Promoting and supporting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace is an important aspect of good people management; it is about valuing everyone in the organisation. However, to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce, it is critical to create an inclusive environment in which everyone feels comfortable participating and reaching their full potential.
While Irish legislation establishes minimum standards for age, disability, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, among other things, an effective diversity and inclusion strategy goes beyond legal compliance to add value to an organisation, contributing to employee well-being and engagement.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) have become ubiquitous in public and academic debates. This is despite ongoing definitional debates and a lack of agreement on the relative importance (and even the appropriate order) of each component.
For our team:
Diversity is increasingly seen as an asset to organizations, and it is associated with a more positive work environment and higher performance. A fair, open, and accommodating workplace fosters high morale for a diverse range of employees, maximising their opportunity to reach their potential and contribute to high-quality service delivery.
Recognizing diversity in the workplace will help everyone understand how diversity leads to a more diverse skill sets and a broader range of opportunities, a variety of ideas, creative thinking, and stimulating group discussions.
We value the unique value, skills, talent, diverse thinking, and experience that everyone brings to the workplace and strive to ensure that each individual maintains their individual identity, interests, and opinions in the professional forum that is our workplace.
Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Policy recognises the talents and skills of all our employees and establishes a culture that seeks, respects, values, and capitalises on differences.
A diverse workforce provides our organisation with a broader range of ideas and insights to draw on when making decisions and developing policies.
A diverse workforce that is comfortable communicating opposing viewpoints creates a larger pool of ideas. We can draw from that pool to better meet the needs of our business strategy and our clients.
Diversity includes differences in thought, outlook, and approach as well as physical characteristics. If we surround ourselves with people who look like us and think like us, we will inevitably be more prone to ‘groupthink,' producing conclusions that reflect our shared outlook and preconceptions.
Irish society and workplaces, in general, are becoming more diverse as a result of a variety of factors such as increased female labour-force participation, an increase in non-national workers, greater inclusion of people with disabilities, and people of increasingly diverse family status, marital status, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, cultural participation and expression.
DE&I is more important than ever in Ireland, thanks to an increasingly diverse workforce and increased competition for talent.
However, Irish employers are being held back by several factors, ranging from a lack of data collection to employee discomfort with data disclosure.
We should learn about the employee perspective and what organisations can do now to improve trust and inclusivity. According to the survey done by Zellis, Ireland in 2022, on the question if employees had seen improvements in the last three years, the most respondents (64%) and (67%), respectively, said yes.
One example of the steps being taken in Ireland to improve DE&I is the implementation of gender pay gap reporting in 2022. If this expands to include ethnicity and other characteristics, it will undoubtedly bring equal pay into sharp focus. Overall, the DE&I indicator is trending upward, aided in part by labour market realities.
In a fiercely competitive environment, demonstrating a diverse and inclusive culture within which to nurture and retain staff is becoming an essential selling point.
RECRUITERS DE&I Best Practices
The authors of a 2018 article published in The Harvard Business Review discuss how culture is shared, pervasive, enduring, and implicit. As a result, without a concerted, focused effort to bring the goals for company culture to light - making them explicit and intentional - culture changes slowly.
Thus, hiring is one of the most effective ways to begin meaningfully shifting your company's culture. This includes recognising the benefits of a diverse workforce, implementing inclusive hiring practises and equitable recruiting strategies, and ensuring that everyone in the organisation understands these goals.
Businesses that want to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion must invest the energy and time necessary to ensure diversity in recruitment, equitable hiring practises, and inclusive messaging throughout the process. A truly equitable hiring process will require more time and energy because it must eliminate any previous shortcuts and turn to less traditional sources. Rather than viewing your candidates as existing in a funnel or a pool, imagine a vast ocean of qualified candidates for your diverse hiring.
This includes everything from bias training to teaching employees the value of inclusive hiring practises. This is more than a few half-day seminars; it is a systematic process of engaging in conversations about organisational culture and the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion to the company's future. Leadership must initiate this cultural shift. Nothing substantive will change unless those at the top commit to DE&I principles.
You'll be flying blind if you don't know what the numbers mean.
Calculate the numbers for your organization's diversity - race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation - and prioritise the top diversity factors. What are your current whereabouts? What figures make sense based on the data in your industry? How and when do you want the numbers to change in terms of gender, ethnic, or racial diversity?
It's also critical to be aware of the numbers in your candidate pool. Determine what percentage of leaders in that field are diverse, for example, if you are looking to fill a leadership position in engineering. Then, aim for a candidate pool that exceeds that percentage.
In 2019, ABC News reported on a Hewlett Packard study that found that women consistently apply to jobs where they meet 100% of the listed criteria, whereas men apply if they meet 60%. Consider emphasising transferable skills and experience and being less specific in requiring skills that can be taught on the job to avoid gender bias.
Consider the following when rewriting job descriptions to be more gender-neutral: remove words that could be interpreted as gender-coded, such as aggressive, competitive, driven, or outspoken.
Because racial bias, like gender bias, is often implicit, recruitment professionals who recognise the importance of inclusive hiring can and do unwittingly perpetuate it. Begin by replacing phrases like "cultural fit" with words like "values" and "vision." Avoid deterring qualified non-native speakers by avoiding phrases like "strong English language skills" unless the job requires top-level language skills.
Using the inclusive strategy of "screening in" is one of the best ways to increase your diverse candidate pool. When one of the priorities is to diversify candidates, the traditional path of businesses considering talent exclusively from within their own industry or with a certain number of years of experience often limits options. To meet all your hiring objectives, reconsider your "must have" skills and look for transferrable skills and evidence of a growth mindset. According to the World Economic Forum, "in just three years, 54% of all of all employees will require significant reskilling and upskilling in just three years.” Since learning is an essential component of high performance, why not screen for learning capacity rather than screening out for a lack of specific skills or industry experience? Ask industry-agnostic questions during the interview process to screen in rather than out.
One of the most effective ways to eliminate bias from the hiring process is to be more deliberate, base candidate assessments on objective criteria, and ensure that the process is precisely replicated for all candidates. This method is often more effective than some of the quick fixes marketed for bias reduction.
There is solid evidence that blind résumés frequently work well but removing candidate names does not always eliminate all evidence of race or gender, and algorithms that focus on historical data cannot eliminate historical bias that impacts a candidate pool for generations. For more information, see the 180one post on interview bias.
Considering the recent Deloitte survey, 80% of respondents said that inclusion is important when choosing an employer and inclusive hiring policy that keeps you relevant in the face of growing workplace demands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Creating inclusive workplaces is a continuous task. It necessitates leadership throughout an organisation, and everyone has a role to play. Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are now widely recognised as critical factors for organisations competing in the war for talent. To meet future skill needs, organisations must be able to reach out to new talent pools and welcome people from all backgrounds into their workforce.
Our DE&I Program reaffirms our core values and promotes an environment of integrity, fairness, equality, openness, and mutual respect. Through this policy, we hope to investigate, comprehend, and develop practises and approaches that embrace diversity, equality, and inclusion in order to foster an inclusive culture in which all can thrive and realise their full potential.
DE&I Program promotes diversity, equality, and inclusion and abilities of all our employees, as well as fostering a culture that seeks, respects, values, and capitalises on differences RECRUITERS' organizational Culture.
Everyone has the right to work in a prejudice-free environment.
Writte
n by Kristine Lezhava
HR Programme Manager (and in-house D,E,&I expert!) at RECRUITERS
