Inclusion and Belonging at Work | Up for Discussion with Greg Morley

In this episode of CB Up for Discussion, we are thrilled to welcome Greg Morley, the former Global Head of Diversity at Moët Hennessy, a division of LVMH. With a wealth of experience in fostering inclusive environments across the Asia-Pacific region, Greg shares his insights on the significance of belonging in the workplace and how it can drive organizational success. Greg discusses his journey in diversity and inclusion, highlighting the importance of creating cultures where everyone feels valued and heard. He emphasizes that true inclusion starts with understanding the unique cultural contexts within which organizations operate and encourages leaders to engage with their teams to define what belonging means for them.

Key topics include:

• The inspiration behind Greg's book, Bond, which explores strategies for cultivating a culture of belonging.
• The critical role of leadership in driving diversity initiatives from the top down.
• How employee resource groups can effectively engage grassroots efforts while ensuring alignment with broader organizational goals.
• The necessity of fostering common ground among diverse groups to build a more inclusive culture.

Join us for an enlightening conversation about the keys to creating thriving workplaces where everyone can succeed! Tune in now!

(0:00 - 0:13)

This is CB Up for Discussion, a podcast series from Community Business where we tackle DE&I and well-being hot topics with special guests from across Asia.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (0:19 - 0:27)

My name is Ron Sampaga and I'm Senior Manager of Social and Trade at Community Business and I'm your podcast host for today's episode.

 

[Greg Morley] (0:27 - 0:32)

Thanks for having me Ron, I'm really happy to be back at Community Business after so long.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (0:32 - 1:47)

Yeah, thanks for coming here as well and joining us in our Up for Discussion today. So yeah, welcome Greg and just to give a bit of your background is Greg is most recently Global Head of Diversity at Moët Hennessy, a division of LVMH. He brings a personal and professional passion to the development of talent and helping others achieve more than they believe they can.

 

Greg led the HR function of the company's operations across the Asia-Pacific region. He has been based in Hong Kong, Paris, and the U.S. giving him a truly global perspective on leadership. Greg played a leading role in bringing the 2023 Games and a global participant sports, workshop, and diversity event to Asia for the first time in its 40 years history.

 

He's also the author of Bond, a book that presents the key to creating a culture of belonging that lets employees and businesses thrive through stories and strategies that span growth. Welcome Greg to our Up for Discussion podcast today. Thank you so much Ron.

 

Cool, so I'm going to start, maybe we could, you know, share a bit of your background with our viewers here. Sure.

 

[Greg Morley] (1:48 - 3:02)

In fact, coming back to speak with community business is a bit like coming back home for me, and which is a bit of the theme of my book of Inclusion and Belonging. So when I was at Disney in 2005, that's what brought me to Hong Kong for the first time to help with the opening Hong Kong Disneyland. And in fact, we did a lot of work with community business at the time, and I was quite involved with a lot of the events.

 

And community business really helped me to understand Asia from the context of diversity and inclusion, which were things I was then able to incorporate into my work and into my life. So a big thanks to give to community business. Since my arrival in Hong Kong in 2005, I've spent a number of years at Disney, both here and in Shanghai.

 

I came back from Shanghai and worked for Hasbro as the regional head of HR and joining North Tennessee in 2019, and subsequently have relocated back to Paris, which is where we came from. My husband and I relocated back to Paris in 2022, and we're living and loving being back there. Of course, came back here this week and miss my friends.

 

I miss Hong Kong. The weather's perfect this week, so I'm really thrilled to be back and be re-engaged.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (3:03 - 3:19)

Yeah, I agree that, you know, the weather in Hong Kong this week is fantastic, right? So let's get started. Could you share a bit about your background and how you decided to write your book, Belonging and the Keys to Inclusion and Connection?

 

[Greg Morley] (3:19 - 4:46)

Sure, thank you for asking. So I have a real passion about this topic, and the passion comes from my many years of being in HR and different companies and in diversity and inclusion. Why do I have a passion about it?

 

Because I've seen inclusive and environments that are inclusive and very much welcoming, where people can thrive. I'll give you a very, very simple example of this. When I was working in my former company, I had a woman who worked with me in Korea, and because of the culture and the demands on her, her home life was quite challenging.

 

She was to be everybody to everybody. She had to be mom, husband, daughter-in-law, daughter. She had to play all of these roles, and it was, you know, quite stressful for her.

 

When she was at work, she felt like she was her best. Why? Because at work, she was respected, honored, listened to.

