Month: October 2021

Diverse teams outperform mono-cultural teams in the workplace when those individual differences are valued and leveraged. When differences are ignored, organizations miss the benefits of diversity.

There is a growing consensus that inclusive work environments yield better results. When employees feel included, they are more engaged and perform better. Organizations that are moving the needle on inclusion know that it is important to create a shared understanding of inclusive behaviors, of the benefits of having a diverse workforce, and of the link between inclusion and their organization’s mission and vision.

Training programs and leaders who model inclusive behaviors are essential to creating inclusive work environments, but they alone are not sufficient. When employees have meaningful workplace relationships with people who are different from them, organizations will become more inclusive. These relationships are where mentoring comes in.

A mentoring culture is a culture that nurtures deeper working relationships and values the development of all employees. When employees have a place where they can focus on their own development, take risks, explore possibilities, gain exposure to senior leaders who get to know them, and understand that differences are not just seen but also valued, they can feel understood and appreciated and know that they are an integral part of the organization.

Cultural competency is the ability to understand, appreciate and interact with people from cultures or belief systems different from one’s own. An organization cannot be inclusive without a culturally competent leadership team and workforce.

Cultural competency requires exposure to people who are different from us in a meaningful way. When we become culturally competent, we stop judging differences as good or bad or as better or worse. Instead, we learn about those differences and how they impact others’ perspectives, motivations and worldviews.

Mentoring helps build cultural competency by creating familiarity and understanding, which may help bridge differences. For example, a mentor might be surprised to learn that her mentee has a different view of authority, is motivated by something entirely different than she is or has a different threshold of tolerance for ambiguity. If the mentor had learned about these differences in the absence of a personal connection, she might be more likely to judge or dismiss them. Through her relationship with her mentee, she can begin to understand these differences and see how they might be significant for him and for others.

Cultural competency cannot be built in a classroom. It grows in trusting relationships where each person can show up authentically. It is developed by creating safe spaces like in a mentoring relationship, where both parties can share their insights and struggles. The skills and awareness that are built in these relationships transfer throughout the organization, helping mentors and mentees better deal with differences among their co-workers.

Focus on Building Trust

It takes time to build a trusting relationship. Encourage pairs to take the time to get to know one another and set up their relationship before diving into setting goals and creating action steps toward achieving them. Provide tools for trust-building exercises.

Reverse Mentoring

Reverse mentoring partners older, more-experienced employees with younger, less-experienced newcomers. The younger employee serves as the mentor, providing senior members of the organization with information on the latest business technologies, candid input on the state of inclusion within departments, and fresh insight on employee experiences within the company.

Protect Mentoring Time

Many mentoring initiatives go awry when mentees’ supervisors schedule team meetings over mentoring meetings. Ensure that all managers understand the organization’s commitments to mentoring, and create the expectation that mentoring time is protected.

Buddy Program

A buddy program, where a new hire is paired with a seasoned employee to informally share knowledge, is an effective way to increase new hire retention. It is important for underrepresented employees to feel a sense of belonging and connection to the organization early on, especially if those connections are virtual. This type of mentoring program can cultivate workplace relationships and increase engagement while speeding time to productivity and getting underrepresented employees acclimated to the company’s culture.

Train Your Mentors

Mentoring is a skill and a leadership competency. Good leaders do not necessarily know how to mentor. If you want to make sure that your mentors create a safe space to explore and understand differences, you have to make sure they learn and practice good mentoring skills.

Create Accountability

Even the most successful mentoring pairs need support from their organizations. Check in regularly with mentors and mentees to make sure they are on track, and ask mentoring pairs to share their goals and their achievements along the way. Encourage mentoring pairs to set a structure for their relationship, including how often they will meet, where they will meet and over what period of time. To ensure that they are developing cultural competency, encourage mentoring partners to discuss diversity and explore the differences between the two of them. Check in to see what they have learned.

Mentoring Circles

A mentoring circle is a peer-to-peer format that enables employees to find co-workers who have different backgrounds than themselves and share experiences as a group to gain better understanding of interactions within the organization. Many organizations enable this format through employee resource groups (ERGs) or other support groups that can gather people based on shared identities to build community and networking within those underrepresented groups.

