Workplace Diversity in Action

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(upbeat music) What can you do to make your company a more diverse place? Here, you'll learn what actionable steps to take in order to promote diversity in your workplace. You'll be given a series of tips and see how they will affect your company. In addition, you'll also learn about the tangible benefits of a more diverse workplace. Workplace inclusion and equity begins with specific employer practices. To promote both, consider taking the following actions within your workplace. Find someone who believes in a workplace diversity and ask them to speak publicly on the importance of diversity and inclusion initiatives. Ideally, this should be someone in an executive position. Establish highly visible diversity and inclusion initiatives. Consider hiring a chief diversity officer. Or at the very least, designate someone who already works with you for this role. Create employee resource groups or ERGs. These groups builds community while helping their members achieve development, both personally and professionally. Encourage mentoring programs to develop your leadership pipelines. Include a salary range on all public job postings. Ensure company benefits are equitable. For example, are spousal health insurance benefits available to same-sex partners? Train hiring managers on equitable candidate evaluations. Whatever aspect of your workplace you think is lacking in diversity, inclusion, or equity, it should be measurable so that you can track any and all progress you have made. Let's say that you work for a company in a male dominated industry and you're looking at the low numbers of women in the company, you decide that you would like to hire more women. First, you should establish a baseline from existing data. Then you can measure the impact of your changes. In that case, you may want to start with data like: One, the number of women in a male dominated field, such as engineering. Two, the average tenure of women working in a male dominated field. Three, percentage of women applicants. And four, percentage of women hires. Now that you have established a baseline, you can measure these same numbers based on your interventions. Some companies have a practice called blind hiring. In this controversial practice, nameless resumes are forwarded to hiring managers. That way, the shortlist candidates demonstrate their qualifications and experience without being impacted by unconscious bias. But this practice isn't full-proof as candidates will be brought in for an interview eventually. If there is bias, it'll still be there in the interview room. However, this practice has a chance to bring in someone who may have been excluded because of unconscious bias in the evaluation process. Just reflect for a moment, without a name on a resume, would you still be able to guess an applicant's gender? Maybe, but it would probably be more difficult. After a few months of an intervention or a change from how you were hiring previously, you can compare the current data and establish the increase or decrease from previous data. What changed? Did you hire more women as a result of the changes made? The major challenge here is that the impact of such a hiring program is not immediately measurable. In fact, it may be a year or more before you are able to see results, but they may be worth it as you're promoting diversity and inclusivity.