Many organizations today recognize the value in building a diverse. Inclusion and diversity are two terms that most HR departments are discussing heavily today, but they aren’t just catchwords. A diverse workforce leads to more ideas, more inclusion, and higher retention rates. Here are some ways your organization can build a diverse workforce.
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Start at the Top
If you want to have diversity among your entire workforce, you need to start by looking at the top. Is your company’s executive team diverse? Diversity refers to multiple races, ethnic backgrounds, gender, and sexual orientation.
If you don’t have diversity at the highest levels of your organization, it will be much more challenging to encourage diversity lower down the ladder. What’s more, a diverse workforce will recognize an executive team that isn’t diverse, which could turn them off to the company as a whole.
Injecting diversity into an executive team is more challenging than doing so at lower levels of your company. Over time, though, you should strive to bring diversity to the top rungs of your organization.
Celebrate Cultures
A great way to build a diverse workforce is to celebrate multiple cultures. You can set aside time each month to celebrate the culture and background of some of your employees. Let them take the lead on planning and preparing a company luncheon that highlights different foods and traditions of their own culture. Your company can celebrate multiple holidays from around the world as a way to include all employees and educate them on different perspectives as well.
By integrating your employees into this planning process, you can promote inclusion while celebrating diversity. New potential employees will also see this as a positive for them, especially if they come from a different background.
Recruit for Diversity
One of the biggest benefits of a diverse workforce is the different viewpoints, ideas, and approaches that can be brought to your organization. People who come from different backgrounds, belong to different generations, and have different experiences can provide different ideas and ways of approaching problems and challenges. This can help you solve problems in new ways and create new products and/or services that will ultimately benefit your customers and your business.
If you want to build a diverse workforce, you should start right from the beginning, when you are recruiting new employees. To do this, consider re-writing your job descriptions in a way that a more diverse applicant pool may be attracted to.
Also consider posting job openings on a variety of sites. Traditional job sites are fine, but supplement those with postings on social media sites, other job boards, college forums, and any other place where you might attract candidates who are different from your current employees.
Create Referral Programs
Once you have started to recruit for diversity on your own, you can boost this approach by creating an employee referral program for new employees. Diverse employees are likely to be connected to even more diverse people from outside your organization—and these are the viewpoints that you should look to bring on board.