Measure Results

Mentoring investment has a return, and you can measure it. To gauge results, measure improvements in promotion, retention and advancements statistics for women, people of color and members of other targeted underrepresented groups before and after a mentoring initiative. Don’t forget to gather qualitative data, too. Gather testimonials from your mentoring pairs, and celebrate achievements. Consider sending a self-assessment about cultural competency at the beginning of the relationship and again at the end to measure progress.

Diversity is any characteristic, perspective, or approach to work, that different individuals bring to the workplace. It includes visible and non-visible characteristics such as:

• Cultural: Ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, lifestyle, marital/family status, religion, language.
• Physical: Age, gender, race, colour, abilities, appearance, cognitive style, personality.
• Socio-economic: Education, profession, job function, social class.

When people feel respected and their differences are accommodated rather than ostracized, they are better able to realize their full potential and make a meaningful contribution to their workplace. An environment that is positive and motivating for its people increases worker satisfaction, productivity and retention. In addition, the broader perspective of diverse teams facilitates innovation and provides clients and customers with increased value.

Diversity in the workplace simply makes good business sense, and can bring about many benefits, including the following:

• Improved employee morale, performance, and productivity through equitable workplace practices that select, develop, and treat people based on merit and fairness.
• Improved marketing and customer service through better understanding and accommodation of diverse customer groups and their needs.
• Improved ability to attract and recruit top talent.
• Reduced risk of discrimination lawsuits as a result of more just and nondiscriminatory environment.
• Improved retention and cost reductions due to lower absenteeism and turnover.
• Improved corporate image, which generates public goodwill.
• Improved employee creativity, problem-solving and decision-making through effective management of diverse perspectives and “creative conflict”.
• Eligibility for government contracts for which minority or gender-balanced businesses are given preference.

Diversity is generally defined as acknowledging, understanding, accepting, valuing & celebrating differences among people with respect to age, class, and ethnicity, and gender, physical &mental ability. Over the past decade the work force in industrialized countries has become increasingly heterogeneous. These countries are spending huge amount for diversifying the workforce. Thus, diversity is increasingly recognized & utilized as an important organizational resource in regards to whether the goal is to be an employer of choice to provide an excellent customer service or to maintain a competitive edge.

According to Dahm (2003), diversity within an organization can evoke an array of emotions. Many researchers view diversity as something to be dealt with rather than a tool to be used to improve the organizations. Even though many researchers agree that the results of diversity conscious organizations add value to their performance.

Workforce diversity influence many more other factors:

Internal factors:

Internal environmental factors are such types of factors which can be controlled and managed internally. Organizational policy, rules, culture, resources and employee themselves are some important internal factors.

External factors:

External environmental factors are those types of factors which cannot be controlled by organization. Customers, pressure group, government, suppliers, creditors, distributors, trade union are main environmental factors of diversity. Educational background, religion, habits, experience, unions and marital status are also external factors which direct effect in workforce diversity in organization.

Organizational factors:

Organizational factors are those types of factors which directly effect on workforce diversity. It comprises position, post, location, department, division, financial, technological, cultural strategies and understanding about diversity.

Advantages:

Resource Acquisition Argument

As sources of labor become increasingly diverse, firms that are able to hire, retain and effectively utilize workers from all social-cultural backgrounds may gain an advantage in human assets over firms that less effectively meet their diversity goals.

Cost Argument

Given the reality of diversity in workgroups, failure to manage the special challenges that it presents may lead to higher cost structures for firms by contributing to higher employee turnover, higher interpersonal conflict, and more miscommunication.

Marketing Argument

By tapping the insights and understanding of people of different cultures, genders, ethnic groups, etc., firms may gain advantages in designing and selling products and services to a culturally diverse marketplace.

Problem-Solving Argument

Diverse perspectives create a potential for better problem solving in workforces that are culturally diverse. These advantages should be observable in recognizing and defining problems as well as in generating useful solutions.

Creativity Argument

Human diversity in workgroups creates a richer flow of ideas and thus has the potential to increase creativity and innovation; this, in turn, can improve organizational financial performance.

Values Argument

Organizations seek to perform on a diverse set of measures, including integrity on stated core values such as fair and respectful treatment of all members and/or promotion of equal employment opportunities in the broader society. Firms must be proactive in managing diversity in order to honor these values.

