All employees feel seen in an inclusive workplace culture.
What are the essential traits that make this possible? Are you doing everything you can to make your company culture genuinely inclusive? Whether it’s taking time to overhaul your strategies for communication or knowing the vising meaning and scheduling in employee training, inclusivity only happens with action. Read more to discover which traits your organization should be working to develop.
1. Inclusive Core Values With Leadership Buy-In
Buy-in from the very top is vital. This ensures inclusivity is in your company’s core values. The effects of this are far-reaching. For example, when management proactively implements flexible working approaches, team members with family commitments can take advantage of opportunities that might otherwise have been unavailable to them.
To achieve this, everyone in the company must know of the importance of inclusivity, no matter what role they occupy. If your core company values don’t feature an emphasis on inclusion, now might be a good time to revisit how you want your employees to treat each other at work day-to-day.
2. Accessibility
Everyone in your organization must have access to the same resources. This will help to provide a fully inclusive experience. Actions that need to be taken to achieve this range from checking your office is entirely wheel-chair friendly to providing accessible digital experiences.
3. Conversation-Centric
A team task management software for human resources can be helpful in many ways. It frees up HR staff to create more opportunities for conversation. Employees are empowered when they understand that each of them has a voice that’s heard. Employees need to feel free to express themselves based on their unique perspectives. It is crucial to make sure employees feel included and respected. Listening to employees and asking about their preferences extends far beyond conversations around performance and growth. Ask them how they would like to celebrate at work. It sounds obvious but asking employees proper questions about preferences and offering a variety of food and drink options at small and large celebrations will go a long way in making such experiences more inclusive.
Organizations should model inclusive language by learning. Use the preferred pronouns for all employees. It’s also essential to use gender-neutral terms such as ‘spouse’ and ‘partner.’ This is a best practice if gender and marital status are unknown. Taking real care to use words that are welcoming and inclusive should be first nature.
4. Collaborative Environment
The importance of creating a sense of belonging, connection, and community simply cannot be understated. And this can be achieved through collaboration. Teams with strong relationships can play to every individual’s skills and strengths, leading to success for both the employees and the business overall.
5. Commitment to Comprehensive Training
All employees should have access to learning and development resources. This fosters a greater sense of inclusivity. It deepens an organization’s commitment to the development of its people. It’s a good idea to prepare learning materials on diversity and inclusion in your organization. This may be done right from the beginning of onboarding a new team member. Workplace policies, core values, and expected behaviors should all form part of your comprehensive onboarding plan.
Workforce optimization software can help by providing an insight into staff performance. Coaching and feedback can be given individually. This may be done via on screen and video recordings of actual customer interactions through a call tracking software. This means offering opportunities for promotion or progression within the company solely on performance and ability, with evidence to back this up.
6. Positive Company Culture
Company culture impacts employees in numerous ways. Encouraging a culture of frequent check-ins builds trust and positive workplace relationships. Recognizing and rewarding your employees’ performance should come as second nature. . If you are only singling out and celebrating target sales metrics based on a data from a top selling application, many people will be overlooked and that’s not what you want to happen. Think about the less visible contributions to your company’s success – you may find they’re just as if not more important.
Successful RPA implementation in the workplace allows automation for traditional tasks such as payroll, requests for time off, and record-keeping. This frees up company HR professionals to spend more time focusing on improving culture.
This paragraph above feels a little off-brand. It doesn’t feel right to recommend RPA platforms as we do not have any real experience with this. I think we should leave this part out.
7. Standing Up
Many companies pay lip service to inclusion, but it’s about so much more than creating a policy. Truly inclusive workplaces nurture and support staff. They recognize areas for improvement. These companies take real action. Here are a few examples:
- Publishing an annual report on your organization’s diversity and inclusion measures
- Taking time to survey employees
- Creating an inclusive workplace task force or an employee resource group
- Crafting merit-based recruitment marketing campaigns
- Organizing SaaS events and initiatives that focus on creating a fantastic work environment where everyone can thrive
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Inclusivity initiatives can help your team flourish regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, physical ability, age, or religious background. Working together to welcome and include every employee will really bring your team together.
Inclusion is powerful. It’s all about respecting every employee, celebrating differences, and taking real encouraging action. This can dramatically increase employee engagement and well-being, leading to better business results for your organization.
Society is increasingly demanding greater diversity, equality, and inclusivity. Is your organization truly inclusive? Working to develop the traits above will help to set you on the path to success.
Severine Hierso is EMEA Senior Product Marketing Manager for RingCentral Office, the leader in private cloud hosting, and is passionate about creating value, differentiation, and messaging, ensuring a better experience for customers and partners. She has gained extensive international Product Marketing, Market Research, Sales Enablement, and Business development experience across SaaS, Telecommunications, Video Conferencing and Technology sectors within companies such as Sony, Cisco, Cogeco Peer 1, and Dimension Data/NTT.