This text is part of the special Research section
Getting organizations to commit to hiring immigrants, integrating them and ensuring their professional progression is the objective of an initiative supported by HEC Montréal, the City of Montreal and the province of Quebec: a pact for inclusion in which, for the third year in a row, organizations from all sectors have joined forces.
This year, 17 Montreal organizations took part in the Pact for the inclusion of immigrants at work, which took place from last September to February. In total, 32 managers and employees participated in awareness sessions, coaching, sharing as well as experiments around one of the four aspects of inclusion at work: attraction, hiring, integration and progression of talents. A tailor-made support program offered to them by the Pôle IDEOS HEC Montréal, in collaboration with the City of Montreal, the Office for the Integration of New Arrivals in Montreal, and with provincial support.
According to the Pôle’s estimates, the previous edition reached more than 3,700 people in terms of inclusion at work, due to the participation and commitments made by the participating companies. But this figure varies from year to year, depending on the composition of the cohorts. “If they include large companies like Airbus, it can have an impact in the order of thousands of people. If we work more with small companies, the effect is less in terms of figures, but can be very significant from a qualitative point of view”, underlines Luciano Barin Cruz, director and co-founder of the IDEOS Pole and full professor at the Management department at HEC Montreal.
Diversity of participants
If no cohort is alike, it is due to the vagaries of registration, but also to the selection process which favors the diversity of size, sector and experience of the participating organizations. “This approach is winning because it exposes participants to other realities and practices or to companies that do not have the same state of maturity as theirs. It stimulates inspiration and brings knowledge of what is possible,” says the professor.
“The sharing community is extraordinary”, testifies in the same sense Patricia Muanda Tsimba. With the support of her director, this human resources and organizational development advisor at Bixi jumped at the opportunity to register for the Pacte program. “We believe that providing a good welcome and ensuring employee integration is common sense. But we wanted to set up a more specific route to welcome immigrants, because they have specific needs. »
An immigrant herself, Patricia Muanda Tsimba remembers accepting a first job in Montreal that did not reward her, in order to be able to feed her family. “Within my company today, we try to target people on the basis of their skills rather than their Quebec experience. »
A program designed for action
To support this type of commitment, the HEC Montréal IDEOS center has designed the support program using a methodology that is deployed over 26 hours of group and individualized activities.
The course first opens with a series of awareness workshops in which the cohort learns about subjects such as the condition of immigrants, systemic discrimination, unconscious bias, but also organizational change and design thinking, lists Luciano Barin Cruz. “This ideation workshop allows participants to generate ideas to address the challenges they want to tackle. »
Then comes an action phase through personalized coaching sessions in which participants are invited to carry out a micro-experiment within their organization. “We encourage them to test their solutions on a small scale so that they give themselves the right to make mistakes, correct their plans and make changes until they obtain conclusive results,” explains Sébastien Arcand, director from the Management Department at HEC Montréal and coach within the Pacte.
These experiments are finally shared as a group before the participants make a formal commitment to the inclusion of immigrants: a pact that they sign during the closing ceremony of the program. “Solemnity is very stimulating to sustain commitment. It’s a change from training courses that end with recommendations or reports that sit in drawers,” says Patricia Muanda Tsimba, whose company is committed to entrusting a stimulating project to an immigrant employee.
To further support the move to action, all commitments made by participating organizations will be monitored after 6 and 12 months by program managers. “This also allows us to evaluate its effect in the medium and long term,” says Luciano Barin Cruz, who hopes to see the formula improve from year to year thanks to the support of HEC and its allies. “It’s one of the roles of universities to get us to work on major societal issues. And this type of project is only possible thanks to the support of an ecosystem of actors and companies that have the courage to get on board. »
A project all the more necessary as the rights of immigrants are never completely acquired, underlines Sébastien Arcand. “Often, people think that society is aware of it, that there is no longer discrimination, but the economic situation is extremely important and the progression curve is not always upwards. »
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