 

Her ideas all the way up to the CEO were incorporated, and that was something that I noticed with other people, and I wanted to share stories about that because I think they're very inspiring, and some of the things that we do to create those environments are quite simple. They don't have to be very complicated or costly, yet what we know from data is when those environments exist, companies do better, and that's why I wanted to tell the stories in the book.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (4:47 - 5:08)

Totally agree with what you mentioned, and, you know, you were as the Global Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Formal Advocacy, a company with diverse workforce of over 119 nationalities. That's amazing. What big challenges and opportunities did you encounter while you're promoting belonging in such a global, diverse organization?

 

[Greg Morley] (5:09 - 6:37)

I think the thing that was most important in that organization, I would say two things. One is that the executive sponsor was the senior leader of the organization, and in any forum that he was speaking, he would speak about the importance of having a more diverse and inclusive company. Why?

 

Because he knew the data was there also, that diverse and inclusive companies are more successful. They're more innovative. There's more creativity, and they can spot risks in the business much better.

 

Why did that matter to him? Because he was trying to create an organization that was much closer to its consumers. That could be the consumer in any of those regions that the company's working.

 

And again, he knew that inclusive companies have people in the organization that live the life of the consumer because they're from there. So that was really critical. The second thing that was critical was allowing enough independence of all of these different geographies and many cultures that existed in the company for them to also create their own diversity and inclusion plans.

 

It's very clear that the diversity and inclusion issues in one location may be very different than another location. So while we have principles and pillars, we allow the location to create its own plan. Yeah, I agree that every location is different, right?

 

[Ron Sampaga] (6:37 - 7:15)

That's why here in community business as well, that's something that we would love to support, and that's something that we would love to do. So here in community business, we've recently published a research about inclusion and belonging at the workplace, and we'd love to get your thoughts and insights in some of our findings. One of our interviews indicated that in the Asian world context, the concept of belonging might require more explanation.

 

How can we ensure that the belonging initiative resonates across cultures and are tailored to specific cultural contexts?

 

[Greg Morley] (7:16 - 9:45)

I think it goes without saying oftentimes that when we're trying to solve an issue as it relates to diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and equity, oftentimes what we don't do is start with the people whose problems we're trying to solve, right? So oftentimes from a corporate perspective, we get trapped in imposing great ideas on people rather than working with people to help uplift them together. And in the Asian context, I think that's particularly important.

 

If you're dealing with inclusion issues in, say, Malaysia, your approach may be very different than if you're dealing with an inclusion agenda in Australia, or India, or Japan. And it's really important from the cultural context, and I mean the culture of the location, the culture of the company, that you have people in the organization at all levels that are helping you to define what belonging is rather than telling people what belonging is. And I think what's worked particularly well in the Asian context in comparison to work, say, in North America, where we focus very much on the underrepresented groups themselves, what works very well in Asia is to focus on the culture of the organization in which everybody feels like they're part of defining belonging, defining inclusion.

 

What does equity feel like here? And then working backwards up to making sure that all of the underrepresented groups of people feel like they're part of that conversation. In addition, there are a whole group of people that don't represent themselves as underrepresented.

 

They've always had a position, they've had privilege, they've had the managerial positions in power. Those individuals need to feel like they're part of the discussion as much as anybody else. One of the key reasons I wrote the book Bond was that I saw over time, as we focused more and energy on bringing people into the discussion, that there were a whole group of people that were actually being excluded from the discussion, and those were the people who were making the decisions.

 

So we get back to belonging as a definition. Belonging has to include everybody in the organization. It's not a matter of bringing some people in who are out.

 

It's also making sure that people who are in don't become out.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (9:45 - 10:07)

I agree. It seems like belonging is the missing piece on BD&I. We found that the company culture plays a significant role in shaping belonging.

 

What are some specific ways companies can assess the current culture and identify areas for improvement regarding inclusivity and belonging?

 

[Greg Morley] (10:08 - 13:07)

Great question, and I think it's the place to start. Culture is the place to start. We oftentimes, I think we start with policy.

 

Policy is important, but it underpins culture, and if you don't address culture and you don't have an agreement on what kind of culture do we want, what kind of behaviors do we want to see both in employees and managers, what kind of talents do we want to attract, ultimately what kind of business do we want to have, then the policy elements are only marginal improvements. So I think what you found in the study is absolutely spot on, that addressing culture first is important. How do you do that in the context across this region?

 

The first is that the senior people in the organization need to lead, and not just say, signing a letter or saying, here's a couple of dollars to go do something. It's the senior leader, whether it's the CEO, the regional director, the head of the function, the head of the team, the head of the project, they speak about it. They speak about it in personal terms.