Conceptual framework

Workforce diversity plays an important role in organizational change and performance. It enhances employee’s capacity and build new image by gathering with diverse people. When people from different caste, sex, religion, ability, geographical region, age, different perception and attitude and professional background come together in an organization, it enables multiple ideas and better solution of problem at work ultimately improving employee and organizational performance. Diversity builds a positive image and reputation of the organization in both internal and foreign market. So, based on this fact, researcher has some recommendation to policy makers and senior personality of Government, workforce diversity is an important aspect of recruitment and selection of talent mixture steering business growth and organizational change rather than legal mandatory.

A company’s workforce is its lifeblood. Whether your company creates the latest nano-tech or engages in doing some social service, the people you hire matter the most. The role of recruiters is especially important when it comes to establishing and maintaining a diverse and equal workplace as having a diverse workplace is not easy. Different people communicate differently and have different ways of synthesizing and interpreting data.  Recruiters must be able to navigate the gender divides, geographic divides, age gaps, and cultural divides amongst others to establish a diverse workforce.

Although diversity and inclusion-in-the-workplace initiatives start at the top, recruiters play a key role in who moves forward to the next round of interviews and, ultimately, who gets hired.

As someone who has worked in the recruitment marketing industry for over five years, It’s found that for inclusion and diversity initiatives to move forward, recruiters need more training and need to understand the experience of Black professionals and what makes them unique.

Recruiters and Unconscious Bias

Indeed, even at top consulting firms that have diversity and inclusion initiatives in place, some of their own recruiters don’t fully understand the meaning of diversity and inclusion. It’s even harder for them to see or understand the Black experience.

In fact, in an alarming experience, one White recruiter shared another company’s employer branding video, which focused on the experience of Black professionals and what their hair means to them, in a group chat. The recruiter couldn’t understand why their experience with their hair was being highlighted, and she thought it was inappropriate.

Situations like this further underscore the need for thorough and rigorous diversity and inclusion training for recruiters so diversity and inclusion in the workplace can advance.

Strategies:

Diverse workforce is good for compliance

There are strong anti-discriminatory laws in most of the developed and developing economies of the world. Therefore, attracting a diverse set of people to your workforce as a policy will help you avoid the legal complications that sometimes even the biggest companies face. Such diverse hiring policies come to rescue when you have to let go of an employee and your company is less likely to face litigation.

Diverse workforce is more productive

A combined study conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University revealed that people are happier working with same gender and yet teams with gender diversity are more productive. The impact of gender diverse team is nothing less than extraordinary on the company’s bottom line with researchers estimating that offices with an evenly distributed workforce of men and women stand to gain 41% in revenue. This can be attributed to the fact that employees work less and socialize more when matched with people who are similar to them.

Diversity in the workplace is profitable

Multiple researches have revealed that organizations which leverage diversity and provide an environment conducive to participation from people of diverse backgrounds experience better financial performance in the long run than organizations which are not so good at managing diversity. A study also found that the annual returns for the 100 companies which ranked at the bottom in equal employment opportunities issues, average 7.9 percent, when compared to 18.3 percent for the 100 companies that rated highest in their equal employment opportunities.

Recognize your own biases and reduce them to increase diversity in the workplace

In order to address diversity challenges, as a recruiter you must first recognize your conscious and unconscious bias that are coming in way of making the best hiring choices. Everyone has certain leanings and preferences, often referred to as biases, and many a times we are unaware of these preferences. For example, many recruiters tend to ignore candidates with regional accents or disabilities. Then, we also have these assumptions about young people being more creative, innovative and energetic than older candidates. Once we have all our biases out in the open it will be easy to identify how these are impacting our choices of recruitment. Once this has been done, it will allow you to judge candidate on their individual merits, qualifications and competencies needed for a particular role.

Evaluate the diversity of your current team

It is necessary to constantly evaluate the diversity composition of your current employees and the initiatives taken at the company to maintain this composition. For instance, you could analyze the gender composition, the median age of employees, the cultural background that the employees belong to and other characteristics that currently represent your staff. Find the diversity strengths of the company and how you can build on those strengths. Also, take note of the diversity challenges and the areas that need to be addressed in the future.

