What does it mean to have an inclusive and diverse workforce?
Diversity is a very hot topic at the moment, and many business owners may want to know what it means to have a diverse workplace in 2021. Does it mean making a few “diversity hires”? What about the culture and image of the business? It’s one thing to have diverse employees, but what about your marketing material and branding?
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Inclusivity is more than just representation, it’s about making everyone feel welcome and feel like they have access to the same opportunities, and this isn’t something that can be done overnight. Let’s take a look at how to truly create an inclusive and diverse workplace.
Be realistic
You can’t go in with the idea of filling quotas. Many circumstances may make them impossible to fill. There might simply not be enough people from certain groups applying. This isn’t something you can control. If you don’t have much diversity in your market, then you can’t expect to have diverse applicants.
The most important is building a strategy and committing to it. You have to make sure that everyone is on board and start with important areas. For instance, having a diverse HR team will help you make recruitment fairer and allow you to hire both for diversity and talent.
Train your recruitment team
If you don’t have diversity in your HR team, then you will have to identify and fix any bias that they may have. Note that it can be both positive or negative. They might have a positive bias towards certain groups which will push them to overlook some of their flaws. Or they may have negative biases that push them to nit-pick everything a person says. So you will need to teach them how to avoid bias in the recruitment process if you want to get the best people no matter their age, sex, race, or past.
Listing to experts
If you’re intimidated by the idea of workplace diversity and are afraid to make mistakes, we suggest that you look at as many resources as you can on the subject. One you should check out is the Lay of the Brand podcasts. They had a very interesting episode where they spoke about diversity, equity, and inclusion with multiple experts. This could give you a few ideas of the dos and don’ts of establishing a workplace diversity strategy in your organization.
Use specialized job boards
You should also harness the power of specialized job boards during your search. You have boards like Diversity Working that focus specifically on hiring employees from diverse backgrounds. You also have boards such as Recruit Disabilities or Hire Autism to help you give someone in need a chance. Or you have boards like 70 million jobs that help ex-cons find a job. These are what will allow you to have real diversity in your workforce.
These are all things that will help make your workforce more diverse and inclusive. You have to go past the token hires and change your organization at every level if you want diversity to be more than lip service.