 

That changes the culture. We all have bosses. We take cues from bosses, and when bosses prioritize something, like inclusivity, like belonging, like culture, that makes a big difference.

 

I think that that is important. The second thing that's important, and probably most important secondarily, is that we try to find common ground with other people. We live in a world of separation.

 

You're right, I'm wrong. I'm wrong, you're right. There seems to be no gray area now.

 

In fact, the world is gray area. So what's important, if you and I are trying to find a way to build an inclusion agenda, build a culture, is we find some area of common ground, and we build on that, rather than starting in our distance and trying to fight each other back to the middle. I tell a story in the book about a high school friend, or a college friend of mine, and we were having a discussion about marriage equality back before it was legalized in the U.S., and he quite shockingly said to me that marriage equality was really meaningless to him. Now he's a straight man, four children was the only way to have five, and to me, marriage equality, there was nothing more important to me at the time. And so my idea was, okay, how do I find common ground with him on this topic? Now, we got to some level of common ground because he understood my position, and I tried to explain to him why I thought it was important for his family and kids.

 

I understood his position. I don't think he's going to pick up a flag and march in the next crime group. He's supportive of me personally and of my family, but we found some common ground, and I think that's really critical in companies when you're building an inclusion and belonging agenda.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (13:08 - 13:56)

That's really true. I totally agree with that, because for us, right, you have your people's mind with your own experience, you have a job to do with, and then working in an organization or maybe meeting your family, you have something to give it in common, right? Yeah, so again, the question will be on the research as well, and I would love to know to know your perspective.

 

Our research also suggests the importance of employing your research groups or the ERG, but also emphasizes the need for senior management to drive inclusion efforts from top down, like what you mentioned earlier. How can business strike a balance between these two approaches to foster a culture of belonging?

 

[Greg Morley] (13:57 - 16:30)

My experience is that your research is spot on, that the two go hand in hand. Employee resource groups are critical in engaging grassroots in an organization, but the warning is that they stay at the grassroots level. So having senior management engaged both in sponsorship, allyship, but also leadership of employee resource groups is very critical.

 

When the two become separated, then you have a lot of employees who feel quite good because somebody's representing me. I use my example of when I first joined Disney. So when I first joined Disney, they had an employee resource group for LGBTQ people.

 

And I joined and I felt like, well, it was great, like it was a rush that there was this group and they were supportive and they were working on things. And there was a group working on women and veterans and working parents. The problem is that when employee resource groups are focused just on those agendas and not overlapping or impacting the culture, the culture of the greater organization, they become bubbles.

 

And so it feels good, but it doesn't do much good. So I think it's critically important that senior management are engaged in that. Allyship is a sport.

 

It's a verb. It's something you have to do. And so being an ally of somebody means to me, you're acting on it.

 

And even as a member of the community I'm a member of, it's imperative that I act for others, not just on my own behalf. So this kind of intersectionality that exists between groups and resource groups particularly is critically important. And the last thing I'll say that's critically important about employee resource groups is they need to have a mindset of ever growing.

 

I did an event recently and it was with one of the employee resource groups. And I said, what I think you should do is every one of those members of the employee resource group should bring somebody to the event who hasn't attended one. Give them some kind of swag.

 

I don't know what it is, but at least encourage them to come lunch or something. Because you need to grow the bubble. The bubble becomes, if the bubble of an employee resource group becomes exclusive, that's when we start to lose the game.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (16:31 - 16:57)

Totally agree with that. And it's right now in terms of the D&I itself is actually evolving, right? So there's often a gap between stated D&I goals of organization in our research and actual experience of employees, right?

 

How can companies bridge this gap to ensure that the efforts to promote their longings translate into tangible change?

 

[Greg Morley] (16:58 - 18:34)

This goes back around to what I was saying before, is that engaging people who you're trying to help in the effort of lifting them up is critically important. And this is another area where I think an organization like community business is critical. So what you do is work with companies to improve the company, right?

 

Where D&I is evolving is that we're calling it maybe sometimes less diversity, equity, and inclusion. We're calling it belong and we're putting some other label on it. I'm not sure that that's such a bad thing.

 

I use the example of when I used to be a head of HR, we rolled out a program called inclusive hiring. So it was a great program and we were training all the hiring managers in HR about how to create an inclusive environment, how to find the right candidates, how to post on the right platforms, how to make sure that they were prepared properly so that everybody had a very equal chance. And ultimately you end up with the best people in the organization.

