Diversifying your workplace is a necessity both for well-rounded results, improved product feedback, and socially acceptable appearances; unfortunately, too many businesses focus on the latter while completely neglecting the former. There’s only one way to make your diverse office an inclusive one, and it doesn’t involve any graphs.
The bottom line for inclusivity is that you must impart ownership from day one. Having a diverse workplace is useless if you don’t take advantage of the talent you have in order to flesh out and enrich your process, and failing to use your diverse employees’ unique skillsets in practice is a guaranteed way to lose those skillsets to a competitor.
Sadly, fostering a sense of belonging is far easier said than done, and hokey “solutions” like team-building exercises and PowerPoint presentations about inclusion only serve to further the gap between your original team and your diverse team members. Instead of discussing the full implementation of your workforce’s talent over coffee, you should just do it.
The easiest way to ensure that your employees all feel included is by giving equal weight to their input. This isn’t to say that your employees need to be patted on the back even when they’re spouting nonsense; it just means that your role should include listening to everyone’s point of view rather than favoring a specific person or group of people — a problem that is all too easy to develop and nearly impossible to see until someone points it out.
Of course, diversification can also refer to accepting ideas that run counter to your own. Nothing will shut down office morale faster than a boss who doesn’t accept multiple channels of consideration.
Remember that your team’s diversity is valuable BECAUSE of its differences in perception, not in spite of them.
Rather than practicing diversity on paper while utilizing the same process, look at your new employees as individual opportunities to branch out.
It’s important to remember that diversity isn’t just about having different genders or races in your office. While you should strive to keep your employees’ cultural backgrounds as widespread as possible, actual diversification results when you’re able to use those employees’ unique abilities and experiences to create a truly multifaceted product.
Jack Lloyd has a BA in Creative Writing from Forest Grove's Pacific University; he spends his writing days using his degree to pursue semicolons, freelance writing and editing, oxford commas, and enough coffee to kill a bear. His infatuation with rain is matched only by his dry sense of humor.
