How to Build a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion in Your Workplace

As we saw right at the beginning of this
series, diversity can bring great
benefits to your business—everything from more innovation and better
decision-making to a healthier bottom line.

But those benefits don't come
automatically. Even if you’ve followed all the steps in our hiring
tutorial and have started recruiting a more diverse set of employees, you
won’t get the benefits unless you manage the process carefully so that, when
they join the company, all your employees feel included and respected and can
perform to the best of their ability.

So in this tutorial we’ll look at how to
build a culture of diversity and inclusion in your workplace. You’ll learn what
structures to put in place, some best practices around communication and
training, how to deal with benefits packages, and much more.

1. Create a Structure

If you want to move from a homogeneous
workplace to a diverse one, that will involve making some changes to the way
you do things. So someone needs to be responsible for doing this.

The structure you use depends on the size
of the company, but you'll need to have something in place. For example, Envato,
the parent company of Tuts+, appointed a Diversity & Inclusion Advisor who
is responsible for leading all the efforts to improve diversity across the
company.

Larger companies will probably need an
entire department dedicated to diversity; for smaller startups, maybe it’s just
part of the responsibilities of the owner or a key employee. The point is to
make a commitment and dedicate time and resources to effecting change, so that
your diversity policy goes beyond paper and becomes reality. We’ll look at what
some of those changes could look like in the rest of this tutorial.

2. Choose Your Focus

As we mentioned in an earlier tutorial,
there are many different dimensions
of diversity. Do you plan to work on all of them at once, or to handle them
one at a time so that you have more focus?

A large company like Microsoft has a broad approach, with seven major employee groups and over 40
employee networks working on different areas.

At Envato, the focus
is on four themes to begin with:

1. Gender


2. LGBTI


3. Mental health


4. Unconscious bias

There are other areas
where the company wants to make progress, of course, but the goal for now is to
see a significant impact in those four.

“It’s about striking
the right balance,” says Abbie Burgess, Envato’s Diversity
& Inclusion Advisor. “We could have made a decision to focus on more themes, but maybe then
we wouldn’t see the same measurable success. We want to make a real difference with the
resources we have.”

The themes at Envato
grew out of work that was already being done by employees who had
self-organised before a formal program was put in place. Their passion in particular areas was clear, and they have been driven to make change. 

For your own business, you could set your own
areas of focus based on a similar process. Make decisions based on what’s important to you,
your customers, and your employees.

Then set objectives in
each area. How will you measure success? Some examples could be:

• Retention rates


• Employee survey
  results


• The percentage of
  different groups represented in your business


• Results of industry-wide
  equality and inclusion surveys

There are other
metrics you could use, too. The important thing is to have a goal to work
towards. We’ll talk more about measuring progress at the end.

3. Build Networks

The best way to help people overcome differences
is to encourage them to mix in an informal or social setting. And sometimes people
can benefit from specific groups to help them connect with each other and share
experiences.

Many large companies have dedicated groups
for different employee segments. Consulting firm Accenture, for
example, has hundreds of Employee Resource
Groups in 120 offices around the world.

“We bring together
individuals with common needs or interests ranging from ethnicity, gender and
sexual orientation, gender identity or expression to faith or religion, ability
and career paths, and more.”

Setting up ways for
employees to connect with each other can help in many ways. As well as groups,
you could look at informal buddy systems or more formal mentoring programs.
These can help employees feel comfortable in the company, talk about any issues
and problems they encounter, and find the best way to be successful.

Mentoring programs can also lead to another
benefit: internal promotion. In a
study of the mentoring program at Sun Microsystems, employees in the mentoring
program were promoted
more than twice as often as other employees.

If you want your diversity initiatives to
be successful, you’ll need not just to hire a diverse group of employees but to
give them a clear, realistic career path to the higher levels of the organization.
Mentoring is a great way to encourage this upward mobility, ensuring that
diversity flows right through to the leadership team and also contributing to
pay equality—an important issue that we looked at in an earlier
tutorial:

• 
  Diversity
  
  
  How to Achieve Gender Equality in Your Business
  
  
  Andrew Blackman

4. Have Clear Anti-Discrimination Policies, and Enforce
Them

OK, this one is a no-brainer. Every company
should have a policy informing employees of their right to be free from
workplace discrimination. In many places, it’s a legal requirement.

But if you are truly committed to a diverse
workplace, you’ll want to go further. As part of the induction process for new
employees, set very clear guidelines around what sort of behavior is OK and not
OK, so that everyone understands what’s expected of them and what sort of
support they can expect from you.

And it’s also important to take firm action
if people behave in ways that don’t match your company’s values. If you’ve
managed diversity well and have a healthy, inclusive workplace culture, then
these incidents should be rare. But they will occur, and when they do, you need
to ensure that you take them seriously—it’s a crucial part of ensuring that
everyone feels safe and supported and can work without harassment or
discrimination.

5. Get Everyone on Board

For a commitment to diversity and inclusion
to really take root in your organization, you’ll need to get the majority of
your employees on board.

Try to communicate the benefit of diversity
to the company and employees as a whole, to counteract the notion that it’s
only aimed at helping certain groups. You could use some of the research we
looked at earlier in the series on how it will give your company an advantage,
or communicate the importance of diversity in terms of alignment with the
company’s values.