Attracting diverse candidates to your company

Having a diverse workforce requires you to help professionals from different backgrounds find your company and the job you have posted. However, many recruiters narrow down their recruitment advertising to channels that are likely to offer candidates with similar backgrounds, which needs to change. Also, recruiters must be careful how job advertisements are worded, making sure that the language used does not imply bias towards candidates of a certain “type”. There are online tools and editorial help that can tune out such words or phrases that may subconsciously repel professionals from certain backgrounds while applying.

Explore new recruitment technologies as a part of diversity recruitment strategy

As the world of recruitment evolves, companies must be ready to involve technology to increase the reach of their sourcing campaigns. Adopting full scale recruitment software that allows sourcing from multiple channels at the click of a button can give employers an advantage when looking to tap into more diverse talent pools. Also, crawling technology which finds potential fits for a role by scouring their online profiles allows companies to access candidates from beyond their usual talent pools.

While companies talk about strategies to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion, workers just want a fair shake. From an employee’s point of view being treated fairly means that you have the same shot at success as the person next to you. It means that you don’t have disadvantages that you can’t control and can’t make up for in the eyes of your employer. It means that your managers are less likely to purposefully (or unconsciously) limit the opportunities you receive or how you are recognized and rewarded, due to their own blind spots or even conscious prejudices.

It’s important to note here that “equity” is important but it doesn’t fully solve the diversity and inclusion problem. Just because people are paid fairly, doesn’t mean their managers are free of unconscious bias, that they are hired into leadership positions or that they are given advancement opportunities open to their more privileged peers. However, pay equity would go a long way towards empowering employees to identify situations where they are being under-compensated and perhaps treated unfairly. This is why the “E” of equity is important alongside the “D” of diversity and the “I” of inclusion.

Consideration Requirement:

• Make gender diversity a requirement for recruiting new board members. Modify existing requirements to focus on candidates having the right experiences rather than requiring prior board experience.
• Embrace diversity in the boardroom. This sends a clear and powerful message to employees and members about the credit union’s commitment to diversity, as well as opportunity and equality. The board, CEO, and other C-suite leaders must be committed to ensure long-term success.
• Support actions that promote and address gender equality issues including equal pay, power and decision-making, personal safety, interpersonal work relationships, and community involvement.

DEI metrics for performance-based compensation are currently used by ~20% of the Fortune 200 companies, mostly in the annual incentive plan as part of a scorecard or individual performance assessment (vs. a quantitative metric with an explicit weighting). With increased focus on these topics, we expect both the prevalence and prominence of DEI metrics to increase markedly in the next few years. Several companies including Nike and Starbucks have already recently announced that they will be tying executive pay to DEI metrics for the first time.

Conditions Needed to Optimize DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) Metrics in the Pay Program

• There is a well articulated strategy for execution and clarity on how success will be defined.
• There is an understanding that elevating DEI may send unintended signals (e.g., tying pay to DEI but not sustainability may send a message about company priorities).
• The DEI metric(s) are part of a balanced, comprehensive assessment. Narrowly defined metrics can miss the spirit of the overall commitment (e.g., meet recruiting targets, but miss on culture).
• There is a willingness to maintain a DEI component in pay for an extended period of time.
• There is a willingness to set real, stretch goals that are durable and can withstand shifts in strategy.
• If goals are missed, boards are willing to disclose externally how or why goals were not achieved.

Fairness is fundamental to a diverse and inclusive company culture, yet according to Gallup, only 29% of employees strongly agree that their performance reviews were fair.

And it only gets worse once you start digging deeper into the data. For example, one study found that African Americans and women were less likely to get good ratings, and that ratings were more favorable for people that shared the same race as the rater.

Employee engagement is directly tied to performance results. The more engaged the employee, the more likely they are producing results that outweigh their cost to the organization. In a workplace where diversity, equity, and inclusion are lacking, at an absolute minimum, this will impact those on the “outside.” Those employees who have picked up on the personal or systemic biases living within individuals and organizations, those who do not feel utilized or leveraged, or those who know they do not have a real seat at the table, are not engaged and, therefore, are more than likely not producing the best results.

