Simple Tips For Business Owners To Create A More Inclusive Workplace

A diverse workforce is a strong workforce. The variety of experiences and backgrounds that your business could have will greatly benefit you as an employer and will naturally help your company find greater success. A major part of this is going to be the morale boost that inclusivity and diversity can bring to a workplace. It’s important to remember that simply being diverse is not the same as being inclusive. Diversity is where you have people from all different backgrounds, races, and genders, for example, as a part of your business. However, you can still fail to be inclusive by not offering the same opportunities to everyone. Here we have some simple tips for business owners on how they can create a more inclusive workplace for their business.

Get The Rest Of Your Leadership On-Board

Change doesn’t happen overnight and most certainly can’t be done alone. To bring your entire team to a stage where they are all considering diversity and inclusion to be a pillar of virtue within your business, you’re going to have to get the rest of your management team on the same page as you. You’ll have to first make it clear what your goals are with these ideas and discuss the ways in which you can all work together to promote these mindsets and ethics. There are many ways in which managers can be more inclusive, and this might include you having to educate certain members of your management team on these principles. For example, you could do this by offering special inclusive management training to your staff.

Offer Equal Opportunities

You should try to stay aware of ways in which your business might be biased towards certain genders or races. To encourage greater diversity, it may be worthwhile to offer to train female employees via a women’s leadership program. This will not only serve as a great opportunity for female staff members, but it will also help you gain more women in management roles within your business, helping to better level the playing field. Of course, you have to balance this well, as merit and skill should arguably play the largest part in promotions too. However, promotions aren’t always based on these things. In many cases, a promotion will be down to confidence, how much leadership likes a particular person, and in some cases, that person will be chosen based on an unconscious bias based on their gender, race, or even sexual preferences. It’s therefore very important to root out these biases and strive to make your company a better place for everyone.

Push For Inclusive Language

While you must be careful when trying to change the language used by others, you can do this subtly by leading by example. You and your managers and your HR department should start by using more inclusive language around your team. If questioned on this, your managers should be able to provide a calm and reasonable response as to why inclusive language can be important today, especially to marginalized groups within your business. Simple things like learning the preferred pronouns of your employees and avoiding gendered language at work can show respect for the individual. If you know someone is married, then it’s best not to assume if they have a husband or a wife, for example, and to instead simply say, partner or spouse.