Diversity and Inclusion as a growth strategy for 2022 | Inpulse Employee Engagement Software

Most organisations are keenly working to improve Diversity and Inclusion in their teams and greater workplace. This year, we saw a massive rise in organisations conducting our Diversity and Inclusion surveys and we helped hundreds of leaders create more diverse teams and a more inclusive company culture. Great strides were made, but there’s no quick fix to Diversity and Inclusion, it’s a forever kind of commitment that requires consistent effort. We at Inpulse make that commitment with our clients. We’re here to hold their hand (and yours), and we’re thrilled to see Diversity and Inclusion become a growth strategy for 2022. In this post we let you in on how to do just that, and the plans successful organisations have for Diversity and Inclusion in 2022.

To recap, true Diversity and Inclusion requires change and communication. As much as you may believe it’s a numbers game (many leaders approach it in this way), it’s not at all. It’s a change in behaviour and mindset, it’s a change in the way you communicate with your people and make decisions, it’s communicating needs and putting personal perceptions aside to listen to what your people need within their teams, the company culture and their workplaces. This is just one reason why we involve diverse employees in Diversity and Inclusion discussions and strategies — which most engagement specialists don’t do. Diversity and Inclusion cannot be achieved without including everyone, from the beginning and beyond.

Another thing to remember is that diversity is not the same as inclusion. Diversity is somewhat driven by numbers. You can look at a team and tell whether it’s diverse or not. Inclusion is different; it’s not seen, it’s felt. It’s felt by the employees within the teams, the people that make up the organisation. This is what organisations are focussing on in 2022. Not how their teams look, but how their people feel within their teams and about the culture.

Another reason why Inpulse is the chosen partner in Diversity and Inclusion is that we measure emotional analytics. We measure how employees feel and why, providing leaders with hard-to-get data to make better, more rewarding decisions. We’re the only engagement experts that provide this additional metric.

“In the offices and warehouses of global institutions, C-suite leaders understand that for their enterprises to survive and thrive in a world in which their employees and customers span multiple countries, languages, generations, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds — they need their organisations to be inclusive.” (Forbes)

Inclusion is active: It’s an organization that welcomes every individual. Inclusion is a behavior that opens our minds to the importance of being more interconnected and interdependent upon each other — within our departments and across the organisation.

Aligning to the needs of next-gen talent

Combined, Millennials and Generation Z will be the largest workforce of our time. Millennials alone are “more ethnically diverse, more technologically savvy and more educated than their predecessor generations. A fifth of them have immigrant parentage and the majority have friends with a different ethnic background.” (The Keckley Report October 2, 2017, “My Take: Millennials aren’t Buying What We’re Selling”). This same holds true for Generation Z.

Diversity and Inclusion is a major driver in the recruitment and retention of Millennial and GenZ employees.

It’s essential for organisations to understand the characteristics and needs of their desired talent, and have this reflected in growth strategies, leadership and operational practices, even the allocation of capital and financial resources. These shifts have a significant impact on your ability to win the war for top talent, improve engagement and achieve success.

Inclusion by design

According to leadership strategise, Glenn Llopis, organisations are not inherently built for inclusion, he breaks it down here:

• The corporate playbook was not designed to lead or serve mass differences.
• For decades, brands have not only attempted to define how employees should act or behave at work, but also have tried to influence consumers to make certain purchases to create idealized “lifestyles.”
• Today we’ve entered a new age of personalization, in which employees and consumers want to align with brands that are capable of leading and serving them based on their values, unique needs and desires. This shifts the balance of power from brands and businesses to individuals.

The level of inclusion organisations need to achieve (and are striving for) is one that requires change in systems and processes, achieved only with communication and listening strategies. It’s inclusion by design — building an organisation for inclusion. A change in behaviour and mindset begins with transparency, talking through barriers and listening to what your people feel and need. This is what our Diversity and Inclusion strategies have been built around. It’s not about trying to be diverse and inclusive, but being it and setting the foundation where diversity and inclusion is a culture.

Communicating our way to greater diversity and inclusion

Inclusion is all about letting the individual (employee) ‘touch’, or influence the organisation. It’s involving employees in people-related decision-making and working as a unit, rather than top management taking full control of decisions that directly affect employees. In fact, employees and consumers often know the requirements for the organisation (particularly when it comes to culture and people-related areas) better than their own leaders. Inclusion is about creating interdependency between people. Inpulse’s suite of surveys including Diversity and Inclusion, Employee Engagement, Wellbeing and more, are designed to help you achieve collaboration between people and management to make better people-related decisions. We measure emotional analytics alongside eNPS, EI and others, ensuring you make decisions with a variety of data that matters for Diversity and Inclusion, Employee Engagement and wellbeing.

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Originally published at https://www.inpulse.com on December 22, 2021.