HOW A SMALL BUSINESS CAN CREATE A DIVERSE WORKPLACE
paystubmakr.com present one more article about small business and diversity
There are no doubts that a diverse workplace has an advantage like driving innovation, helps create and give better service to the customers, and in the bottom line bring more money in. Diversity helps growth and recruitment to be more manageable.
A Glassdoor survey shows us that two-thirds of the polled people gave high importance to the level of diversity when they were offered a job.
Those words are proof of the difficulties of a small business in the tech industry to achieve diversity within its workforce.
Workforce diversity is more than not having discrimination in your company’s workforce that is based on, Race, gender, national origin or disability. Alternative view or difference in opinions is what diversity can bring into your small business. Differing backgrounds in religion, sexual orientation, varying age ranges, political affiliation, education, and personality will become invaluable to an organization. You need to cultivate the culture of diversity and inclusion within your workforce. According to Harvard Business Review Diversity works better when you do not force it on your employees. Teaching employees the right answers to questionnaires on biases or learning the appropriate responses for a given situation can be easy enough. Researchers found that the forced learning rarely sticks for more than a short time. Other studies found that mandatory training for your employees for a positive behavior toward the implementation of a diversity project can have adverse effects. Confrontation and even anger can be a result of the mandatory training. In some cases, it increased the animosity toward the minorities groups.
When workers see the training as voluntary activities, the results are much more successful and five years from the practice an increase of 9-13% was registered in the hiring of minorities.
As something crucial to the success of your company but tough to succeed.
How does an employer ensure the success in fostering a work environment that can let diversity to grow and flourish?
There are a few ways that you can consider when you want to step up your company game in building a more well-rounded and diverse workforce.
Hiring Process Evaluation
Do you know the level of diversity in the company? Study if it reflects the general workforce of the of your community?
Review your workforce diversity by departments and figure which one is at a low rate of diversity and check what the reasons for this are.
What is the status of your management positions? Do your hiring of managers is based on your own biases?
As in any project or problem-solving leadership as its share in success or failure, you have to be an advocate for diversity and inclusion in all hiring process from the first level entries to the executive positions, in case that you have hiring test is that the managers are looking for diversity. Implement the recommendation you can learn reading How to avoid unconscious biases
Watch if your recruitment tests were used selectively or result ignored by your recruiting team.
Create your hiring panel and a system that follow up your recruiting, ensuring that no one of your HR team is abusing the rules of your hiring process, influenced by their own biases. Your influence must be there as a guide for the diversity project.
Mentoring Programs
Mentoring program can create a casual relationship between employees that will reduce biases a manager might have and vice versa.
A mentor can bestow knowledge to you and your employees. The mentoring program activity is an opportunity to create an atmosphere that will make the participants feel closer and open to learning that their bias is not a real difference.
We know that one of the ways to reduce bias between different groups is to let them get close by having activities where they need one another to accomplish some tasks.
Participants of mentoring classes will value the experiences and will come to respect their mentor leaving back their preconceived biases or prejudices and take care better care of their work and the organization. Remember that to keep having it all as a voluntary activity.
Inclusion
Employees who are part of a self-managed team who work to complete a project, working as equals like an army unit who serve together on the front-lines will learn to dismiss biases on their own.
Creating environments where an employee can collaborate and connect increases engagement and allow more interaction then they make under regular and common work environment.
A High-tech organization that is looking for the world market must move past using “diversity” as a meaningless word to succeed in a global market it must start developing and implementing an equal employment opportunity for their employees or job applicants.
To succeed in the global market tech organization must move past using “diversity” as a meaningless buzzword and step into action by developing and implementing an equal opportunity employment policy, following the EEOC guidelines.
Building and maintaining your workforce as a diverse group is vital for your business growth and develop innovation in its industry, and more important in the High Tech industry that is a border-less operation. For example, Intel that develops and produce products in Israel and at the same time have its base in the USA and production in China and other places in the world.
Bad managed diversity policy and action will cause more than a few headaches or even legal complications.
Driving to succeed with diversity need a fresh leadership that can create the liberal culture that is required to let the diversity seed to germinate within your business or service.