To be honest, your team isn’t very diverse. Whether most people are a certain gender, race, religion, or from a similar economic background, something needs to change.
You’re ready to put in the work, but you’re not sure where to start. Here’s some advice to help you learn more about the importance of a diverse workforce and how to start creating one.
Understanding the Business Case for Diversity
Building a diverse team will benefit your business in a variety of ways. For example, having people from various backgrounds on your team will help you gain insights and ideas that allow you to serve your client base better.
Additionally, top talent wants to work for a diverse company where there are equal opportunities for everyone. Studies have even shown that diverse teams are more likely to be more profitable than those lacking diversity.
Building a Culture of Inclusion
The importance of creating a culture where all employees feel valued, respected, and included cannot be emphasized enough. This may involve a multi-step approach, but it’s worth all the effort needed.
Educating your employees on topics like unconscious bias is imperative. You’ll also want to take steps such as rewriting job descriptions to make them gender-neutral, exploring new talent pools, and maybe hiring someone to oversee your diversity and inclusion approach .
Strategies for Recruiting a Diverse Workforce
Your hiring strategy may need some adjustments — big and small — to attract candidates from a variety of backgrounds. As noted above, you might remove gender-specific pronouns from job descriptions and seek out new talent pools to source candidates from.
On a larger scale, you may want to create an employer brand that highlights your diversity, establish company policies that appeal to diverse candidates — i.e., flexible work hours, more floating holidays that can be used for religious holidays — and start using blind resumes to ensure nothing personal is known about candidates.
Best Practices for Managing a Diverse Team
Once you’ve built a diverse team, you want to do everything in your power to keep people happy, so they stay put. This involves various activities, including eliminating any unconscious bias, making sure everyone feels valued, acknowledging and celebrating cultural differences, regularly asking employees for feedback, and listening to what they have to say.
Finding top talent isn’t easy, but you don’t have to go it alone. Wood Staffing is here to help you build the best team your Michiana company has ever had. Contact us today to discuss a partnership!
