Being An Inclusive Workplace Culture

Diversity and inclusion are a major part of doing business these days. Building an inclusive workplace is now a CEO-level concern, especially with the growth of globalization and digitization. Today a company can have offices across numerous states, even countries, so workplace culture is even more crucial to a company’s success.

It’s no longer just a human resources responsibility; it’s a tangible and direct way for leadership to achieve goals, outperform competitors, and increase their revenue. According to a McKinsey & Company report, companies with the most gender diversity on executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform on profitability and 27% more likely to have superior value creation. And companies in the top-quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity among their executive teams were 33% more likely to have industry-leading profitability.

An inclusive workplace is a company that aligns their diversity practices with their organizational goals. Inclusion happens on a day-to-day basis, through interactions that occur during onboarding, the office holiday party, even at the exit interview.

An inclusive workplace has employees connected and feeling like they belong. There’s a larger bond between colleagues from every department. Employees feel like they truly matter, that what they have to offer is valued. So they’re more likely to voice their opinions, cooperate, and even be more productive. After all, we spend a lot of time at work, so the environment and workplace culture for the most part can feel like a second family, your work family. As Marcus often says, “The key to business isn’t being smarter or wealthier, it’s being able to connect to people and relate to them.”

The benefits to an inclusive company culture are multifold and become even more crucial when you fully understand what’s happening in the workforce. For example, CNN Money reports that Millennial and Gen Z generations are the most diverse in history. Only 56% of the 87 million Millennials in the U.S. are white, compared to 72% of the 76 million in the Baby Boomer generation. It’s safe to say the career landscape is changing, and companies have to adapt their workplace culture to make everyone feel welcomed and valued.

Issues such as lack of growth and development opportunities, long commutes and lack of schedule flexibility, as well as poor communication, lack of professionalism and lack of support on management’s part, were cited as key factors. If you have an inclusive workplace, many issues within each of those categories are naturally addressed.

It’s a major investment to bring talent into your organization, so why bring them in if they’re not happy when they get here? You’ve got to get the inclusion part right.”

“We look at the opportunities where people managers are making decisions about employees and integrate a D & I filter into those opportunities to ensure we are making decisions appropriately,” says Celeste R. Warren, Vice President, HR and Global Diversity and Inclusion Center of Excellence at the Merck & Co of Upper Gwynedd, PA.

Some companies actually form an inclusion council with the help of several influential leaders. The group sets goals for an inclusive workplace and takes on all these mentioned responsibilities and tasks. An inclusion council continuously advocates for workplace culture, using findings and creating new policies to impact hiring, retention, engagement, training, and more. It’s important to note that these days, an inclusive culture is also an accolade that can help a company rise to the top of a best place to work list, garner employee satisfaction reviews online and in magazines, and even get a company publicity.

Companies today agree on the importance of a welcoming workplace culture and what it can do to overall performance.

Unfortunately, most fail at implementing new diversity policies to support the changes needed to achieve their goals, while others choose to just focus on underrepresented social groups. Diversity and inclusion are for everyone, at every level of the company.

Custom-Build Your D & I Initiative: You may be tempted to just mimic others, but your workplace culture should truly be unique. Sure you can leverage other brands’ experiences for research and inspiration, but the end result should be tailor-made for your workforce, including its social and contextual landscape.

Turnover affects productivity, increases hiring and training time, interrupts schedules, demands overtime from other employees, increases frustrations and negatively impacts your company. To make matters worse, there are costs associated with each one of those challenges. So what can you do to hire a more diverse workforce?

Properly Survey Employees During Their Exit Interview: What would be required for them to stay? Why did they really leave? What are their likes and dislikes that matter to them? You can also ask open-ended questions to get more of a dialogue, and perhaps get to the bottom of the honest reason for their departure.

For example, every so often you could end the work day an hour early and have a happy hour with your crew. That doesn’t mean you have to end up at a bar; it can simply be coffee and pastries around the company’s kitchen table. Such shared activities will foster more trust over time and make everyone more vested in other employees’ success.

An inclusive workplace is more important than ever. More than 42,000,000 workers voluntarily left their jobs in 2019. What does your current workforce look like?