ESG at Protiviti: Diversity & Inclusion

This blog post was written by Junior Consultant Hannah Meijer.

In the past month, our office had an off-site retreat to Terschelling. While this trip was extremely fun and brought us together as a team, we also wanted to make sure out trip had some ESG (environmental, social, and governance) elements represented. Have fun and do good!

To do this, we had two segments of the trip focused on ESG: a Terschelling beach clean-up and a diversity and inclusion workshop. Our retreat first begun with the inclusion workshop led by an external lecturer.

“Diversity is being invited to the party,” said the lecturer. “Inclusion is being asked to dance.”

In this interactive session, we discussed the meaning of diversity, and while diversity can mean differences in ethnicity, sexuality, & gender, it can also mean a diversity in values and backgrounds. Inclusion, on the other hand, has a much stronger focus on how people can and should feel psychologically safe in their workplace.

“It makes people more aware of their behavior,” said one of my colleagues, a senior consultant at the firm. “Psychological safety is key for people to feel included. Essentially, it means our coworkers feel safe being themselves and voicing their ideas.”

This is one of many reasons why diversity and inclusion are so important to us at Protiviti the Netherlands and throughout the global organization. Our diversity and our views on that diversity makes us stronger as a team. In today’s business world and arguably the business world always, making colleagues feel that they have a place in the team and being unafraid to voice their ideas allows our team to tackle projects both efficiently and uniquely.

In the words of another colleague of mine: “Diversity is important because you can learn a lot from it. The more you meet people who are different than you in any way, you learn from them. It expands your world; it just makes you a better person.”

From a personal perspective, the feeling I had as an intern in Protiviti and now going on as a junior consultant, I definitely feel I have a place here. I can be myself here. This is one of the big reasons I chose to continue to work for Protiviti when my internship ended.

In our office we may not all be from the same place or think the same things, but we are all Protiviti the Netherlands. And as our presenter said: “we are all diverse, and our diversity is a talent.”

In my next blog, I look forward to discussing our other ESG event: the beach cleanup!