A diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens your organization, boosts engagement, fosters innovation, and creates better opportunities for all employees.
Driving Diversity in the Workplace
To develop a measurable and effective diversity & inclusion strategy, you’ll need to understand workforce diversity best practices and proven methods for welcoming a broader talent pool and inviting new perspectives that can improve problem-solving and day-to-day operations.
Here, we’ll explore how to implement diversity policies, enhance hiring & recruitment, promote leadership diversity, provide educational opportunities, and take other key steps to improve employee experience and improve your business’ reputation in the process.
Foster an Inclusive Workplace Culture
Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace means offering a welcoming environment for all employees and tangible opportunities for employee development, increased internal & external collaboration, improved internal communication, and consistently fair hiring practices.
- Developing mentorship programs for underrepresented groups to create clear opportunities for advancement business-wide
- Setting measurable diversity goals related to recruitment, hiring, increased educational opportunities, or pathways to executive leadership
- Increasing remote/hybrid work options & improving work-life balance to accommodate families, caretakers, senior employees, and others
- Establishing a returnship program that offer incentives to workers who are returning to the workforce following an extended absence
- Collaboration or partnership with post-secondary institutions to establish a diverse talent pipeline for various roles in your business. This could include actively promoting careers in a field or fields where underrepresented groups are typically excluded.
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Implement Comprehensive Diversity Policies
The diversity policies your business develops should be both comprehensive and transparent: available to all employees at all times, and rooted in the core principle that all employees will receive fair and equal treatment, bias-free performance evaluation, and open access to opportunities for advancement, education, fair compensation, and benefits.
A well-formulated set of policies should address all of the following:
- How recruitment and hiring will be approached to ensure non-discrimination and fairness (a blind screening process for resumes, for example)
- Clear criteria for employee promotions that applies equally to all employees
- Clear criteria for job performance evaluations that applies equally to all employees
- How development programs work within the company, with emphasis on equal access for all staff, regardless of race, gender, age, or other characteristics.
- Clear policies and statements regarding discrimination, harassment, and retaliation
- How all employees are held accountable for actions that violate the terms of the company’s diversity or non-discrimination policies
After preparing a written diversity policy, you should also take early steps that concretely demonstrate the ethics articulated in your business’ written policy. This could include all of the following and more:
- Adding a non-discrimination module to your annual employee training process
- Sharing a video address or statement with your employees from your business’ senior leadership
- Inviting employee feedback regarding the company’s diversity & inclusion policy
Once your policies are formulated and shared with staff, it’s time to fully enact your new best practices in areas like recruitment, hiring, training, education, promotion, and internal and external collaboration.
Enhance Recruitment and Hiring Practices
Recruitment
There are a number of ways to enhance recruitment and hiring practices to align with your business’ diversity policies. As a starting point, your business should use inclusive language to avoid deterring certain groups from applying for new positions and include information about diversity policies and initiatives within each job posting.
In addition to modifying the text and emphasis of job postings, your business can also begin posting on job boards and channels organized for and by underrepresented groups, including women, veterans, people with disabilities, and minorities.
As a consideration for both recruitment and hiring, we also recommend surveying post-secondary institutions in your region – from HBCUs to trade schools and community colleges – to establish a potential pipeline for hiring from within a diverse student population. A partnership or collaboration with one or more of these institutions could provide access to a wider talent pool for your business and concretely improve your business’ diversity recruitment strategies.
Hiring
To ensure fair hiring, one common approach is to implement blind or anonymous review of resumes: removing name, gender, race, ethnicity, age and other personal information from a candidate’s application materials at the start of the review process. This increases the likelihood of a bias-free evaluation of each applicant and ensures a focus on meeting stated requirements, qualifications and attributes included in the job listing.
For other organizations, it’s also possible to establish a more diverse hiring committee that includes individuals from a broader range of backgrounds and perspectives. Regardless of the scale of your hiring policy changes, it’s important to adjust interviewing protocols to complement the anonymous review of resumes. Ideally, interviews should shift towards emphasizing an applicant’s qualifications, skills, and other objectively verifiable qualities rather than relying on a more subjective approach. Whether it’s using standardized questions for all candidates or taking another approach, by focusing on objectivity and fairness, your business can reduce bias in the hiring process and increase the likelihood of attracting and hiring a more diverse range of candidates.
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Promote Leadership Diversity
Promoting leadership diversity within your business includes creating opportunities for internal promotion to executive positions, as well as seeking out individuals from diverse backgrounds to fulfill leadership roles.
In this sense, your business should strive to use mentorship programs, continuing education programs, and other programming to facilitate growth for all of your employees while working to externally attract candidates for executive leadership who can help your business embrace a wider range of perspectives, experiences, and insights.
Hiring or internally promoting more diverse leadership can create a more inclusive workplace , but also help you more deeply understand the needs and priorities of a wider range of clients, making more thoughtful and innovative decision-making that ensures the long-term success of your business.
Provide Ongoing Training and Education
Part of effectively creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace is offering training and education that helps employees meaningfully advance their careers. Whether it’s collaborating with outside organizations & institutions, supporting continuing education through tuition assistance, or creating mentorship programs that facilitate job advancement, these steps are all tangible and demonstrable ways your business can show its commitment to supporting all employees, regardless of race, age, gender, or other factors.
Another facet of this process is to offer regular training sessions for all employees that promote understanding and inclusiveness. In some cases, this includes unconscious bias training for those involved in the hiring process, cultural competency training to promote the appreciation of diverse perspectives, as well as workshops or modules on non-discrimination for all employees. When a business’ leadership is meaningfully involved in the training process – participating in a shift towards more equitable recruitment, hiring, and internal communication – this can improve employee satisfaction and retention while affirming the core values of your organization.
Establish Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
Employee resource groups (ERGs) are employee-led groups that organize based on shared identities or experiences, including gender, ethnicity, race, disability status, and other factors. In general, ERGs empower employees from underrepresented groups to meet and share resources, perspectives, and even advocate for policy change(s) within a business. Especially with direct support and early participation from a business’ leadership, ERGs are shown to improve employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction by promoting belonging within an organization and inspiring organizational change. ERGs can even influence and strengthen professional development opportunities and help managers and HR staff improve inclusive hiring and recruitment strategies.
Celebrate and Acknowledge Diversity
In addition to providing cultural competency/awareness training and celebrating diverse holidays or important dates for a range of employees, your business should also consider organizing a recognition program. A recognition program allows your employees to celebrate the accomplishments of their peers, including when an employee utilizes a mentorship program, continuing education program, development program, or has contributed to supporting diversity and inclusion within your organization.
As with the other programming we’ve discussed, a recognition program is generally more effective when all staff & senior leadership participate and acknowledge achievements collectively. Recognition programs are an investment in promoting diversity and inclusion, but also improve employee morale and satisfaction.
Streamline HR & Training with Payroll Freedom
Fostering a more diverse and inclusive workforce increases employee engagement, encourages the career growth of employees, and gives your business access to a wider talent pool. That’s why Payroll Freedom offers HR & compliance support and enhanced training services to help your business streamline this process and implement best practices that help your business and employees thrive.
Contact us today to establish a more diverse and inclusive workplace and improve your business’ recruitment and hiring strategies.
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