“Inclusion” is a simple but powerful concept. At its most basic, the term refers to a state of being in which people are included. But this simple idea can make an oversized impact on the work experience.
In an inclusive workplace culture, the contributions of all employees and everything they bring to the table — including their unique perspectives, backgrounds and experiences — are valued. This includes people of different abilities, ethnicities, religions, cultures, life situations, sexual orientation and more.
Promoting workplace inclusion requires systems built on fairness, ensuring that each employee has the opportunities and support to thrive and that everyone has the chance to be heard. In an inclusive culture, employees feel a sense of belonging and worth.
These characteristics of an inclusive workplace culture create big benefits for organizations:
- Organizational performance: An inclusive workplace fosters a diverse and inclusive workforce, which is strongly linked to financial outperformance.
- Employee engagement: Employees who feel valued and a sense of belonging are more likely to be engaged and feel empowered to do their best work.
- Retention: An inclusive workplace culture cultivates loyalty and motivates employees to invest their time and talents in the organization, increasing retention.
- Recruiting: An inclusive work culture is a big draw for top talent, aiding in recruiting efforts and building leadership.
- Market building: A diverse workforce better reflects diverse markets, supporting a company’s ability to connect with various customer demographics and segments.
- Innovation: A wide distribution of experiences sets the stage for the creation of new ideas. When people bring unique perspectives to the table, it sparks out-of-the box thinking, creativity, innovation and robust problem-solving.
Inclusion may be easy to understand, but it can be challenging to create within an organization. That’s why we’ve created this framework for building an inclusive workplace culture. We’ve identified five pillars that organizations can use to create an inclusive workplace and experience its many benefits.
Pillar 1: Inclusion Starts with Leadership
For inclusion efforts to be successful, they need to be integrated into every part of the organization — and that starts at the top. Leaders need to actively support inclusive company culture policies and programs, setting the tone for the entire organization. Inclusive leadership actively welcomes and leverages diverse perspectives, encourages open dialogue, includes diverse voices in decision-making and models respectful behavior.
Commit to Inclusion
Inclusion requires a serious commitment on the part of organizational leaders, often taking the form of a visible and ongoing pledge to prioritize the creation of a more inclusive workplace. Inclusion should be a core value of the company and integrated into the company’s mission statement. But leaders also need to take public action on inclusion day to day. This can include steps such as publicly stating inclusion goals, allocating resources needed for inclusion programs and ensuring accountability for progress.
Focus on Compassionate Leadership
At its core, inclusion is based on the idea that all people deserve to be accepted for who they are and treated with respect and empathy. Leaders should offer examples of this approach in the way they interact with everyone in the company. That means showing genuine concern for the well-being of employees and backing that up with policies that make a difference in the professional lives of employees.
When leaders walk the walk by modeling inclusive behaviors every day, it reinforces the importance of inclusion principles and nurtures an inclusive culture across the company.
Connect with Employees
Inclusion, by its very nature, is personal. Every employee should feel valued and important. This means leaders need to connect with the people who work for the company to create authentic relationships. Inclusive culture strengthens interpersonal bonds, builds trust and ensures that team members feel recognized as individuals. Leaders can accomplish this with actions such as providing support during challenges, engaging in regular informal meetings and one-on-one check-ins, being open to feedback and practicing active listening.
Mentoring is another way that leaders can connect with employees — this could be traditional mentoring, in which a senior leader mentors a less experienced employee, or reverse mentoring, in which an employee who is less experienced or comes from a different background mentors a more senior leader.
You can also create an inclusion and belonging mentoring program. These programs pair employees across different backgrounds and experiences to build understanding, reduce bias, and strengthen workplace culture. By fostering meaningful, cross-cultural relationships, they help cultivate a sense of community and psychological safety.
Assess Progress
Accountability needs to be built into inclusion programs. Leaders should create clear metrics, regularly review inclusion initiatives to measure progress, identify areas for improvement and take action to move forward. Assessment processes can include audits, formal and informal feedback from employees and managers and performance measurement. This is the only way to see what progress you’re making on your inclusive culture.
Pillar 2: Help Employees Understand and Practice Inclusion
For employees to practice inclusion, they need to understand what it is, why it’s important and how to integrate it into their day-to-day lives. It’s up to leaders to craft and communicate clear messages about inclusion and regularly reinforce those messages in a variety of ways.
Communicate Inclusion Goals
Organizations should have concrete inclusion goals that clearly state what the organization wants to accomplish, aligning teams to a common vision and driving accountability. These objectives should be communicated organization-wide on a regular basis so that everyone is on the same page.
Larger company goals should be broken down to the individual level. For example, teams and individuals should have their own inclusion goals that are part of performance reviews. To make it a real part of your inclusive culture, it needs to interact with your daily, weekly and even quarterly activities.
Offer Ongoing Inclusion Learning Opportunities
Inclusion is not just a concept; it involves behavior and takes practice. Organizations should provide ample opportunities for employees to learn and grow in their knowledge and practice of inclusion and prepare employees to thrive in a diverse environment.
Programs should aim to build cultural competence, reduce unconscious biases and promote respectful interactions. Learning, training and education should be ongoing. This can take a variety of forms, including:
- Workshops and seminars
- E-learning modules
- Interactive role-playing sessions
- Self-guided resource hubs
Mentoring can also be a personal, highly effective way to help employees develop in the context of a trusting relationship and promote diversity within the organization.
