There is the potential for discrimination based on race and ethnicity at any point of the employment journey. For instance, the famous 2004 study, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment”, job applicants with “white-sounding” names receive 50 more callbacks for interviews. Sadly, this hasn’t improved, and it is even at the point where around 58% of Black American employees report experiencing racial discrimination at work in 2020.
So, how should managers respond? When you are thinking about your company or your team, what are you doing to ensure a fairer work environment for people of all backgrounds? Even if that isn’t your priority, it’s important to create a healthier environment purely due to the regulations put forward by the Equality Act 2010, which protects employees of various characteristics, including race and ethnicity. Read on to find out what you can do to create a more diverse and better environment for your employees.
What’s the benefit to the business?
So, beyond adhering to regulations and compliance, what is the motivator to create a more diverse work environment? What’s in it for the business? It turns out a lot.
For one thing, a diverse team does wonders for productivity. With different viewpoints and backgrounds contributing to the conversation, you’re going to see a lot better innovation, creativity and problem-solving throughout your projects.
Additionally, your team is going to establish a better understanding of diverse customer bases. We like to put people into demographics, but they’re often too vague and very much useless if they are from a demographic, you don’t have a lot of exposure to. With a diverse team, you’ll better flesh out your customer parameters.
In turn, all of this will enhance company reputation. As word spreads, and website Meet the Team pages get updated, you’ll better attract talent that will elevate your team and company.
Common barriers to diversity and inclusion
There are a lot more barriers to entry for people of a race and ethnicity minority – both biased and unbiased. The best thing you can do as an employer is to avoid acting on those biases as much as possible and taking steps to avoid them. For example, the onboarding process is notoriously full of them, which is why applications often ask every facet of your background, including race, religion, nationality, gender, etc. in order to monitor diversity in the workplace and ensure that the company is committed diversity. However, it is worth noting that offering any of these details is voluntary and you should always be able to find the “I prefer not to say” option.
Additionally, once your race and ethnicity hires are in their roles, they should get equal opportunity to learn from mentorship and gain from networking opportunities. Stats suggest that even today, people of colour are often overlooked for training and promotions.
Strategies for increasing racial and ethnic diversity
As employers, there is a responsibility to encourage more diverse hires in the workplace, which often means having a plan in place to target recruitment efforts. Offer diverse race and ethnicity candidate slates for open positions and work with your HR team to better target diverse hires.
Additionally, you can create partnerships with professional organisations and recruitment agencies to better find a diverse race and ethnicity hire that offers talent. Create opportunities for inclusive leadership development, which will create a more diverse team with louder voices from a range of backgrounds. This will encourage new perspectives, in turn offering more creative solutions, which will boost productivity.
Create an inclusive workplace culture with employee resource groups and affinity networks. You can also ensure that it’s clear no racial harassment will be tolerated with training. Cultural awareness training can help avoid unintended slights like microaggressions and suppress intended racial discrimination.
Addressing microaggressions and discrimination
Microaggressions, in particular, will need to be addressed. Whether intentional or not, they are harder to address as they are, as the word implies, considered small. A comment or an oversight, compared to outright aggression or slurs. However they are not small, and this idea makes them harder to address.
It’s important to complete regular training on recognizing and responding to microaggressions against race and ethnicity hires and have a plan in place on how to address them. Do the hard work of creating clear policies in different scenarios for reporting procedures and create relative consequences for discriminatory behaviour.
The role of leadership in driving diversity initiatives
It’s important for employers to spearhead these changes in the company and acceptance of hires with diverse racial backgrounds. As mentioned, it will aid productivity, but it will also aid a lot of different aspects of the company – regulation being one.
As employers you should consider setting clear goals and accountability measures in order to ensure that these diverse hires are met. Target modelling inclusive behaviours and allocate resources for diversity programs to encourage a healthier workplace culture.
Conclusion
Diversity in the workplace does wonders for companies, employees, and society in general. At this point racism is just bad business practice, and allowing it in the workplace is too. If you need help with your employee rights, take a look at the services on our website.
