There are other financial incentives too – with the Work Opportunity Tax Credit offering employers the chance to claim credit that ranges from $1,200 to $9,600 should they hire individuals from groups that have faced consistent barriers to securing employment.
However, while there’s no doubt that equality, diversity and inclusion has its benefits for businesses themselves, very few firms have arguably made significant progress towards true diversity. As a case in point, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that during 2019, just 20.8 percent of people with a disability were employed across the States. In contrast, the labor force participation rate for those without a disability was 68.7 percent. And the statistics paint a similar picture across other under-represented groups. For black or African American men, for example, the employment rate last year stood at 64.8 percent, which was 4.4 percentage points lower than the rate for men overall.
Clearly there’s room for improvement when it comes to engaging and employing diverse groups, but how can organizations move things along?
Five top tips to make D&I work in your firm
At Guidant Global, we are experts in delivering equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives across many disadvantaged groups. Within our own business, we have developed an internal inclusion initiative, run by a dedicated taskforce, to guide the entire organization on best practice approaches to ED&I. Based on our experience, here are a few tips from our own learnings:
- Trust: When defining and changing your culture to be more inclusive, there needs to be a level of trust between the business, its staff and any suppliers involved in sourcing and managing workers. ED&I can’t be enforced; it needs to be nurtured with your workers and suppliers driving it themselves – trust them to manage this.
- Get senior teams involved: If you are to get buy-in from the whole company, ED&I needs to be adopted at the top and filtered down throughout the business, from the CEO to the most junior employee. By involving senior teams from the start, it is much easier to get them behind any initiative.
- Keep it natural: As mentioned above, truly inclusive cultures can’t be designed, they evolve. Forcing views and initiatives on the workforce will not often have the desired impact. Nurturing inclusivity will help to create a naturally diverse workforce that is a truer reflection on wider society.
- Consistency is key: ED&I is constantly evolving as the workplace adapts to micro and macro influencers, and consistency of message and stance is required. The communication to the entire workplace – whether that is full-time, temporary, contingent or external – needs to be aligned to avoid conflicting messages.
- Find the passion: Equality, diversity and inclusion efforts will be strengthened to the degree that they are driven by those who are truly passionate about the subject. Look at the resources in your business and identify who has a personal desire to create an inclusive workplace.
Driving diversity and inclusion beyond your immediate business
While HR teams can certainly take action to drive ED&I across their enterprises, there is often an overlooked step: building diversity into the supply chain. When recruitment suppliers are sourcing and placing people resources for your firm, it is critically important that they too have an approach to equality, diversity and inclusion that complements your own. Inevitably, the individuals they are placing – whether employed through a staffing agency or executing against a Statement of Work (SoW) – are likely to engage and interact with your regular workforce. Disruption could become present if the supplier’s ED&I approach and culture doesn’t gel with your own. The suppliers’ ability to attract and retain a diverse workforce will certainly reflect on your business as well.
At Guidant Global, for example, we have actively taken a lead in the recruitment industry to deliver diversity and inclusion initiatives across disadvantaged groups – and we work with our clients, suppliers and industry partners to achieve this. If we are to truly create inclusive workforces – whether that’s our internal, external or hidden talent – there needs to be a commitment across the entire supply chain to achieve this goal. In some cases, difficult decisions regarding which partners are right for our business will need to be made.
