Greater diversity and inclusion in the workplace fuels a wider range of ideas, expertise, and life experience, helping evolve any organization’s collective knowledge and overall mindset.
In fact, there’s plenty of tangible evidence pointing to the fact that diversity is better for business. Studies reveal that more diverse companies produce 2.3 times as much cash flow per employee. Meanwhile, companies with higher female representation in top management positions deliver greater returns to their shareholders.
Finding these successes isn’t simply a matter of assembling diverse talent, though. It’s vitally important to celebrate diversity and inclusion and assure that every employee feels supported and appreciated for the contributions they make to the organization.
Simply put, a better employee experience will ensure that you get the most out of each individual. With that, no company should consider themselves successful if their employees don’t feel celebrated and confident that they can succeed.
Four terrific ways to celebrate diversity and inclusion in the workplace are to:
- Pay close attention to pay equity
- Cater strongly to employee advancement
- Build a company culture event calendar
- Promote diversity education and resource groups to employees
1. Pay close attention to pay equity
Pay equity is extremely important when it comes to maintaining the integrity of your organization. And not just from the standpoint of compliance. Pay equity is as much a cultural issue as it is a law-abiding issue or a matter of dollars and cents.
Without equitable pay, can you honestly say you’re celebrating the diversity that your employees bring to your organization?
Auditing your team’s pay will help you identify any pay gaps between employees based on different factors like gender or race.
The first step of this audit should be to determine which groups you will evaluate and the factors you want to consider. From there, you can bring together data in a people operations platform with analytic capabilities to compare pay relative to employees’ job duties, experience, education, background, and quantitative performance to identify any discrepancies.
This type of audit will also help you communicate your approach to pay equity to employees and build a more evolved compensation plan—not to mention the fact that it will ensure you’re abiding by the Equal Pay Act and any state laws in place.
2. Focus carefully on employee advancement
Another way to celebrate diversity within your company is to support the advancement of underrepresented groups and minorities. As part of this, management should advocate for team members of all backgrounds equally while making decisions on promotions and new hires.
To keep tabs on whether management is effectively advocating for every member of their team equally, your organization needs to facilitate constant communication between your HR team and senior management.
One of the best ways to do this is by connecting the data from your HRIS, ATS, equity, and performance management tools. That will enable you to centralize all of your employee data to more easily identify any gaps and measure how key contributing factors to DEI differ across genders, ethnicities, ages, and so on.
You can bring all of this data together by overlaying each factor on an org chart. This view allows you to visualize any variable in full context—including pay, performance rating, and experience level—to more easily identify trends.
The visual nature of this approach also makes the findings more powerful when sharing with leadership and board members, bringing more life to the data than a spreadsheet.
Centralizing data in this way and allowing for direct collaboration can also improve communication between hiring managers and your HR team to know when to promote from within or potentially move to an outside hire.
It will also help you efficiently audit employee advancement and salary bands and build headcount and compensation plans to meet certain diversity standards as your organization continues to grow.
3. Build a company culture event calendar
A company culture event calendar is a great way to bring some energy to celebrating specific dates and events. It serves as a way to stay organized, gives you ample time to plan worthwhile events, and allows you to properly prepare for and accommodate employee time off.
To do so, create a calendar space where employees can see and/or add days of observance or celebration. It might help to have an accompanying messaging channel (in Slack, for example) where you can vocalize and share information and news regarding diversity and inclusion events.
For your calendar, religious holidays are an obvious starting point, but be sure to include monthly observances, events, and holidays that celebrate gender and racial inclusivity as well as historical events.
Though there are many diversity and inclusion events throughout the year, some examples might include International Transgender Day of Visibility (March), Juneteenth (June), Hispanic Heritage Month (September), and National Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October) to name a few.
Gender, race, and religious affiliation are not the only contributing factors to diversity and inclusion in the workplace, either. When deciding how you’d like to celebrate diversity and inclusion events, you also need to account for different personalities and social types. Happy hours, game nights, potlucks, international movie nights, and sporting events all serve as examples of how you can meet the expectations of everyone in your organization.
All in all, your company event calendar can be an exciting way to build internal traditions while driving more visibility to the mix of holidays, cultures, and backgrounds represented in your organization. With increased visibility, you’ll create a more sensitive environment attuned to celebrating all cultures.
4. Provide diversity education and fund employee resource groups
Of course, you can’t properly celebrate and understand diversity if your employees aren’t all well-educated and trained on awareness of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Either within your culture calendar or separately, share a list of educational events and resources with your team. For example, there are roundtables and workshops held on a regular basis across many denominations and cultures that seek to educate the working population on better inclusivity.
You can also schedule in-house events during work hours—”lunch and learns,” for example, serve as a great way to bring in guest speakers, thought leaders, or even members of your own organization to share stories and teach others about their cultural experiences.
Make sure you’re empowering your team with the time and resources to get educated. You can give employees days off throughout the year to volunteer or attend diversity and inclusion trainings, and you can offer stipends for employees to spend on diversity and inclusion courses and certificates throughout the year.
Additionally, employee resource groups (ERGs) serve as another way to further educate and support members of your organization by celebrating diversity and inclusion. These employee-led groups are often comprised of people of like-characteristics, providing a safe space for them to share thoughts and experiences and have an open discussion around inclusivity. Employee resource groups also help identify and develop internal leaders and build a more diverse talent pipeline. Importantly, these ERGS need funding and support from organizational leaders to be successful.
Celebrating Diversity Means Celebrating Success
Regardless of your company size, you should always put a great effort into celebrating diversity. Creating an equitable environment where all cultures, genders, and races are lifted up will make employees much happier and more energized.
With energized employees and tangible equity built into your company’s culture, diversity can serve as a primary competitive advantage as you hire and continue to grow your organization.
Ready to learn more about how you can celebrate diversity and inclusion in your organization? Watch our HR Tech Talk on taking action on DEI data.
Felecia Phillips Ollie DD (h.c.) is the inspiring leader and founder of The Equality Network LLC (TEN). With a background in coaching, travel, and a career in news, Felecia brings a unique perspective to promoting diversity and inclusion. Holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English/Communications, she is passionate about creating a more inclusive future. From graduating from Mississippi Valley State University to leading initiatives like the Washington State Department of Ecology’s Equal Employment Opportunity Program, Felecia is dedicated to making a positive impact. Join her journey on our blog as she shares insights and leads the charge for equity through The Equality Network.
