The importance of leadership when it comes to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace is a prevalent conversation today. In real estate, leaders have largely taken to heart the figures that show how much more productive and profitable a diverse team makes a business. But what about how real estate itself can lead? Can the sector create a norm for inclusive places? Can it deliver a standard, a common practice out of best practice?
“We are all looking for best practice and this gold standard,” Paul Modu, a NextGen committee member at Real Estate Balance, told a packed room at MIPIM. “But one of the opportunities, and maybe challenges, is how we can move best practice into common practice so that it’s not just this is the gold standard, but this is the common standard across the built environment.”
When the industry can do that, says Modu, then “problems which we are talking about today will no longer be problems”.
There are numerous ways to turn that best practice into common practice. It can be in recruitment processes, in the way leadership works, in the language we use to talk about the sector. But it could also be in the way we design, build and operate the physical built environment.
For Roland Karthaus, programme lead at the Design Council, the sector needs something akin to the targets and standards that have been set around sustainability in the built environment if we are to “shift the needle” in ED&I.
He cites work the Design Council is doing through its Design Academy to remind the sector about who its work is serving and remind operators across the built environment that they need to reframe their assumptions to make places more inclusive.
“The decisions that we make now are very, very long-lasting,” says Karthaus. “It locks in the decisions that we make now. For me, participatory design is about that. It’s not about us saying we should have another prayer room, or we should do this or that. It’s about us giving over the tools to people to help them to have greater agency and responsibility to engage with the built environment.”
Barbara Cominelli, chief executive of JLL Italy, who joined the business from Microsoft in November 2020, reckons real estate could learn from how technology creates its products.
“In the technology industry, when you design a product that needs to be universally designed, in the design teams, diversities are included,” she says.
Valerie Vaughan-Dick, chief executive of RIBA, agrees: “You have to make sure the community, the client, the person with the lived experience is involved in that design.”
Cominelli, along with the other panellists, is keen to see some sort of standard or certification developed to ensure it is not just the few delivering best practice, but the many creating common practice.
“I think it would be important to have some sort of standard,” she says. “We are working with very progressive organisations where they have EDI standards for their buildings across the world.
“Over time, I think they could become the norm and that will then reflect on the value of your property, how well you can market your property, its vacancy level, etc.”
“I think there’s quite a lot to be learned from environmental standards,” says the Design Council’s Karthaus. “First of all, a recognition that they are not perfect, that they are not good enough, but that they are really useful in terms of starting the boulder rolling.
“The built environment needs to be as diverse as the full population that use it, which is infinitely diverse, and that cannot be captured in a standard, but being self-aware of that, and in a funding environment, especially in infrastructure, in the public sector, where it’s all about cost efficiency, then things get prioritised. And if there isn’t a benchmark, quite frankly, it doesn’t get prioritised.”
A standard may not be the perfect tool to force real estate to become a leader in inclusive design, but it would be a start, says the panel.
“The coalition of the willing and the action-oriented is ever-growing,” says British Property Federation chief executive Melanie Leech. “And pressure on those who don’t get it or don’t want to get it is ratcheting up.”
Time, perhaps, to ratchet it up even further with a new benchmark on inclusivity.
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