Pioneer Profile: Richard Odufisan

It’s time that we recognise the people behind the evolving world of work. Our working lives have shifted to being more inclusive, more people-centric, more flexible, and just plain better for both employees and companies. 

These changes didn’t just happen: they were put into place and upheld by individuals and teams working to create a better working future for everyone. 

So we’re finally putting the spotlight on the people who make great companies great: the people-people.  

People-people are crucial to the success of every company. They find you the talent that drives you forwards, and they’ve taken on an increasingly strategic role in the past few years – often taking on responsibility for mental health, diversity and inclusion, culture, EVPs, Employer Branding and team happiness. 

Read more about the Pioneers List and go behind the scenes to understand how and why we’ve selected our Pioneers.

Tell us a little bit about your career history, and how you got to where you are now. What were the key milestones?

My name is Richard Odufisan, DEIB Project Manager at Somerset House. My career actually started because of just how much I loved performing on stage. In year 12, instead of focusing on revision and exams, I decided to do a play and a musical, and unsurprisingly didn’t end up getting the grades I would need to get into the courses I’d end up applying to in Year 13. Luckily, we still had the benefit of resits, so I could fix the grades, but I suddenly found myself needing to find something to fill my year after A-levels. Earlier in the year Deloitte had come to a career’s evening talking about their gap year programme, the Scholar Scheme, and I decided to go for it. Knowing very little about the world of professional services, I tapped into my acting skills, and did my best cosplay version of “person who cares about the 2008 recession, and reads the FT”. Thankfully, I got the role and it unlocked  the most incredible world of experiences.

The joy of the scholar scheme was that I got to experience many career options during the gap year and summers at uni, from being an actuary, to a tax analyst before finding my love for consulting. During my 8 incredible years, I really enjoyed the consultant life, especially the joys of travelling for work, from Copenhagen to the exotic heights of Bracknell…(the loyalty points made up for it!) But what I learned about myself as I progressed through the firm was how significantly my personal motivations shifted over time. After I suffered a pretty rough experience of burnout, my attention moved from trying to make Partner as quickly as possible, to being the leader that created a working environment that protected my team from the same experience, while allowing them to still chase their definition of success. 

At the same time, I recognised that not only were there few Black senior leaders in my area, but even the few Black peers I had started with as an analyst weren’t being afforded the same opportunities for success that I had been, and were having to leave to get those opportunities. I had built up the professional capital now to be able to have a voice that carried weight, and with the support and guidance of Sheree Atcheson, started getting more involved in the DEI work internally, and realising this was where my heart was, and what I needed to do with my career. For where I was in my journey at Deloitte, my next step wasn’t the most logical move, and I’m sure there are still some people who question how and why I made this choice, but I left Deloitte to go into inclusion full time.

When did you become interested in the future of work?

What is the most impactful change that you’ve implemented?

To date, the biggest impact I have introduced has been the Deloitte Black Action Plan. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, while the community of black colleagues were feeling the emotional toll of a sense of lost safety and collective trauma, many outside of the community were completely unaware of just how different the day-to-day experience of their colleagues were. I designed the Black Action Plan alongside three other colleagues to address several aspects of this experience gap:

1)  Awareness - It wasn’t good enough that some people just weren’t aware of what their colleagues were going through. We weren’t blaming them for their ignorance, but we put in place avenues for them to listen and gain some empathy to see that what was happening “over there” was a lot closer to them than many may have previously realised.

2) Representation - We needed to not only help the company’s leadership understand how the ignorance to the experiences of people from black backgrounds was a symptom of a lack of representation at senior levels, but to work together to review the end to end employee lifecycle to see where the systems and processes may unfairly disadvantage people, not only from black backgrounds, but other underrepresented demographics. This wasn’t just about an initiative for one group, but thinking about how we create fairer processes. 

3) Community - Ultimately, when we talk about belonging, it’s about having those spaces and communities where you feel at home. That isn’t exclusively within groups according to our similarities, but especially when you are finding your way around and trying to carve out your niche, it helps to have people you feel affinity to and closeness to when you have those moments of doubt, anxiety, or even loneliness. Those communities were open to people outside the network, but ultimately were there to nurture a sense of safety and rest.

What’s the biggest challenge of being in your role/industry right now?

The politicisation of DEI as a term and associated work. It’s impossible to avoid the fact that DEI has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years, and woke/anti-woke are two seemingly exclusive groupings that our society has been divided up into. Being brutally honest, it has made what can often be quite an emotionally draining, and thankless job that little bit harder. While I don’t think the overall sentiment towards or belief in the importance of the work is as negative as the media can sometimes portray, there’s no hiding from the reality that the social and political pressure has seen many roles in the industry being cut, at a time when the overall job market seems to be a lot less forgiving. Interactions with this work (especially online) have gotten far more polarised with consequences spilling into the real world, as we saw with the riots in the UK recently, or even in the rhetoric shared through political campaigns across the world.

What do you think the next big trend is in working culture?

We still haven’t really caught up, in my opinion, with the changes that have happened as a result of the pandemic. Necessity forced us into the current iteration of hybrid working which was largely just recreating the experience of a traditional meeting room but where you are in a square on the screen rather than in a seat around a table. It didn’t really solve for many of the problems we had even before Teams, Zoom and Google Meet took over, like who actually gets to contribute in those meetings, how we make those meetings more accessible or inclusive, or even more fundamentally how to stop having meetings that should have been emails.