Did you know that, according to Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, men and women are assessed differently at work, where men are three times more likely to hear feedback based on business outcomes while women received 2.5 times the amount of feedback men did about aggressive communication styles? These compounded and distorted experiences can result in low employee engagement and high employee turnover, particularly impacting women and minorities.
Identifying and understanding your organization’s blind spots so as to counter both overt and subtle inequities is advantageous, especially organizations that engage in strong diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies. Numerous studies have shown that diverse teams, on average, outperform more homogeneous ones and tend to generate 20-30% more revenue than less diverse organizations and teams. CEB (now part of Gartner) found that highly diverse and inclusive organizations had a 26% increase in team collaboration and an 18% increase in team commitment. Additionally, a study by Harvard Business Review showed that companies with higher-than-average diversity had 19% higher innovation revenues.
Diversity in business can bring underrepresented thoughts and experiences to the table, inspiring increased creativity and innovation. For this reason, building diverse, equitable and inclusive teams is imperative to business success, and as studies have shown, increases your bottom line!
There are a multitude of initiatives you can take to make improvements to your organization. Below are 5 examples of things you can do immediately to increase your organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Provide space and support for your current employees so that they feel safe and affirmed. Not everyone is like you. Thinking that everyone you hire has similar religious, political, and personal beliefs as you is an error in judgement that can result in you losing amazing talent, gaining a reputation for being biased, and ending up with a very homogeneous organization that is not only missing out on opportunities, but exposed to lawsuits for being discriminatory. Don’t just be tolerant…take a proactive approach to including others who are different, especially when hiring. It has to start somewhere. That somewhere is you.
- Look at your pay structure and re-evaluate its effectiveness and equity. Gender based pay inequities are common and their existence is a drag on organizational effectiveness. Open up conversation about the issue and develop strategies to address it, being transparent throughout the process. Pay people for what they are bringing to the organization, not on what it is they used to make elsewhere or based on other factors that have nothing to do with work quality and/or quantity.
- Build a workforce that is multi-generational. Diversity isn’t just about race, religion, gender, etc. It is also about the spectrum of ages. If everyone is about the same age, you most likely are missing out on insights, trends, and opportunities for business growth. You can also miss out on wisdom that comes only as a result of one’s breadth of experiences.
- Strengthen your anti-discrimination policies. If it isn’t written down, it is likely not a policy being followed. If it is written down, the leaders of the company must actively pursue and enforce the policy as written. If one policy isn’t followed in practice, it is hard to argue why any others should be followed as well. Hence, the importance of employee handbooks and well-thought through strategies about all aspects of your operation, from marketing to your people management. Get it right.
- Re-evaluate your promotion and hiring processes. Often, processes structure in biases without your realization. For example, are most of your hires internal referrals, thus likely resulting in hiring people similar to those already within the organization? Other practices that help remove bias include removing names from resumes being evaluated so as to mitigate bias that may result from seeing a candidate’s name. Standardized interview questions that are focused on behaviors and the requirements of the position also mitigate bias from affecting hiring decisions. We all have biases, often unaware of them in such ways that they rear their heads in subtle ways resulting in bad decisions. A good HR pro, can help you identify those blind spots and steer you to implementing better practices, thus hiring better people, supporting their success, and keeping them around longer.