PAYSTUBMAKR.COM Present you the second part of the article about Gender equality.
Your Company’s Image
The hiring process is a bi-directional action; you sell your company working post the same as the applicant is selling is working force. The image of your business is of high importance matter. There may be a few companies looking for the same kind of skills or profession at the same time; you need to be attractive to those people that are looking for the same type of job. Your company’s image is essential, the website, social media, marketing materials and more public information are the tools to use for sales and looking for employees as I say above is a buy and sell action. An image is not built in one day; you need to work on this since your first day in business, most of the people think about sales and direct the energy for advertising the product. Once your business grew to the level of looking for more employees, start building the page for “Jobs” let the people that are looking for jobs to see what your company can be for them, talk to the hearts and minds. Show your diversity it will pull more people that like the idea of working in a diverse group. It may reject those that are racists or chauvinists that anyhow will not make good teammates.
Your Interview Procedures
Gender bias can come up during the interview.
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The interviewer can have unconscious biases from math and women to the blond and stupid or being a chauvinist that will incline to hire men.
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Men are twice as likely to hire a man over a woman.
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When a less qualified candidate was hired instead of a more qualified candidate, it was a man in two third of the times.
How to win this biases? A tool that can help you is the Implicit Association Tests offered free by Harvard University. You can use it for gender, religion or other biased community. If you add women to your hiring team it will help you to balance between man and women but not completely; a woman was found preferring man for the new job.
3. How to Improve Employee Retention
If you made the step into gender diversity, you still have to make it permanent. Making women come in is a great achievement, keeping them in for long will be the victory. If you did not make it clear to you your staff that you are not going to tolerate misogynistic behavior you may fail in the mission of diversifying the genders of your employees. To assure the success of your gender diversity project you need to prepare your staff and make sure that anyone that will do anything that will make the women feel unwanted by their colleges.
In this section, we will see what the measures that we can take for making the workplace culture be more open and tolerate the diversity of genders are.
Taking a Firm Stand on Discrimination and Harassment
The worst thing that can happen to your company is an employee of high level harassing one of your women employees. That is something you can not permit to happened and have to act with all the power of the law against it. You can not add more and more significant problem by defending your male employee or blame the victim.
If gender equality is something that you want to see in your business, you must have a clear policy on discrimination and harassment and react immediately to any allegations. Training and explicit company instruction may help. A strict action in case of anyone that did something like harassment, no matter how vital is the employee in the company’s production it will save you more situations in the future.
Offer Women-Friendly Benefits
Childcare used to be 100 percent women’s responsibility before they start working. Today it is yet taken care in its bigger part by women. Reading the survey made by THINKPROGRESS “ Even Today, Women Still Do Most Of The Housework And Childcare “
The traditional gender roles are dominating and women still have the household on their shoulders at the same time they are working out of the home. You need to think about some degree of flexibility with your female staff, Onsite childcare, maternity leave larger than the minimum by law are top priority for women, it will be paid back to your business by those women by happily putting all the energy into the work they do for you and stay long in their valuable job with your company.
Offering part-time jobs and job sharing can get you some female power in your company, Women will appreciate this opportunity to work and not lose their carrier.
Read what The Guardian has to tell about job sharing. Will job sharing support gender equality at work?
Do not miss out holidays pay or time off with this part-timers and job sharing employees. Sharing a job means sharing the benefits too.
Mentoring Programs can make things easier
The glass ceiling is yet to be open by women; it is not an easy goal to achieve, women may need some mentoring help to do it. You can read about it in Recruitbox article How to Create a Women’s Mentorship Program in Your Company
You can create a full mentoring program or build a supporting team of you best leader employees to help the newcomers to grow in your company so both parts will be enjoying the benefits. A good example is: How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year
Be Fair
Women are not pushing to for promotion; you better create a promotion process that looks for the women that are a good potential for promotion and not make the mistake of thinking that they are less ambitious. It should not be giving an advantage to the women it is just avoiding overlooking on good employees that can be promoted.
Meritocracy is the right thing to do for better diversity in your business, it will take time and effort but it will payback when you will have it working with your staff.