54% of business leaders consider diversity as a priority area for their organization ~ PwC’s Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Survey
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (D, E, &I) in the workplace have gained momentum over the past years. It involves creating a workforce that consists of people of different ages, genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, cultural backgrounds, and more.
Having a DEI workforce not only improves creativity, productivity, and innovation but also positively impacts the bottom line. In addition, it enables organizations to experience better financial returns and profitability.
However, making a workplace diverse, equitable, and inclusive requires a judicious and custom approach to ensure no aspect is overlooked.
This article covers the effective ways to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and how SAVIOM’s resource management software can help.
But first, let’s understand,
1. Why are diversity, equity, and inclusion crucial for organizations?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are integral to an organization’s success in the current hypercompetitive global business scenario. Incorporating DEI initiatives provides several benefits, as follows.
Hiring a diverse workforce in terms of background, race, gender, ethnicity, etc., helps reach and onboard a more extensive and inclusive talent pool.
It also empowers them to share their ideas and contribute to decision-making, increasing their engagement, productivity, and retention levels.
When people from diverse backgrounds bring their knowledge, experience, and perspectives to the table, it enhances innovation and creativity. It also helps improve product(s)/service(s) quality, boosts client satisfaction, increasing sales and revenue.
Diverse and inclusive workplaces foster a sense of belonging that enables employees to feel comfortable and work collaboratively towards common goals.
Further, fostering equity in a diverse workforce helps ensure everyone has equal access to opportunities as per their aspirational goals.
Now that the importance of DEI is clear, let’s understand how to promote them.
2. Ways to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion
Diversity and inclusion, which are the real grounds for creativity, must remain at the center of what we do. ~ Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s CEO
Following are a few to promote DEI.
2.1 Foster equal growth opportunities at all levels
Most employers implement diverse hiring for entry-level jobs but fail to ensure the same diversity when hiring for senior or leadership roles. It can result in bias leading to unequal opportunities and mentorship support for employees from underrepresented communities. So, companies should restructure their employee recruitment processes to hire a diverse workforce from entry-level to senior roles.
They can factor in disability status, veteran status, socioeconomic background, etc., to increase inclusivity. Moreover, formulating a comprehensive internal promotion policy can enable all the top performers to prove their potential and climb up the ladder without facing any biases.
2.2 Prevent proximity bias in global teams
Proximity bias occurs when people in senior positions tend to favor those in the office or on the site. It generally arises from the assumption that on-site employees are more productive or capable than remote ones. Hence, they favor on-site employees while assigning high-priority work, reviewing performance, or during appraisal times. This unequal treatment develops internal conflicts, distrust in management, unplanned attrition, etc.
To avoid it, managers should first assess both on-site and remote teammates’ skills, competency levels, and schedules before resource allocation. They can also consider time zone differences while scheduling meetings or assigning work to avoid instances of overutilization. These measures help ensure both on-site and remote employees are treated fairly while avoiding proximity bias.
2.3 Offer flexible work schedules
Organizations nowadays are more open to hiring geographically dispersed teams due to lower resourcing costs and increased profit margins. However, every member of such a team may not find the standard 9-5 work culture feasible for certain personal reasons. For instance, single mothers who look after their children may struggle to be productive during standard working hours.
Therefore, organizations must provide flexible work arrangements. One of the models to do that is flextime, which enables employees to customize their work hours and break durations while adhering to minimum work hours. Another approach is an alternative schedule to allow working in shifts or weekends for individuals who are unable to follow the regular 5-day schedule. These measures boost employee productivity and enhance workplace inclusivity.
2.4 Conduct dedicated training sessions & workshops
While hiring and engaging a diverse workforce is crucial, it is also essential for organizations to facilitate dedicated diversity and inclusion training sessions like cultural sensitivity or anti-racism trainings and workshops for employees. It helps make employees aware of the significance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Moreover, it makes teammates more conscious of workplace diversity issues, acknowledge conscious or unconscious biases, and take the initiative to eliminate them. Such training sessions eventually help the workforce embrace and respect the team’s diverse nature and work.
2.5 Promote pay equity for similar roles
According to the Bureau of Labour statistics,
Women earned about $.82 for every dollar men earned and the gap is even wider for many women of color.
Equal pay for similar job roles is vital to developing a DEI workplace. However, numerous statistics have proved the pay disparity between people of different genders, ethnicities, races, etc. Hence, a standardized and transparent compensation framework is crucial to ensure pay equity in an organization.
Firms can also collect the employees’ data, including job title, department, gender, etc., and review it to ensure that everyone is paid per the framework. They can also conduct a pay parity analysis to determine pay gaps between males and females or among people of different colors, ethnicities, etc. They can then coordinate with HR and higher-ups to eliminate all such disparities and achieve organization-wide pay equity.
2.6 Implement a 360-degree feedback mechanism
Feedback is the key to helping employees understand how they perform. So, managers should organize regular sessions to discuss and review every employee’s performance. They can also consider clients’, reporting mangers’, and peers’ opinions to make feedback more comprehensive. It enables employees to identify performance gaps and improve themselves, fostering better career development.
Companies can also consider conducting anonymous feedback surveys that allow teammates to raise concerns, issues, or grievances. This 360-degree feedback mechanism helps remove discrepancies in performance appraisals, fosters trust and transparency, and paves the way to an equitable work culture.
2.7 Incorporate multicultural and religious holidays
Acknowledging a diverse workforce’s religious and cultural holidays is imperative to maintain inclusivity. Organizations should create a calendar with all the upcoming holidays and festivals of various religious or ethnic groups.
Companies can also decide on the festivals when they can announce enterprise-wide holidays. Furthermore, they can also introduce floating holidays to accommodate diverse needs and interests. Wishing employees on their festivals can also make them feel included and valued.
Given the best DEI tips, let’s understand how resource management software can contribute.
3. How can resource management software help foster D, E, &I?
An advanced resource management tool has numerous functionalities that enable managers to ensure that every employee is treated equally and works on profitable projects.
Here’s how.
It provides enterprise-wide visibility to help understand the type of work assigned to each employee. It also allows flagging diverse individuals’ identities to help resource managers assign billable projects to them based on their merit without any discrimination. Further, managers can evaluate the employees’ time zones and prior bookings before allocating them to any project to prevent work overload.
Utilization reports help project managers track diverse individuals’ productivity and detect any instances of sub-par performance. Feedback sessions can then be conducted to understand the underlying issue and resolve it with remedial measures.
The tool also provides the Open Seat feature to enable managers to publish open positions. Employees with matching qualifications can apply for these vacancies, and managers can identify and allocate the best-fit candidates for the given task. This feature promotes inclusion, where every employee is empowered to take up the work of their interest.
These are some of the ways modern ERM tool supports DEI initiatives.
4. Conclusion
Creating and managing a diverse workforce is a process, not a destination. ~ Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
While hiring a diverse workforce can be the first step, maintaining an equitable and inclusive workforce is also important. One can implement the above mentioned practices and leverage a resource management tool to create a D, E, &I global team.
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