There is also the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our biases create an invisible wall that prevents deeper professional relationships with those who the bias is against. When healthy workplace relationships are not created between the two parties, coaching, mentoring, and professional development are unlikely to happen, resulting in the person who is receiving the bias not having an equitable chance at career advancement and/or business impact. Not to mention the bias receiver (the person who the bias is against) is likely feeling dissatisfied, frustrated, or stuck and unable or unwilling to perform at their optimal level. When performance review time comes, it is doubtful they will be scored as a star performer. You cannot build a healthy relationship when biases are present. To add another layer, we must be extremely careful that performance management is not solely based on the strength of the relationship between the two parties but on the results the individual achieves and the impact on the organization.

1. Set clear goals to base performance on facts, not opinion

If expectations are unclear, employees may feel like they’re not evaluated based on their performance. Instead, factors unrelated to their contributions, such as gender or age, seem to creep into their assessment. Of course, a manager could also simply have a bad day and therefore give more critical feedback.

Defining and assessing performance based on specific objectives and clearly articulated behaviors ensures that the focus is on what people actually contribute to the organization. And it limits the tendency to base performance on a gut feeling that’s subject to biases and prejudices.

2. Use multiple feedback sources to limit bias

Basing performance evaluation on one person’s perception at one point in time makes biased reviews much more likely. Similarity bias makes us devote more attention to people similar to them. As a result, you might have to work harder for recognition in your performance review if your manager is an Ivy League graduate, and you’re not.

Adding 360-degree reviews to your performance management process ensures you include multiple sources (managers, colleagues, reports) and reduces the likeliness of biased reviews. In addition, a culture of ongoing feedback helps tackle recency bias. The more frequent the feedback and the more diverse the group of people it’s coming from, the more balanced a view you get of someone’s performance.

3. Nudge people into using inclusive language

Even with the best intentions, words often convey prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination. For example, words can suggest expectations or limitations related to their social group. The sentence “I’m surprised you stay on top of all the latest trends in the industry, especially given your age” may sound like a compliment. But more importantly, it suggests age-related limitations and has no place in an employee evaluation.

To avoid discrimination of any kind, remind staff to check their language when talking about other people’s job performance. An easy way to embrace diversity and inclusion (D&I) through words is to include a helpful note in all performance review and peer feedback forms.

4. Reinforce inclusive behaviors

Role models are a prerequisite for inclusive behaviors to spread across your organization. Also, employees who don’t associate these desired behaviors with positive responses tend to put in less effort.

So if you want a culture of inclusion, reinforcing inclusive behavior is key. Encourage staff (and especially leadership) to keep their eyes open for inclusive behavior of their co-workers and to recognize it publicly when they see it. For example, someone who actively seeks input from people who don’t usually contribute much in meetings should be reinforced in that behavior. If you use Small Improvements, you can add a custom “Includer” badge to our Praise feature that people can use to give kudos to inclusive colleagues.

5. Ask employees how they feel

You might think team members feel welcome at work perhaps because you do but actually, they don’t. The only way to find out if people feel included is to ask them.

Engagement or pulse surveys are an effective way to gauge people’s perception of diversity, inclusion, and belonging regularly. Consider using a pulse survey question template that measures the state of D&I in your organization.

A great way to start checking for biases on a deeper level is to simply be aware of what they are and how they can manifest in the workplace. Here’s a list of some of the most common performance management biases from the experts at Diversity Best Practices.

• Halo and Horn Bias: Like an availability bias, this bias comes from a good or bad first impression we let come before the whole picture of a person’s performance.
• Availability/Recency Bias: The most recent, or most memorable moment crowds out the rest. This bias slants a review to one or two big moments and makes it much less holistic.
• Confirmation Bias: When we unknowingly focus on the evidence that supports our worldview and ignore evidence that counters it. Sweeping generalizations like “bad employees have disorganized desks” can come from confirmation bias.
• Implicit Stereotyping: Our preconceived notions change how we see someone’s performance. Racism, sexism, ableism, and other ‘isms’ all come into play here.
• Affinity Bias: We see people like us in a more positive light and it seeps into how we judge their performance.

Diversity training is any program designed to facilitate positive intergroup interaction, reduce prejudice and discrimination, and generally teach individuals who are different from others how to work together effectively.

Diversity training is training delivered to make participants more aware of diversity issues in the workplace, their own beliefs on diversity, as well as provide skills to help them interact, collaborate and work more closely with people that have different qualities to their own.

Diversity training is often aimed to meet objectives such as attracting and retaining customers and productive workers; maintaining high employee morale; and/or fostering understanding and harmony between workers.

