Encouraging Diversity in the Workplace By Catherine Miklaus, GreenJobInterview
In many companies, diversity is an issue that often goes overlooked. After Google announced in 2014 that 70% of its workforce was male, many companies began to look at their own internal structures to define whether or not they’re actively promoting diversity in the workplace. Statistics show that diverse companies outperformed their competitors by over 35%. But absent a solid strategy, many companies fell short with objections like they had no time, or that HR had not received complaints about the issue. It became a non-issue in some companies, but the issue has continued to grow. Recently, Pew Research Center conducted a study exposing potential causes for unconscious bias in the workplace. 40% of respondents felt that there weren’t more women in leadership positions because of a perceived double standard. This was not the only such study to illuminate a lack of diversity in companies; a recent Glassdoor survey shows that 57% of employees feel their company should be doing more to encourage diversity in the workplace. So how does a company make diversity a priority?
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Make Diversity a Priority with New Strategies The problems many companies have with encouraging diversity in the workplace is that they don’t know where to begin. It’s not as easy as telling hiring managers they have to hire more candidates from diverse ethnicities and backgrounds. These kinds of policies can lead to discrimination, although they are intended to do quite the opposite. Instead of creating policies to fail, consider the following strategies instead: •
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Train the team to become aware of their unconscious biases. It’s human nature to have a set of beliefs about those who are different from us. These are usually unconscious beliefs that we hold in the very back of our minds. But they can be coloring our decisions when we meet others. A great way to begin the process of encouraging diversity is to hold trainings to make employees aware of these unconscious biases and how to overcome them. Extend recruiting to broader talent pools. Some areas are very homogeneous, so it’s helpful to extend your recruiting efforts to more heterogeneous areas. Talent Acquisition can post open positions on more diverse sites, target new regions, and make use of diversity language in their social recruiting efforts. The search does not have to be limited to one specific geographical area, though. A great way to reach more diverse areas is with video interviewing. By removing the boundaries of geography, the company can extend its reach into more diverse candidate pools to encourage diversity. Hiring from more potentially distant locales can enhance diversity by providing access to people of different backgrounds and experiences. Highlight diversity in your recruiting content. Many candidates are visual and respond best to images of diversity on company career pages. Take an opportunity to highlight how diverse your team is to encourage other diversity candidates to apply. A great way to reinforce this initiative is to offer diverse candidates as brand ambassadors. These brand ambassadors can speak more convincingly about how your company celebrates diversity in the workplace. Create mentorship programs. In companies where women are underrepresented in management positions, it’s helpful to pair more junior employees with more senior employees as mentors. Who better to help guide a female employee’s career path than a woman who has already successfully achieved the same goal of management level? Mentorship programs can help to mold the next generation of employees by enhancing communication, passing on new skill sets and increasing transparency in key positions and departments.
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Create employee referral programs. Your existing employees are the most effective brand advocate. So why not rely on the people who know the company the best and celebrate its commitment to diversity? Employee referrals are very effective and represent 40% of new successful hires at organizations with active employee referral programs. Consider how your already diverse workforce can help the company make diversity hiring efforts more successful.
Many companies are fearful that creating new diversity programs in the workplace is difficult. But using these strategies, companies are better able to encourage diversity and create a company culture which celebrates diversity as a part of their employer brand.