Executive and Management Leadership programs and initiatives)
Click here to see training modules and inclusions.
Winitha also offers one-on-one Executive Coaching (inclusive communication and behavior for leaders)
Contact Winitha directly to discuss your Executive Coaching needs.
Format
Inclusion sessions can be run as 1-2hour sessions, half-day masterclasses or 3/6/12 month deep dives.
Sessions can be run virtually, in-person or hybrid. It can also be implemented as an e-module and uploaded to your LMS.
Investment
Contact Winitha to discuss your organisation’s needs.
How we work
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We leverage systems thinking, behavior design and other design thinking, organisational transformation, organisational psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, culture change, innovation and strategy tools to redesign systems and embed inclusion into HOW you do business. People only change if they want to. If you want to impact and influence behaviors to create an inclusive culture and business, change the systems that govern it.
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An inclusive culture and business is created through unity and harmony, not silos, an ‘us vs. them’ or ‘either/or’ mentality, or ‘whose problem is this to solve attitude’. Inclusion is the responsibility of everyone (not just leaders) and it takes everyone to truly create inclusion. We do this through powerful positive framing and doing the work through the lens of kindness, compassion, tolerance, togetherness, acceptance, connection, cohesion, ‘both/and’ mindset, patience, and empathy; not judgments, shaming, canceling, polarization, calling out, or blaming.
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We work with your people, customers, partners, and communities through collaboration tools such as human-centered and co-design and work in partnership with them to deliver on the work so that there is shared ownership and responsibility and the work is responsive (agile) to their needs (emerging and current). Our work is focused on practical strategies, tools, and resources that are actionable, relevant, and tailored to your business culture and people to build organisational capacity and capability.
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We use cutting-edge data and research with proven evidence-based models for behavior and systems change, not ambiguous theory or generalist approaches; thought leadership that goes beyond best practice.
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We put your people (team, consumers, partners and communities) at the center of everything we do. It’s not about saving people, it’s about serving.
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We identify and diagnose the root cause and design tailored nuanced solutions that are focused on getting real fiscal and social outcomes with intention and integrity. Step-by-step transformational change, not a tick-the-box exercise thats tokenistic or performative.
