How to Better Recognize and Celebrate Diversity at Work

In the past couple of years, diversity has become an incredibly hot topic. Our society is grappling with its previous injustices and is making an effort to lift up and include marginalized communities where they have been belittled in the past. Many companies have made diversity a top priority, launching internal campaigns to celebrate the disparate experiences of their workforce, and have even adjusted their hiring practices to foster a more inclusive environment. As an employer, you should absolutely make an effort to incorporate diverse voices and talents into your workflow. However, celebrating these diverse backgrounds is not a simple task and requires earnest effort. If done carelessly, your attempt will more than likely come off as offensive and destroy the trust between yourself and your employees from marginalized backgrounds. Use this guide to lift up the diverse voices in your company in an appropriate and considerate manner.

Image from Pixabay.

Adjust your hiring process

In order to have diverse and unique talent at your company, you first need to make sure those people get hired. Traditional hiring methods have been reexamined in recent years, and many have found that they overwhelmingly favor white male applicants while discrediting the achievements of people of color and those who identify as different genders. Train your hiring team to identify the biases they carry into applicant screening and interview scenarios to better allow diverse candidates to show what they can do. You may also post job listings in spaces catered to certain minority groups, like message boards or student clubs, so that you attract more workers from those specific communities. If you’re still worried about screening out too much diverse talent, partnering with a third-party recruiting agency might be helpful, and they can help you find employees with the background and experience you’re looking for. Finally, when you have hired some of these candidates, you can open a dialogue with them, finding out what they like about their position and how you can make employees of different backgrounds more comfortable while working for your company.

Include diverse voices in your culture team

Diversity is about a lot more than just surface-level observations like skin color, it’s also about the way people experience life differently. Our year is built around certain events and holidays, but other cultures have their own annual touchstones. When we only acknowledge popular holidays like Halloween and Christmas, the lived experiences of others are inadvertently pushed to the wayside. This can be remedied by including people of all sorts of backgrounds in your company’s culture team, ensuring the events and cultural practices important to them are recognized by the business, and can even be enjoyed by the entire workforce. This diversity of activities will also educate everyone at the company about other people’s experiences, creating a more understanding and inclusive workplace as a result.

Allow time off for cultural events

Along with your business actively acknowledging different holidays and cultural activities, it would behoove you to offer employees who partake in these celebrations time off. As previously mentioned, the traditional business calendar in this country is built around popular Christian holidays like Christmas, but if you have cultivated a diverse workforce, you may have a lot of employees who don’t celebrate these events. They may have other holidays that are important to their culture, and would much rather have those days off than the ones regularly offered to them. Consider implementing a floating holiday program, allowing your workforce to pick the days they would like off. This practice will demonstrate your level of understanding to your employees and show you value them and their cultural differences, ultimately leading to better employee retention.

Provide mentorship to help with employee retention

Speaking of retention, after hiring your new talent, pair them with a mentor to show them the ropes. If your new employee comes into work and sees there aren’t a lot of people that look like them or share their culture, they may feel alienated and unwelcome every time they go to the office. This can be mitigated with a mentor system to ensure they have someone at their side and can ask questions in a safe environment. Utilizing mentors will show you’re committed to your employee’s success, and they will realize their differences are valued by the company.

Yes, diversity is sometimes a touchy subject, but it shouldn’t be a four-letter word. Diversity in the workplace creates a more inclusive company culture, which in turn makes your business more attractive to top candidates when you need to fill open positions. The trick is to find appropriate ways to recognize your workforce’s differences without singling anyone out in an offensive manner. Using this guide will help you celebrate the diversity in your office in thoughtful and respectful ways.