Diversity and inclusion cultures at companies don’t just develop from existing staff; rather, they depend on who they hire as new hires as well.
Assess your top management team as a whole to ascertain its representativeness to the workforce as a whole.
Encourage your managers to provide cultural and other sensitivity training. Develop and adopt a code of conduct which details your company’s stance on discrimination/nondiscrimination issues within its workplace policies.
Affinity Groups
All organizations should strive to offer their employees a diverse and inclusive working experience, from safe environments with regard to age, sex, religion, gender reassignment, disability, sexual orientation marriage/civil partnerships pregnancy maternity as well as race/ethnicity differences.
Establishing an inclusive culture takes active engagement from employees. One approach to doing so is through affinity groups – an effective way for employees with similar interests or identities to join together and feel more a part of the company.
Affinity groups should be accessible and visible throughout your organization so employees can find and learn about them, and any interested individual should feel welcome to join. By sharing details such as events that the groups host or resources that they recommend, you can demonstrate to employees your dedication to diversity and inclusion at work.
Listening Circles
While organizations understand the value of diversifying their workforces, shifting cultures can often prove to be challenging. One effective method for doing so is listening circles; they provide an effective means of discovering what employees require in order to feel more included and included within an organization.
Listening circles are informal dialogues among a small group of individuals in which participants exchange their perspectives on an issue or topic. These sessions should remain completely voluntary and be conducted in an environment in which employees feel safe to express themselves without judgement.
Conducting a listening circle requires asking open-ended questions that encourage employees to share their experiences. Allowing speakers time and avoiding offering positive or negative feedback will also allow them to reframe their feelings and situations based on what’s important to them; this will make them feel heard and valued by their employer.
Training
An effective way of fostering diversity and inclusion in the workplace is through diversity training for all staff. Such courses should cover topics like how to overcome unconscious biases – which arise without our awareness – as well as learning how to recognize and combat microaggressions.
Diversity training teaches employees to show empathy toward people from diverse backgrounds, making them feel welcomed into the team and contributing towards creating an inclusive working environment where employees can collaborate productively together.
One effective way of measuring the success of diversity and inclusion initiatives is through conducting an internal staff survey. This can provide valuable information as to where your efforts need to be focused; for example, survey results could reveal that certain job postings do not include inclusive language which might lead to less diverse applicants applying for roles; you could then amend these listings or incorporate inclusive language into future postings.
Hiring
People from various backgrounds bring unique insights to innovation teams, which makes them invaluable contributors. When teams collaborate across viewpoints they may discover solutions which otherwise go undiscovered.
Diversity and inclusion begin in the hiring process. Create diversity panels of interviewers who have undergone training on unconscious bias to ensure a more diverse pool of candidates. Furthermore, ask candidates to bring samples of their work rather than resumes so that they may share it during interviews.
Once you’ve recruited a diverse team, it’s essential that they remain happy and engaged. Employees who feel included are more likely to remain with your company for longer. Therefore, inclusive policies such as mentoring and virtual coffee chats that connect randomly assigned employees in order to discuss any topic are key in creating a healthy work culture. Finally, focus both on diversity AND inclusion-diversity without inclusion can create toxic cultures!
