Human Capital Management, Leadership

Tips: What You Can Do to Maximize Inclusion in the Workplace

/ February 26, 2018 February 26, 2018

In the current social climate, it’s important not to lose what you’ve worked hard to gain. Stand Your Ground – Messaging:

  • Reinforce the Organizational Commitment to Inclusion and Employee Engagement
  • Reinforce the Organizational Core Competencies (e.g. Integrity, Respect, etc.)
  • Reinforce the importance/value of all Employees
  • Be Honest about What’s Not Working; Call it out appropriately and be intolerant of “excluding behaviors” (disrespect, bullying, racial/gender slurs, harassment, discrimination, inequity)

Keep Your Focus regardless of the Social Climate

  • Ensure a Healthy Organization: Check your practices and processes for inclusion.
  • Cultivate Cultural Intelligence: At all levels of the organization build the capability to understand, communicate and interact with everyone.
  • Create Psychological Safety: Allow employees to express their ideas and opinions openly and take risks without fear of negative repercussion.
  • Foster Belongingness. Employees need to be able to connect their own identity to the organization’s intrinsic identity to feel that they belong.
  • Encourage Authenticity: Conformity can stifle employee performance. Make it safe for people to contribute and progress at work without surrendering who they really are.

Reminder – Our Behavior:

  • Social and Cultural impact: Everyone has biases, preferences.
  • Many of these biases are unknown to us – they’re based in past experiences.
  • We all use heuristics (rules of thumb) to deal with cognitive overload; careful of stereotyping (positive and negative).

Reminder – Manage Your Own Biases:

  • Acknowledge biases (great and small).
  • Understand yourself and how you make decisions about people
  • Set-up a check-and-balance for yourself; second guess yourself or check-in with a colleague.