Business Leaders: Embed Fairness in Strategic Operational Design

A fairness and inclusion lens must be applied with critical-thinking to ensure leaders do not inadvertently exacerbate existing inequities at scale.

Based on our experience, what this requires is for the role of the equity and inclusion / HR leader to urgently evolve to respond to the future of work.

What it also requires is for business leaders to ensure those with the expertise of equity and inclusion thinking are invited into organisational design teams and adopt a role as key challenger and enabler.

In our last thought leadership article, we highlighted some of the inequity risks in AI adoption and that without careful design and oversight, it can unintentionally reinforce structural biases embedded in the data that technological tools are trained on. Responsible AI adoption within organisations is a key area where existing equity and inclusion leaders must ensure they are appropriately skilled, continually learning and adapting.

Another key area for equity and inclusion and HR leaders to take hold of and advise on is inclusive organisational design for the future of work.

Companies are increasingly recognising the need for strategic organisational design and workforce skills mapping to retain competitiveness. McKinsey cites strategic planning as one of the top 5 priorities for HR leaders in our time of technological change.  The report’s recommendation is for ‘a skills-based strategic workforce planning approach that forecasts staffing requirements based on the skills a company may need in both the short and long term’.

How we structure organisations and who we hire, develop and retain pose a real opportunity to embed fairness and inclusion at the heart of workplace design. If we don’t take a proactive approach to have equitable principles as perimeters to design, we risk cementing inequities within organisational structures.

This is an opportunity to make real shifts in existing structural inequities whilst transforming for business performance.

When we talk about inequities, what we are referring to are the barriers to an organisations’ ability to achieve fair and open access for all.

Embedding fairness into workforce skills planning

There is a risk that because we are embarking on what we think is an objective, efficient and neutral process, we assume that the result of our decision-making will be fair for all, some refer to that as a meritocracy.

As Amis, Mair, and Munir put forward in their paper, the myth of meritocracy, together with the myths of efficiency and positive globalisation, are ‘pervasive in their influence and allow the enactment of practices in a way that reproduces inequality in organisations’.

As leaders, we will need to bring a critical lens to examine how decisions are made in strategic organisational design to ensure fair outcomes are created within organisations and society at large.

Let’s explore some of the steps required for strategic skills planning as an example.

1) Define the future business strategy and skills required

At this stage, organisations will be shaping how the business strategy will evolve to respond to future needs. They will be identifying future skills and roles required to enable the business to remain strategic, competitive and relevant. However, the skills we value in society and within organisations are loaded with cultural bias. Who is within that assessment team will also define the strategy and skills from their individual perspectives and references.

Some questions to consider to ensure we are embedding fairness into this step:

• How are we identifying the future skills and roles required and how do we know they respond to the business strategy?
• What are the skills deemed to be ‘strategic’ and ‘relevant’? How is our assessment shaped by our own perception and biases? Who do these skills benefit based on historical pathways?
• What are we missing that would enable us to respond to the business strategy?
• What additional skills would differentiate us from our competitors?

 

2) Identify what skills the business already benefits from

At this stage, leaders might assess what skills existing employees already have, aggregating data from HR systems, curriculum vitaes (CVs), projects, etc. Technological or AI tools might be used to gather this snapshot based on existing data. However, employees may not start on a level-playing field when it comes to their ability to record or self-promote their skills. Cases have also highlighted the risk of AI tools inadvertently disadvantaging certain groups during sifting. A recent study found that AI models “favour CVs they generated themselves over equivalent human-written versions.”

Some questions to consider to ensure we are embedding fairness into this step:

• How can we accurately identify the suite of skills existing employees have?
• How can we provide structure, for example, to enable employees to share their skills and experience in a holistic and fair way?
• What skills might we be overlooking and not currently captured?
• What skills might we not value now that could be invaluable in the future?

 

3) Identifying how to ‘plug’ the skills gap

Once the skills gap has been identified, organisations will want to fill this by upskilling existing employees, hiring, or automating, for example. As with inequities that show up in how we make existing learning and development decisions, we need to be wary of who gains access (and who doesn’t) to high-potential programmes.

Some questions to consider to ensure we are embedding fairness into this step:

• How are you identifying who gains access to upskilling and development? How do you ensure those decisions are being made fairly across the organisation?
• What groups will be disproportionately advantaged / disadvantaged by these decisions? How do we mitigate this impact?
• Where are you hiring? How are you ensuring you are hiring from as diverse a pool as possible to gain the best talent?

 

Our approach when advising organisations is to always embed fairness and inclusion into everyday business rather than delivering this as a separate agenda. Fundamental business decisions such as organisational design and workforce planning are exactly the business decisions requiring fairness and inclusion to be embedded from the outset.

The business risk of not doing so is to further scale existing inequities in our evolved organisational structure, creating increased cost further down the line both to solve for inequities and as a result of the negative impact on trust and reputation.  Embedding from the start is always far more effective, in resources, reputation and time, than retrofitting afterwards.

To speak to one of our experts in culture, inclusion and leadership or to find out more about how we can support you with inclusive organisational design, please get in touch via the link below.

 

This article is a part of our 'Inclusive Leadership 10 Years On' series. See more about the series here.

Co-authored by Charlotte Sweeney OBE & Liz Pawson-Poon

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Sources:

1 McKinsey & Company (2025) “HR Monitor 2025” Report: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/people%20and%20organizational%20performance/our%20insights/hr%20monitor%202025/hr-monitor-2025.pdf

2 Amis, J.M., Mair, J. and Munir, K.A. (2020), “The Organizational Reproduction of Inequality”: https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Amis-Mair-Munir-AMA-2020-The-orgnaizational-reproduction-of-inequality.pdf

3 Soutar, L. (2026) “'Self-preference' | The new recruitment bias: How AI hiring tools may favour AI-written CVs”: https://www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2026-04-30-the-new-recruitment-bias-how-ai-tools-may-favour-ai-written-cvs