Companies have started prioritizing and embracing diversity in the workplace. An inclusive work environment can enhance your employees’ experience and productivity. Diversity in the workplace can help your company foster ideas and innovation that transcend all boundaries. However, a company that promotes diversity must also account for inclusivity in workplace wellness programs.
Diversity and Its Types
Diversity in the workplace refers to an organization with diverse employees, regardless of demographic differences. Diversity occurs when your company considers and includes employees with different characteristics, backgrounds, and experiences.
Different types of diversity are:
- Gender
- Race or ethnicity
- Age
- Nationality
- Education
- Skills
- Income
- Religion and beliefs
- Cultural background
- Upbringing
- Sexual orientation
- Physical or mental ability
Benefits of Diversity in the Workplace
Diversity in the workplace represents growth opportunities for your company and employees. Companies with diversity generate a 19% greater proportion of revenue through innovation than others. According to McKinsey & Company, more ethnic and gender diversity makes companies 36% and 25% more likely to gain financial profits, respectively.
Diversity allows you to:
- Access more candidates and attract a wider talent pool
- Gain fresh perspectives, tap into new ideas, and improve decision-making
- Identify creative solutions and innovate more
- Improve employee performance and productivity
- Represent a wider customer base and build customer trust
- Increase your profits and financial performance
Barriers to Diversity in the Workplace
Lack of diversity in workplaces can be attributed to the following:
- Women and ethnic minorities are highly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math fields. Fictiv champions promoting diversity in engineering, which is key to innovation, productivity, and market growth.
- A lack of diversity training programs can make it difficult for diverse employees to integrate into a new workplace.
- Resistance to change by some individuals can have negative outcomes, like stereotyping, racism, offensive behaviors, and harm in the workplace.
- Most workplace wellness programs fail to account for an inclusive, multicultural workforce. Companies must consider the lack of wellness privilege and varying healthcare outcomes among diverse employees of color.
5 Powerful Ways to Promote Diversity for Inclusive Workplace Wellness
Make your work culture diverse and workplace wellness programs more inclusive through the following steps:
1. Make Diversity a Continuous Process
Diversity is not just a promotional concept that fosters innovation, nor is it tokenizing a few employees for representation. It is a continuous process to ensure your company constantly changes and improves. This strengthens your company and empowers individuals belonging to different demographics.
Make diversity a continuous process by valuing the differences in your workforce. Introduce diversity and team-building initiatives and build awareness through diversity and implicit bias training. Set diversity-related goals for your teams and track their progress.
Build an inclusive workplace wellness program by:
- Creating awareness about diversity in and outside of your workplace
- Deeply focusing on organizational and societal issues along with individual needs
- Considering the needs of your Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color (BIPOC) employees and employees across different age groups
- Ensuring that they are not underrepresented or underutilized
- Accounting for physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, environmental, financial, occupational, and cultural needs of each employee
2. Hire Executive Team Leaders Who Value Inclusivity
Your executive team determines your work culture. A diverse set of leaders representing various characteristics can help enforce diversity in the workplace and create inclusive wellness programs.
If your company’s leaders epitomize the values of diversity and inclusion, you can create a safe space for all your employees. You can then cultivate transparent communication between the executive team and your employees. This can help build authentic connections in the workplace, inviting different perspectives and new growth opportunities.
3. Create a Safe Space for Diverse Employees
If employees do not feel included in your workplace or wellness program, they may not perform to their highest potential or fully participate in your organization. Establishing diversity will help your employees feel safe, valued, respected, and accepted at work. For this, you can:
- Strengthen anti-discriminatory policies
- Use gender-neutral language at work
- Share new opportunities with underrepresented employees
- Invite people to participate in diversity-based initiatives and events
- Avoid bias during employee evaluation or promotion
- Train in-house mentors to connect with underrepresented employees and address their needs
- Build employee assistance and counselling programs and seek services to help diverse people overcome personal difficulties or work-related issues
- Enable freedom of expression and value diverse perspectives
4. Respect All Religions, Cultures, and Beliefs
To create a diverse and inclusive work culture, you must acknowledge and respect the religious preferences of all your employees. You can:
- Introduce policies to build cultural and religious tolerance
- Honor various cultural and religious practices, including food preferences
- Celebrate regular culture days so all your employees interact
- Focus on important religious festivals or celebrations and offer optional holidays
- Designate a space for prayer or meditation
5. Promote Diversity Through Discussion
A progressive, inclusive workspace enables your employees to freely express themselves without any discrimination. This can also help you understand your employees’ wellness needs. To promote diversity through discussion, you can:
- Seek networking opportunities with companies that value diversity
- Stand up for your underrepresented employees at work
- Include a multilingual workforce to account for language barriers and educational opportunities
- Offer workplace wellness programs in different languages
- Engage in conversations about health disparities across diverse backgrounds
- Discuss topics such as diversity, race, income, disabilities, and religion with your employees and executive team
- Make sure employees are comfortable communicating with each other
- Create a workplace wellness improvement system to seek the feedback of diverse employees and understand whether your wellness program addresses their needs
Improve Diversity in Your Workplace and Reap the Benefits
Diversity in the workplace can help bring positivity and cohesiveness among heterogeneous teams while eliminating intolerance and discrimination. At the same time, it can encourage creativity and innovation, allowing your organization to profit through new opportunities.