Creating and maintaining a truly diverse and inclusive workplace can be a daunting task, but by taking just a few simple steps, you can pave the way for a truly diverse pool of talents, skills, and thoughts that will lead your company to success.
Promote Your Dedication To Diversity
Simply letting potential employees know of your company’s dedication to diversity is a surprisingly effective way to increase the diversity of candidates. This can be accomplished by posting a diversity statement prominently on your site, or by including it in the description of every job that you post.
Additionally, setting clear and measurable goals for diversity is another way to tangibly improve your company’s diversity. By accomplishing your publicly stated goals, it helps to prove the sincerity of your company’s commitment to a diverse workforce.
Rethink The Language in Your Job Descriptions
Whether intentional or not, job descriptions often contain language considered “exclusionary,” which can dramatically shrink the pool of interested candidates. Exclusionary language can include gendered phrases or seemingly innocuous words that possess a different connotation for different groups.
Rethink Your Hiring Process
Consider structured or blind interviews for incoming candidates, which will help to eliminate the possibility of inherent bias while providing consistency to every candidate equally.
This concept can be applied to resumes as well, with “blind resumes” being devoid of any information that might reveal a candidate’s gender, race or other identifying factor.
Diversify Your Candidate Pools
When seeking new candidates, avoid using the same job boards, methods or other sources you typically rely on. Instead, seek out new hiring platforms to broaden the scope of available prospects.
Additionally, consider posting your latest jobs on career websites or platforms that focus on representing diverse or underrepresented groups.
Educate Employees and Leadership on Inclusion, Diversity and Unconscious Bias
Training and education are highly effective ways to provide your company’s leadership and workforce with the knowledge they need to better understand the benefits that diversity brings to the table.
Additionally, such training and education will allow employees to pinpoint and address practices that discriminate or promote exclusivity. Unconscious bias training, in particular, is an excellent method to correct biases on a company-wide level.
Create a Culture of Inclusivity
Any steps taken toward diversifying your workforce will backfire if the work culture is inherently toxic or exclusionary.
In order to improve a company’s culture, it’s a common practice to form an inclusion council. Their goal is to identify inclusion or diversity issues throughout the company, and use this valuable feedback to come up with ways to improve or rectify the situations.
Consider Hiring a Diversity Expert
Hiring a diversity expert or officer can also be a great way to learn about your company’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to diversity. An expert will also be able to help you create strategies for greater diversity and inclusion successes, along with solutions for any problem areas that are discovered.
Accomodate a Wider Scope of Religious and Cultural Holidays
A simple action that you can take to increase inclusivity is expanding the company calendar to accommodate a wider scope of religious and cultural holidays. This is not only an inviting gesture for possible applicants, but also proof of your dedication to diversity.
Provide Internships and Scholarships
Providing desirable scholarships or internship opportunities to under-represented communities are an excellent way to widen your pool of candidates while broadening your inclusivity. By appealing to groups that previously may not have applied for an open position, this method can also act as an incentive that leads to a greater diversification of your workforce.
Modernize Company Policies Regarding Flexible Work
Remote work is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Because of this reality, it’s important to embrace the idea of flexible work. Better yet, by adequately implementing remote work accommodations, there is actually a greater chance of diversifying your workforce.
With appealing flexible work policies, you’ll find an inherently larger pool of interested applicants, and a greater amount of diversity within that pool (as remote work opens the job market to individuals who may not have applied previously due to medical or personal reasons.)
Study Your Exit Interviews
By thoroughly reviewing feedback from exit interviews, you may be able to identify previously unseen areas in which you can improve your company’s diversity. Although the reliability of exit interviews can be questionable on occasion, there is still a chance to discover unknown weaknesses, room for growth, or other eye-opening insights.
A diverse workforce is a thriving workforce, overflowing with unique thoughts and talents.
Although these are just a few of the ways you can diversify your employees or pools of candidates, they are still an excellent starting point for building and broadening inclusivity throughout your company.