Reaping the Benefits of the Modern Era of Diversity and Inclusion: How to Ensure You Have the Best People for Your Workplace

Earlier, I wrote a post about Google’s Project Aristotle and how its results show how the modern era of diversity and inclusion in the workplace helps to create and maintain high functioning groups.  The value a diverse and inclusive workforce brings cannot be overstated.  As I discussed in my prior post:

The value of diversity and inclusion efforts has been recognized and reinforced by current research.  For example, a 2015 Bersin by Deloitte study found that companies that link diversity and inclusion efforts to business goals statistically outperform their peers.  And Millennials, the up and coming labor force, place a high value on working for companies with a strong focus on diversity initiatives and inclusive environments.  Simply put, diversity and inclusion make for successful workplaces, both in the present moment and looking towards the future.

Given the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, what steps can you take to ensure you are making the most of your employee base?  How can you make sure you have the best group of diverse thinkers and problems solvers to maximize the functionality of your team?  What are some steps you can take in order to ensure your workplace is making the most of this modern era of diversity and inclusion?

As with most things in life, including preparing for a mediation, getting clear on what your goals are is the first step.  In the case of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, are you concerned with addressing an existing lack of diversity, addressing challenges a diverse workforce presents to group functionality, or both?

If a lack of existing diversity is your primary concern, begin by taking a clear look at your workplace in order to identify any “diversity lapses,” and then determine the changes you want to make to address these lapses.  For example, is there a significant gender imbalance in your workplace, or a dearth of employees of color?  Do you want your workplace to have wider range of ages of your employees to better leverage different life experiences?  How about different educational backgrounds in order to encourage different ways to think about the problems your workplace is designed to address?  This analysis will tell you what your diversity and inclusion goals are.

Once you have your goals in mind, then you can start to implement ways to achieve that diversity goal in your workplace.  Take a look at your pipeline, where are your employees coming from?  If all of your hiring is done through your management’s LinkedIn network, then you may end up with a homogeneous applicant pool.  Think of ways you can redesign your hiring procedure to broaden your applicant pool.  Can you recruit more extensively geographically, can you deliberately try to broaden your management’s networks, can you actively post job openings directed at applicants from different academic backgrounds?  There are many possibilities for broadening your pipeline of talented applicants to ensure greater diversity and all the benefits that brings to your workplace.

On a related note, if your workplace shows diversity at entry level positions, but looks increasingly homogeneous as you move up through the ranks, you can use the same process as revising your hiring and recruitment techniques in order to make your internal promotion processes more effective for increasing diversity throughout the workplace.  A great example of this also comes to us from Google.  An analysis of their promotion program showed what in order to be promoted, employees had to volunteer to be considered.  For a whole host of societal reasons, it was much easier for men to volunteer than women, thus leading to a severe gender imbalance in applications for promotion management.  When Google realized the problem, the requirement to volunteer was replaced with a direct reminder to all employees to apply.  This simple change yielded a dramatic uptick in women applicants for management positions.

What if your workplace analysis shows that while the workforce is diverse in gender, race, thought, background, age, etc., the issue is bringing people together to successfully work in groups?  In that case, your workplace analysis should begin with a workplace audit.  Check in with all the employees to get a full understanding of the issues at hand.  Is there lack of clarity regarding goals, objectives or responsibilities?  Is everyone on the same page regarding decision making?  Do people feel trusted, valued and safe to bring their whole self to the table?  Once you have identified any challenges, you can then work with management and employees to think about new ways to promote more effective workplace relationships.  This can take the form of coaching, the creation or redesign of policies and systems, or training about effective communication.  And these are all things that a qualified workplace mediator can help you deal with.

When you are dealing with diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the key lesson from Google’s Project Aristotle remains this: do people feel valued for everything they have to bring to the workplace?  If not, what steps can we take to make that the new office norm?