When it comes to company policies and high employee engagement, your company should prioritise having a diverse and inclusive workplace. Here’s why.
Better known as D&I, diversity and inclusion is a lot more than just company policies and running programmes. It is about understanding and respecting every single employee’s needs, perspectives, and abilities while cultivating a safe and positive work environment for all.
But aside from the benefits that employees stand to gain, D&I benefits your business as well. According to a McKinsey series investigating business case for diversity 1, diversity and inclusion in the workplace helps companies outperform their competitors that are lacking in these aspects. Clearly, with D&I, your business stands a chance to have a more robust financial performance and higher employee engagement in the long run.
So, the question is: how does your company become diverse and inclusive? What company policies should your business have? Is there anything in particular you should look out for?
Here are three simple questions to guide your company to becoming more diverse and inclusive for your employees and business performance.
1. Do you have representation for diverse talents?
This pertains to your hiring process and the way promotion works in your company. It is important to focus on advancing diverse talents into roles of leadership, management, and decision-making.
Only then can your company ensure a variety of voices and that multiple perspectives are being laid out. By doing so, you practice how good work is fairly rewarded and that everyone stands a fair chance in the workplace. This might even make your company a more attractive choice for new hires to join and for current employees.
To take representation a small step further, your company can also consider different forms of diversity. You can go beyond just gender and ethnicity to look at other factors, such as age, neurodiversity, or even sexual orientation.
2. Does your company effectively deal with microaggressions in the workplace to better diversity and inclusion?
To truly achieve D&I in the workplace, your company shouldn’t tolerate any discriminatory behaviour. Acts like bullying and harassment should have no place at work when trying to cultivate a positive work environment. To tackle this, help all employees to identify and address microaggressions.
By keeping communication open and welcoming, employees would feel more comfortable coming forward when such unpleasant experiences occur. This would help your company nip the problem in the bud a lot earlier, helping to foster a stronger sense of belonging for all employees across diverse backgrounds.
3. Is there an avenue for your employees to speak up about how diverse and/or inclusive your company currently is?
One sure-fire way to assess how diverse and inclusive your company currently is would be through your employees. They are at work most of the time, having to interact with one another and get work done, so they would have the most accurate idea of what issues to address and how to better improve D&I in the workplace.
Reach out to your employees through internal surveys and get their opinions on workplace matters. Afterwards, you can start to identify areas of concern and gradually work on a plan of action to make change.
However, it is possible that employees may not trust your company enough to divulge personal information. This may then skew the results, leading you to poor execution of your company’s D&I practices.
This is where a PEO service platform such as AYP can come in to lend a hand. With a single dashboard, AYP gathers HR department data for people, payroll, and compliance securely and anonymously.
We can then put our data, analytics, and algorithms to good use by implementing initiatives to push your company towards a more diverse and inclusive environment. Achieving D&I in your company really doesn’t need to be a difficult process.
Just give us a call, and help will be on the way!
Featured Content
1. Employee Welfare & How to Improve It
2. Why Analytics Matter With Diversity and Inclusion
3. 5 Hot Tips to Stop Employee Burnout Before It Starts