 

What we found out was inclusive hiring is just good hiring. And we had actually never trained people to hire at all. We had just said, you're a manager, you now suddenly know everything.

 

So why is that important to the evolution of where we are? Moving these inclusive behaviors into the operating model of the company and the operating principle of the company, the culture of the company is where we're headed. And frankly, it's where we should be headed in organizations.

 

Yeah, really true.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (18:38 - 19:14)

Not only about D&I is actually evolving, the current work landscape also changed dramatically, right? A few years back, the way we do things, the way we work is also different compared now, right? In 2025, which is actually next year, you're proposing a research on the future work and how organizations are balancing flexible arrangement with the desire to return to the office.

 

What implications do you think is changing working styles may have on inclusion and fostering a sense of belonging to work?

 

[Greg Morley] (19:15 - 21:35)

Great question. And it's really the question of our times when it comes to how to run organizations. There's a statistic that I share in my book, and I think it's really very relevant to this topic.

 

And that is that there is a crisis of loneliness in the workplace. And the World Health Organization has identified this as a health crisis. And loneliness is the equivalence to your health, your negative health of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

 

Now, there are a lot of programs out there to help people stop smoking one cigarette a day. So we have to think of this as a health imperative, as well as an operational imperative. I believe that we're moving to an equilibrium to work from home, work in the office, in a way that's trying to recapture the sense of belonging.

 

You can feel like you belong very much working from home, as long as the company is intentionally trying to bring you back. Different companies are tackling this in different ways. And it gets back to the culture of the company.

 

What is the culture of the company? What are we trying to attain? During COVID, a lot of us who worked at home felt very connected to the company, because we were, I remember many Fridays we had virtual drinks.

 

So I'm having a glass of wine in my home, but I'm with all of my colleagues. So that felt like very much a sort of belonging family situation. We can't lose that specialness, while also making sure that people have a reason to come to work, not because we told them, but because they want to.

 

Make work a place of honor, safety, belonging, so that people are drawn into the office, rather than saying you have to be here three or four days a week. Of course, you say have to be here three or four days a week, I'll come. But I might also be looking for someplace else that only makes me come two or three days a week.

 

So I think creating this sense that work is the safe place, work is the place I'm my best, I'm my full person, is what will create an equilibrium again in the work-life balance world.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (21:35 - 21:49)

That's right. You put a smile on my face, because I remember those times when I'm working from home, and you need to make sure you also connect with people, right? That's a very memorable experience as well, not only for me, I'm sure for everyone.

 

[Greg Morley] (21:49 - 22:15)

Yeah, and having, you know, this is like simple things. Who's your buddy in the workplace? Who's the person that's looking out for you?

 

Who are you looking out for? Those kinds of things are not that costly or complicated. And we had a lot of those really great programs, ideas, activations during COVID.

 

Let's make sure we don't lose those really great ideas, as we're trying to rebalance and reform the work-life balance paradigm.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (22:16 - 22:32)

You know what, Greg, there's a lot of questions I would love to ask you, and I'm sure it will not end. Finally, this will be my last question to you. What do you think is the biggest way we can make a little change throughout society?

 

[Greg Morley] (22:34 - 23:54)

My answer to this question may be counterintuitive. We make change by one person at a time. If you and I have an interaction, and I learned something from you, which I already have in our conversation today, I can take that.

 

It changes me, and I can pay that forward. I think it's imperative that we think about change one person at a time. So, one rock in the pond at a time, which creates a ripple.

 

And the ripple is telling our stories. We all have compelling stories to tell, and stories that resonate with other people. It's why in my book, Bond, I tell stories, because I think they really capture people's imagination.

 

They capture people's heart. They can imagine themselves in the shoes of other people. It creates a sense of empathy, and that's the way we create change.

 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion work can be hard. There's always a resistance. There's always something we have to do next.

 

And oftentimes, we're not being drawn to it. We're having to push barriers. So, being empathetic, being curious about other people, and being hopeful is the way that this work gets done, and that's the way we create a ripple of change.

 

[Ron Sampaga] (23:55 - 24:16)

I totally agree. It's such a pleasure, Greg, to have a chance to speak with you today. Thank you so much.

 

And good luck on the book. I'll let you take a look at that, on the book, Bond. And yeah, it was nice meeting you, and thank you so much for having me here in our after discussion.

 

Thanks for having me, Ron. Thank you.

 

(24:20 - 24:28)

Thank you for listening to CB Up for Discussion. For more information about our work across Asia, head to the Community Business website.