Should business be inclusive?

As inclusion in business is experiencing a backlash globally, the London Business School convened industry leaders to cut through the noise: Is inclusion simply a buzzword? A moral obligation? Or a strategic lever to build a future-proof business?

Tackling these questions were three distinguished corporate and academic leaders: ‘Tokunboh Ishmael, founder and managing director of Alitheia Capital, Kathleen O’Connor, Clinical Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and Jesper With-Fogstrup, Group CEO of Moneypenny.

Through practical examples and personal reflections, these leaders unpacked that inclusion isn't just formal policy — it's a daily practice with the power to drive performance and long-term impact.

Defining inclusion

While O’Connor’s initial area of expertise was in collaboration, engagement and conflict, her research interests turned to inclusion in response to hearing her executive education clients who wanted practical advice on how to create more inclusive cultures.

As an academic, O’Connor untangles the concept of inclusion from belonging. Belonging is a core human need while inclusion, she said, is “the practices that managers use, their behaviors that help people feel like they belong or don't belong.”

For With-Fogstrup, creating an inclusive workplace is akin to making people feel welcome in his home — it’s things like not putting a specific gendered sign on the restroom, ensuring those who are less-abled will be able to feel comfortable, and asking people what they want to eat rather than serving whatever he feels like.

For Ishmael, leading a Lagos-based firm that invests with intentionality to drive impact in addition to financial returns means inclusion is front and centre in her work. In the context of Africa, key to creating this impact is both gender inclusion and financial inclusion, the latter providing a greater proportion of the population with access to finance and opportunities to scale their business.

“We think about that from injecting gender consciousness from the boardroom all the way to the factory floor,” she said.

Inclusion as strategy

“The quicker you figure out what's going to keep your people happy and productive at work — I think that’s inclusivity practices and a sense of belonging — the better off your results are going to be,” said O’Connor. “I don't think you can be a resilient organization and decide you're going to cling to some of the old bad habits, like command-and-control.”

In other words, inclusion isn't a “feel-good” extra — it’s a business strategy. For Ishmael, gender is a “factor for superior performance. She provided an example of a sanitary pad company run by an all-male leadership team getting rid of the thinnest option for customers, an evident disconnect between product and perspective.

As an impact-driven investor, the advantages for ensuring a broad range of perspectives are clear for Ishmael: “When you have businesses that are composed of teams that reflect the markets they're serving, you can have a diversity of perspectives [leading to] better innovation.”

With-Fogstrup sees the business case from the inside out. Inclusion directly affects staff retention. If employees at Moneypenny didn’t feel a sense of belonging, the consequences would be clear: “We would see the result of that by people voting with their feet, walking out the door — whether that be clients or whether it be some of our employees, because that's not the environment they want to be in.”

When people don't feel they belong, O’Connor adds, employee engagement suffers, and ultimately productivity will suffer. “It's going to be pretty clear that you've got a problem.”

Accountability

For Ishmael, the journey toward inclusive investing began with a public reckoning. “I was on stage, talking about our work, and someone asked how many female founders we had in our portfolio,” she said. “That was the moment I realized, oh, I need to be more intentional about this.”

That question was the spark that led her to explicitly champion gender lens investing. Now, every new business her firm engages with is evaluated through a gender lens investing framework. As soon as she starts speaking with a business, she routinely asks about the diversity in ownership, on the board, in its employee base. She also looks at the quality of jobs women are in, ensuring they aren’t all in the “broom room.”

“We track these [measures] with every company, month to month, quarter to quarter.”

The human factor

O’Connor noted that there are two approaches to inclusion that go hand-in-hand: formal procedures, and the daily practices managers use to bring out the best in their people. The latter is mostly “common sense,” she said, emphasizing that inclusion doesn’t always have to be a complex strategy, it can be built from everyday actions.

O’Connor asked the audience to think of inclusive leaders in their own lives. The list of things that made them memorable is likely simple but effective: they treated you with respect, solicited ideas from you, coached you informally. “This doesn't seem like it should be that heavy a lift,” she said.

There is a risk of inclusion simply becoming a tick-box exercise, rather than a measure of an organisation simply doing the right thing, added With-Fogstrup. He is a big believer in data, but when it comes to inclusion, he prefers a “very simple” KPI, asking people: “How happy do you feel?”