Despite purported and intended benefits, systematic studies have not shown benefits to forced diversity training and instead show that they can backfire and lead to reductions in diversity and to discrimination complaints being taken less seriously.

Findings on diversity trainings are mixed. According to Harvard University sociologist Frank Dobbin, there is no evidence to indicate that anti-bias training leads to increases in the number of women or people of color in management positions. A 2009 Annual Review of Psychology study concluded, “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,” with the authors of the study stating in 2020 that as the quality of studies increases, the effect size of anti-bias training dwindles.

According to a 2006 study in the American Sociological Review, “diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management.” A meta-analysis suggests that diversity training could have a relatively large effect on cognitive-based and skill-based training outcomes. An analysis of data from over 800 firms over 30 years shows that diversity training and grievance procedures backfires and leads to reductions in the diversity of the firms workforce. A 2013 study found that the presence of a diversity program in a workplace made high-status subjects less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously.

Alexandra Kalev and Frank Dobbin conducted a comprehensive review of cultural diversity training conducted in 830 midsize to large U.S. workplaces over a thirty one-year period. The results showed that diversity training was followed by a decrease of anywhere from 7.5–10% in the number of women in management. The percentage of black men in top positions fell by 12 percent. Similar effects were shown for Latinos and Asians. The study did not find that all diversity training is ineffective. Mandatory training programs offered to protect against discrimination lawsuits were called into question. Voluntary diversity training participation to advance organization’s business goals was associated with increased diversity at the management level; voluntary services resulted in near triple digit increases for black, Hispanic, and Asian men.

A 2021 meta-analysis found a lack of high quality studies on the efficacy of diversity training. The researchers concluded that “while the small number of experimental studies provide encouraging average effects. the effects shrink when the training are conducted in real-world workplace settings, when the outcomes are measured at a greater time distance than immediately following the intervention, and, most importantly, when the sample size is large enough to produce reliable results.”

From a business perspective, diversity training is seen to have a number of benefits such as increased collaboration and relational skills, protecting against violations of discrimination legislation (therefore reducing the firm’s risk profile) and empowering those from underrepresented groups to feel more confident and valued in the workplace.

Despite these perceived benefits, diversity training attracts significant criticism some question its ability to drive change. According to some critics, it may be counterproductive because it reinforces the differences between people rather than celebrating them.

Diversity training can be divided into two categories:

Skill-based training

This deals with developing employees’ proficiency in handling diversity in the workplace. Various tools are used to take the employees from the awareness to the proficiency stage. The tools used help in improving employees’ interpretation of cross-cultural differences, communication with people from different cultures, and adaptability.

Awareness-based training:

This type of training is generally used as a sensitizer for employees. It deals with making employees aware of the importance of diversity in business. It also makes employees aware of their prejudices and cultural assumptions about others. The training uses case studies and experiential exercises as the method of training implementation.

Mentoring for Diversity

In a corporate world, diversity in the organization does no longer exist; however, in many organizations wants to maintain a collaborative competitive advantage in a global environment. Many organization mentor’s minority groups and deploys wide range of knowledge, skills and motivate the talented employees from different cultural backgrounds, sexes, or races/ethnicities to perform their best in reaching organization goals. Many companies have a wide array of cultural workforce where employees showcase different perspectives and skills to the table. A major challenge organization faces during the implementation of diversity training to employees to collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal of an organization.

Diversity audits

Diversity Audits are a very daunting task for HR which are formal assessments that evaluate the current situation, they are mostly involved in managing employee management attitudes such as their periodical review related to policies & procedures. Hence the diversity audits serves as a critical to manage the thought process of the employee within the organization.

To create an environment that encourages the realization of diversity and inclusion, Need to promoting work-life balance in two core ways: Enriching our Family-Friendly System and Working to transform work styles.

The globalization we’ve seen over the last two decades has led to a profound transformation of society at every level we imagine. It has also had major repercussions on the present in economic, social, technological, and legal dimensions, to name a few.

These social changes have prompted companies to modify their way of relating to their environment, including their own employees.

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) management at organizations has been on every company’s management and talent management agendas for years. Beyond the fact that these concepts are in vogue.