Good communication goes both ways, of
course. As well as talking to your employees, also listen to them. Even though
you’re committed to diversity and inclusion, people could have legitimate
concerns about the way in which you’re doing it. Listen to those concerns and
have a genuine, open conversation. You may learn something and improve the
program.

Training can also help your employees to
get a better understanding of the topic. You can find some resources online,
such as this eLesson
on unconscious bias provided free by Microsoft, or Project Implicit’s free
online tests of implicit attitudes. The results can be fascinating, and you can
arrange more training to help people understand what to do with the results and
how they can counteract any biases in their day-to-day work.

6. Be Fair With Benefits

Are your employee benefits packages fair to
everyone? For example, if you offer health insurance or other benefits to employees'
spouses, does that include same-sex partners? Do you give your employees enough
flexibility, parental leave, and childcare support to enable them to balance
their work with raising a family?

Go back to all the dimensions
of diversity that we looked at in a previous example, and reassess all your
employee benefits with those areas in mind (or your chosen areas of focus, if
you’re starting off with a more targeted focus). What would different types of
employees need from a company benefits plan? If you don’t know, run surveys or
do other research to find out.

7. Accommodate Everyone's Needs

Educate yourself about any special
requirements particular groups might have, and then provide what they need. For
example, people with disabilities may need special computer equipment to help
them do their jobs. Some companies go even further to provide equal access to
jobs: Walgreens
has outfitted a couple of its warehouses and distribution centers with disability-friendly
equipment, and in one of them, roughly half of the staff has a disability.

Envato now has specially trained Mental
Health First Aid Officers in the workplace. They’re similar to the physical
first aiders you’re probably familiar with, but in the field of mental
health—whilst they are not qualified counsellors or psychologists, they’re trained to spot the first signs of health problems and be a
first point of contact to talk, provide support, and connect employees to the
resources they need.

Other accommodations could include a prayer
and meditation room, language training for people of different nationalities,
time off on important religious holidays, or a multitude of other things.
Listen to your employees and prospective employees, keep up to date with what
other companies are doing, and try to create a workplace that provides for
everyone.

8. Welcome Difference

Diversity is not about having a certain
number of people from a certain group. It's about really listening to their
different perspectives, valuing them, and benefiting from them. It's about achieving a new way of thinking.

Sometimes that can involve conflict or
disagreements, and rethinking your own views, so you’ll need to be willing to
do that to achieve true inclusion.

A study of 450 U.S.
bank branches by academics at Harvard Business School found that
organizations had three different perspectives on diversity:

1. 
   Discrimination
   and fairness perspective. The
   work groups aspire to being color blind, so conversations around race are
   limited.


2. 
   Access and
   legitimacy perspective. There
   is diversity only in certain parts of the organization. People are effectively
   shunted onto segregated career tracks and told, "This is what you're good
   at."


3. 
   Integration and
   learning perspective. Group
   members are encouraged to bring all relevant insights and perspectives to bear
   on their work.

Only the third perspective led to sustained
performance gains; the other two led to employees feeling like “cogs in a
wheel”.

The difference in the third perspective is
that the groups had open
discussions about their differences and learned from them. To achieve that,
you’ll need not only to take all the steps we’ve discussed in this tutorial,
but also to have a genuine openness to change and having difficult
conversations, and you’ll need to encourage those traits in your employees too.

9. Measure and Monitor

The success of any project depends on
measuring progress. So the last step is to monitor the success of your
diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Employee surveys are a great way to do
this. The Society for Human Resource Management offers a useful sample
diversity survey. You can adapt these generic questions to your own needs,
adding questions on specific projects or areas of focus that you want to track.
Or work with a consulting firm to design and administer a survey.

If you repeat the survey at regular
intervals with the same core set of questions, you’ll soon start to see
patterns that can help you improve and learn.

Also consider participating in wider
industry surveys, which can help you get an external benchmark on how you’re
doing compared to other companies in your country or your industry. Envato
participates in the Australian
Workplace Equality Index, for example. There are many similar surveys in
different countries that can help you get an impartial view of your progress.

There are many other ways to measure
success, and many other metrics you can use. Which ones you use will be driven
by the objectives you set, but whichever methods you use, make regular
monitoring a part of the process, and use the results to improve your diversity
initiatives.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you’ve learned about
building a culture of inclusion and diversity in your workplace. You’ve seen
some concrete strategies you can use and some examples of how that’s worked at
Envato and other companies.

It’s a large topic, however, so consider
this your introduction. To be successful, you’ll need to commit significant
resources over a long period of time. It may not always be a smooth process,
but it will be rewarding. As Envato’s Abbie Burgess says:

“Diversity and inclusion is not one of
those things that we’ll be able to tick a box on one day and say we’ve done it.
It’s an ongoing commitment that we’ll always be working on.”

If you’d like to learn more on the subject,
please check the earlier tutorials in the series if you haven’t read them
already:

• 
  Diversity
  
  
  10 Key Advantages of Promoting Diversity in Your Business
  
  
  Andrew Blackman


• 
  Diversity
  
  
  What Are the Important Dimensions of Workplace Diversity?
  
  
  Andrew Blackman


• 
  Diversity
  
  
  How to Achieve Gender Equality in Your Business
  
  
  Andrew Blackman


• 
  Diversity
  
  
  How to Ensure Diversity in Your Recruiting and Hiring Practices
  
  
  Andrew Blackman