Building Inclusive Workplaces with Ardie Harrison

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
All right, Ardie, keep trash talking, Mike, on that pickleball.

**Ardie Harrison** (0:23)
Mike, listen, I have been playing tennis for a while, and pickleball players are an annoyance. And it's more like being on a ping pong table except for you're on concrete. I'm having this intense singles match and all of a sudden here comes four pickleball players setting up a net and just bang, bang, bang, just run off my opponent and I was, it's annoying.
Like, I can stay in the kitchen at home, you know, I know you have to stay in the kitchen and pick the ball.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:54)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. We aren't exploring pickleball today, but we are exploring the topic of building inclusive workplaces with empathy and authenticity. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with Michael Liwski and our special guest. We are live, so if you have questions or comments, send them along and we'll try to get them in the mix during our conversation.
Mike, introduce our guest today, even though she just trash-talked you.

**Michael Liwski** (1:24)
I know, Stephen, I'm stabbed to the heart. But it's okay. I love it. I would love to. I can't wait for our followers and our listeners to really get a chance to know this lovely lady. So Ardie Harrison has been a trailblazer for some time now in creating inclusive workplaces and with extensive experience in human resources and leadership, she's really got a long track record of developing impactful DEI programs and cultivating environments that truly support diversity, equity, and inclusion, which we know is a major topic in our business environment today. So currently, Ardie is focused on building structures that prioritize belonging, empathy, and authentic inclusion of all voices in the organizations that she works with. Her work has transformed the cultures of numerous organizations and helped countless of individuals thrive in environments that empower them to bring their full selves to work. So we're really honored to have her with us today. Ardie, welcome to our show.

**Ardie Harrison** (2:30)
Welcome, Mike, and I'm sorry about Pickleball.

**Michael Liwski** (2:32)
Sorry.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:36)
It'll be okay. Ardie, are we making progress in building inclusive workplaces? It feels like there's been a little bit of ebb and flow lately in our country.

**Ardie Harrison** (2:49)
Yeah, I think we're making some progress in other areas. You could find that we're probably have still a lot of opportunity. A lot of leaders when it comes to just thinking about an awareness of inclusion, it's understanding like what does inclusion look like for my organization? What do I want inclusion to feel like? And if you can ask multiple organizations, you might get very, very different answers because it's a very cultural centric type of a concept. But I think the levels of progress has just been the awareness that we need to have it. The ways in which perhaps we've fallen back is being afraid to have the conversations about what does that look like at my organization. There's certain things that people in the organizations want to stay away from because it feels too controversial and they don't want to tackle that. So yeah, I think there's a plus and minus on both sides for sure.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:48)
Has it always been too controversial or has that just been kind of a lately thing?
I mean, you've had the career path in this area for quite a while. How has your journey seen it evolve over time with some of these conversations?

**Ardie Harrison** (4:06)
Well, I think one of the pivotal points happened with George Floyd's murder. That was a pivotal point. Not that it was something new, but it surfaced it in such a way where now the conversations were more engaging because people wanted to talk about it. That was now more of a desire to want to have train around it. There was a more desire to bring in outside parties because within the organizations, people were just not equipped to have those conversations because they were difficult. There were lots of biases and we all have biases and biases alone are not a bad thing. But it's just how do you temper the conversation when it gets to be at a certain point and you don't know where to pivot, then you end up creating more harm than you do good because you're stuck with not being able to move the organization forward. And so with this desire that organizations had to be able, particularly after that event, to move their organization in a different way, they began to look at things like how are we showing up in the community? What does our website look like? Do we have a website that invites people that shows that we're inclusive? Organizations began to take an internal look and say, we're not being very inclusive. Just about everybody in our organization looks like me.