Pillar 3: Create a Culture of Inclusivity
Inclusion starts with pledges and policies, but it really comes to life in the everyday interactions among employees. Employers can nurture an inclusive organizational culture in several different ways.
Celebrate Differences
In an inclusive work environment, workplace diversity equals strength. An inclusive culture emphasizes the value of different viewpoints, recognizes a variety of contributions and celebrates difference. Employers can help employees feel seen and enhance morale with initiatives such as:
- Publicly celebrating history days/months
- Organizing events highlighting various cultures
- Telling the stories of employees with diverse backgrounds in company communications, forums and events
Use Inclusive Language
The way people talk about and to others can have a big impact on how employees feel. Employees need to understand how language can cause harm even when that’s not the intended outcome. This can be accomplished through training and setting clear expectations for communications and interactions among employees to avoid bias and cultivate respect.
Foster collaboration and exchange
Inclusion’s strength is the ability to bring different people together for new ideas, ways of seeing and results. Organizations can jump-start this process with initiatives that encourage collaboration throughout the organization. Programs that bring people together for positive exchange on inclusive culture can include:
- Cross-cultural events
- Creating interdepartmental teams for special projects
- Job exchanges
- Establishing mentoring for distributed teams among employees from different departments, backgrounds, generations, etc.
Pillar 4: Give Employees the Support They Need to Thrive
To effectively build a diverse and inclusive workplace, organizations need to not only help employees understand what an inclusive culture is and its value — they need to actively support them with policies that help to continually build and maintain an inclusive workplace.
Establish Adaptive Policies
A core principle of inclusion is recognizing that one size rarely fits all. People in various situations may have different needs when it comes to doing their best work while achieving work-life balance. Policies such as the ability to work flexible hours, for example, can assist employees in a variety of circumstances.
Create Safe Spaces
A key goal of inclusion is building trust among all people in the organization. But trust must be earned. People in underrepresented groups may not feel comfortable expressing themselves authentically in their work environment. It can be helpful to provide safe spaces, virtual or physical, where employees can say what’s on their minds without fear of judgment. In these dedicated spaces, employees can be invited to be themselves, with clear guidelines for respectful interactions.
Establish Employee Communities
Employee communities, also known as affinity groups, business resource groups and employee resource groups, are voluntary, employee-led groups that offer support, networking and advocacy around shared identities or interests. They are effective in creating a sense of community and supporting employees in addressing the unique challenges faced by underrepresented groups in a diverse workplace. Organizations can help them succeed by creating official channels and providing funding as well as leveraging their insights to create a more inclusive environment within the company.
Ensure Team Members Have a Voice
In an inclusive culture, everyone’s viewpoints are heard and valued. Organizations should create systems and processes that empower employees to express their opinions — and then integrate those concerns into policy. This includes feedback mechanisms such as:
- Regular surveys
- Open forums
- Town halls
- Suggestion boxes
- Individual check-ins with managers
Organizations should encourage employees to express themselves honestly and act on this feedback, ensuring that employee concerns are promptly addressed and fueling continuous improvement.
Pillar 5: Approach Hiring with an Inclusive Lens
Thoughtful recruiting, hiring and promotion processes are key to cultivating a workforce with a broad mix of backgrounds, identities and perspectives that also feel part of a larger whole. It’s also crucial for maintaining an inclusive culture in the workplace.
Establish Inclusive Recruiting and Hiring Practices
Recruiting practices play a significant role in shaping an organization’s workforce. Designing recruitment with an inclusive lens requires a change in perspective and creativity to widen recruitment efforts beyond business as usual. Steps to support inclusive recruiting include:
- Ensure that job descriptions are crafted in an inclusive way, such as eliminating language that is gendered or uses subtext to reach out to one group but not others. Every job description should reiterate the organization’s commitment to building an inclusive workforce.
- Be proactive in seeking out a variety of applicants. This could mean building relationships with organizations that support underrepresented groups, engaging with communities directly and encouraging employees to refer candidates from diverse backgrounds.
- Standardize job interviews so that all candidates respond to the same questions and are evaluated on a standard scale to offer a fair foundation. Questions should focus on aspects directly related to success in the role.
- Including work sample tests in the interview process helps to ensure that evaluations are objectively focused on what the candidate can do rather on more subjective criteria.
- To mitigate bias, candidates should be evaluated by a diverse panel, rather than just one person.
Create Equal Opportunities for Advancement
Inclusive recruiting and hiring can get a healthy variety of employees in the door, but they must also be given inclusive opportunities to grow within the organization. This means all employees should have the same access to the resources they need to succeed.
Professional development is critical for creating opportunities for all employees — and providing these programs reaps big benefits for companies as well, such as a more highly skilled workforce, increased retention and a strong leadership pipeline.
Mentoring has been shown to be very effective in helping employees advance their careers, especially people from underrepresented groups. Mentoring offers employees personalized access, relationships and resources that they might not have otherwise, giving them the tools and skills they need to thrive and contributing to an inclusive workplace.
Employers can also take steps to make sure that promotions are granted fairly and with equal opportunity. For example, promotions should be based on clearly stated, objective criteria rather than subjective opinions.
Wrap Up: Implementing the 5 Pillars Framework
Inclusion is more than a buzzword. It takes true commitment, awareness and effort to integrate the principles of inclusion across an organization. But when it’s done right, creating a more inclusive culture makes a company stronger, more competitive and fuels success now and into the future.