Workplace diversity has become a growing concern within organizations. Managers are now challenged with learning new ways to effectively communicate the importance of embracing different races and ethnicities. Diversity encompasses many different characteristics including age, gender, ethnicity, religion and disabilities (Robbins). As of late, age has become more of a concern as the baby boomer generation begins to reach retirement age; many are not retiring early but instead are working well into their seventies.

Unfortunately for those baby boomers, the number of retirees decreased during the 2008-2009 recession mostly due to economic struggle. People cannot afford to retire, perhaps because they did not save enough for retirement or had to dip into their retirement fund to survive earlier in life. In addition to age discrimination, gender discrimination is another common diversity issue. According to “Organizational Behavior,” as of 2000, more women are working full time, have more education, and have started to close the earning gap between men and women.

Adjust performance expectations and be mindful that well-known biases in performance evaluations could be exacerbated in this crisis. What are appropriate criteria for evaluation in this “new normal”? If the answer is ambiguous, research suggests that the probability of bias will increase and further disadvantage women, people of color and others. If organizations are continuing with their performance review cycles, they should be especially mindful of providing clear criteria for managers. Several companies we talked to in our focus group are simply delaying or canceling performance review cycles.

Paying attention to the role of managers, and providing them with the right resources and skills to support employees is critical. In our research, we see that managerial decisions and behaviors are at the crux of inclusion and equity. Managers may not be used to leading a remote team and being in charge of crisis management, so they need access to frameworks and research-based insights. Providing tools and infrastructure to work from home safely is also important. At Stanford, trainings on using telework software, for example, have been useful.

If you are don’t know what work life balance is, you won’t be able to realize why it’s so important. A common assumption is that individuals who would like more “balance” aren’t necessarily as driven or interested in building a career. Many people who want more balance, enjoy working hard, have ambitions, and even want to achieve high levels of success. While it’s not likely to have a balance or an equal equation between work and life. It’s much more about:

• Feeling like work has an impact on the workplace as well as in personal life. These feelings do more to connect with other and provides more fulfillment
• Having the ability to make time for important things; work and personal priorities
• Feeling calmer and more focused instead of scattered and out of control
• Leaving work with energy to spend on other things.

Employee Engagement

According to Gallup, around 34% of U.S. workers are engaged, which is described as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.  Happy employees are more engaged and loyal.  Workplace morale in general increases and that results in improved communication and better teamwork. Employers can see:

Performance and Increase in Productivity

By reducing stress-levels it increases the ability to focus, be attentive and offer new ideas and solutions.  Higher levels of satisfaction increase productivity.

Cost Reductions / Savings from lower employee turnover

Retention is higher because employees are more likely going to want to stay where they are happy and engaged.

Lower absenteeism

Time to take care of one’s self results in improved mental, physical and spiritual health. Employees are not as likely to take off as much time for sickness or workplace injuries.

Positive Branding

Many companies offer employees incentives to recruit good employees from people they know.  Those companies who value work life balance for their workforce will become known as a great place to work. More people will be interested in working for a company that values and cares for their employees.

Flexibility and/or Virtual Work Arrangements

Many companies are offering the opportunity for employees to work outside of their place of business.  For many reasons, “Smart Offices” are becoming more common and employers are more in favor or employees off-site work arrangements.  In addition, company benefits have to align with values that demonstrate we are, “taking care of our people”. Here are some of the ways in which employers are responding:

• Meditation, yoga, etc. Workshops
• On-site or childcare voucher programs
• Free or highly discounted gym memberships
• Sabbaticals; paid or unpaid
• Generous maternity, paternity, adoption, and paternal leave benefits.

Workplace Culture

• Model appropriate behavior. Ensure employees that it is really o.k. to take advantage of the work life policies. Telling employees to enjoy their evening, weekends or vacation is great. What is better is to “walk the talk” and constrain yourself from sending emails and calling employees during these times away from work.
• Avoid sending mixed messages. Don’t talk about policies or have them in an employee handbook when they aren’t true. If you demonstrate that vacations are truly vacations, then be sure not to make employees feel like they are doing something wrong or that they should feel bad about taking a vacation.
• Create guidelines and expectations. Train management and employees on these policies and expectations. While managers may communicate in some way or another with employees after work hours without needing an immediate response, employees are more likely to feel pressured to respond to after work hours calls or emails.