Speaker 1: Hey friends, Josh here, founder of HR University and certified HR professional. In this video, I'll be talking about two important issues related to the workplace, diversity and inclusion. Every company should have a ready strategy and initiatives for diversity and inclusion as it helps enhance company culture and retain employees. We all witness diversity in form of age, gender, race, disability, and much more. When companies are striving to diversify the workplace to provide a safe environment where every employee will love spending time, it's good to know that about 33% of companies in the US are ethnically and racially diverse and around 49% of employees want companies to be more inclusive of the LGBTQ plus community and a strong diversity inclusion strategy can help your organization attract top talent and drive innovative results. Now there are ways to implement this and here we'll discuss seven of those, but before we go deeper, remember to hit the subscribe button to keep up with all the HR content from HR University. Now let's go ahead and jump in. The first initiative would be to make it clear that everyone, including senior management, will be held accountable for outcomes related to diversity and inclusion. This is not only an HR concern and it will project an encouraging image of top-down participation if executives are involved and high level managers can propose diversity and inclusion initiatives and strategies within their job functions that will be implemented. You can request that reports be delivered to track the implementation of both positive and negative outcomes. These reports might also help in further advancing the company's strategies here. Moving on to the second initiative, it's about taking action against violators. For example, if an employee repeatedly gives offensive remarks on age, religion, or let's say race, that person needs to be disciplined. Employers need to confront this employee and enforce punishment actions. Of course, the punishment should be supported by providing clear reasons for it and in case of a habitual misbehaving on the employee's part, you should likely terminate their contract just depending on the circumstances around it. However, you shouldn't use examples like this to spread fear among workers, but rather to focus on the positive impact that diversity and inclusion has on the workplace. And that's why it's best to deal with these issues usually very swiftly and make sure that they're taken care of and not dragged out and pull tons and tons of people involved into them. And by doing this, this may help make working teams more diverse and also help increase awareness. And this brings me back to the first initiative. If this kind of behavior comes from senior management, they too should suffer the same consequences as other employees were in terms of if they're found harassing or offending an employee when it comes to diversity and inclusion. And the third initiative is investing in the workspace to make it inclusive for everyone. If you're planning on moving to new offices or maybe renovating the old ones, choosing a design that will be inclusive is a great first start, whether that's for employees with disabilities or various gender roles. The workplace must not isolate employees based on their special needs or make them feel uncomfortable. For instance, think about accessibility of equipment, stairs, ramps, or even doors. Place office items in easy to reach places or think about replacing doorknobs with other more practical options. In any case, make the workplace inclusive and functional for everyone. Inclusive language and acknowledgement of differences is a fourth initiative. Words do affect people and can make them feel uncomfortable or stir a sense of exclusion. Employees may say something negative without any bad intent, but it's a frequent occurrence that needs to be stopped. Having inclusive and politically correct language is a good place to start here. Or even better, introduce this issue as part of the onboarding process, emphasizing that it is a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone is expected to act accordingly. For example, we often use phrases like, are you deaf? Or are you blind? In everyday language without any intention whatsoever to offend anyone. So it's important that we stay away from that language. And one thing that can also help is using gender neutral pronouns in the workplace if that's what an employee's preference is. When talking about acknowledging differences, try honoring holidays and celebrations of different cultures and countries. We all have a colleague that comes from another country or one that has a different religion. Joining the celebration as a team and make them feel honored for respecting their customs and culture. This may also refer to having things like fridges and pantries for vegans, kosher and halal food or gluten free items. We've heard a lot of criticism too from others on why someone has a vegan or gluten-free diet or comes from a country and has a religion different from yours. And now we have initiative number five, which is bias technology. So what do I mean by bias technology? Each step of the employee lifecycle has the potential for unconscious bias, negating the most well-intentioned diversity and inclusion initiatives. All companies are dependent on technology for screening resumes, for example. You never know how the software is programmed. Therefore, always question the algorithm source for bias and poor quality data, which will in turn affect the outcome, especially in recruitment and evaluation. So let us say that your resume software has been fed with keywords such as strong and highly motivated, but these are terms mostly that male applicants use. Well, this will reflect in a lack of diversity of female candidates. The sixth initiative is diminishing implied bias instances in the workplace. There are cases when HR managers and recruiters are making unconsciously biased decisions. Some examples that come to mind are promoting employees you like, or you are friends with accepting applicants that come only from certain universities, or ranking the referrals of a candidate higher than the job performance. These are just to name a few. It's impossible to fully eliminate implied bias, and we know that, but the idea here is to make sure everyone is more conscious about it, whether through workshops or other methods. You should also try scanning talent management procedures and requirements, or opening up the recruitment and promotion process, even including succession planning, to a wider number of talent. And research has shown that minorities in the U.S. are facing a huge promotion gap. The corporate executive positions are held by about 85% of white individuals. Therefore, review promotion requirements and make sure that the positions are open for every employee who wishes to apply. There's also one more option you can consider, which is to hire a chief diversity officer to scan measures and identify assessment blind spots. This will make things much easier to fix. And the seventh initiative here is the last one that I want to introduce, and in my opinion is a very essential one. It's employees' level of satisfaction with their job. By monitoring their satisfaction, you can measure whether expectations related to employment are fulfilled and are affected by workplace diversity and inclusion. So use surveys and questionnaires, including questions targeting specifically just diversity and inclusion, and make them anonymous, these survey responses, so employees can give you honest and straightforward answers. However, before you do anything, make sure you communicate the reasons behind the process. So if you're going to give out a survey, make sure people know why. And inform managers that the results might impact procedures already in place and that the new ones will have to be implemented or the company might lose the faith of their employees. So try making it a regular practice as it will allow you to pinpoint weak spots and help you improve them. And there we have it. That's it for diversity and inclusion initiatives to implement in the workplace. I hope you found this information useful, and I'll encourage you to take some of these initiatives and put them in place at your company. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to our channel for more videos on HR, and I'll go ahead and see you in some of our following videos. Cheers.