Diversify Marketing Strategies with Workplace Inclusivity
By: Carolyn Rawson
Making a big impact as a brand means targeting a diverse market. But reaching a diverse market begins with inclusive etiquette in the workplace.
An inclusive work environment ensures a healthy mix of perspectives and a greater understanding of the customers your business has the potential to serve. It consists of employees of varying race, ethnicity, physical appearance, and abilities.
More and more companies are cluing into the fact that inclusivity is not only ethical but also an integral part of a healthy, attuned workforce.
Trends in inclusivity have the power to keep your employees motivated, challenged, and engaged—all while keeping your brand on the cutting edge of an increasingly heterogeneous market.
Here are some of the latest trends in inclusive business practices. Their implementation will attract a strong and diverse workforce, one that will understand your customers because of their strong, foundational respect for one another.
Training Employees to Recognize Unconscious Bias
Ongoing education is an important component of a healthy work environment. Many businesses already conduct seminars covering topics from sexual assault to personality assessments. Human resource teams should expand training to teach leaders and employees about unconscious bias.
In an environment where cooperation—not consternation—is key, preconceived stereotypes can become an obstacle. But acknowledging unconscious bias helps to break down these often-invisible barriers and make a diverse workforce more confident and cohesive.
Recognizing Multicultural Holidays
If you have—or wish to attract—a diverse workforce, recognizing unstandardized holidays can make employees feel more at home.
Paying respect to religiously significant holidays like Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and Rosh Hashanah might mean allowing practicing Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish employees to take those days off.
Celebrating festivals like Holi or Día de los Muertos alongside traditional holidays like the Fourth of July and Christmas might encourage more worldly appreciation and diversified participation.
Organizing Diverse Hiring Panels
Interviews work both ways; they are as much a candidate’s opportunity to get to know a potential employer as they are the chance for an employer to assess a candidate’s suitability.
To attract a multiethnic, multiracial workforce, it’s therefore encouraging for candidates to witness a diverse representation of employees on the hiring panel. They won’t just hear about promised workplace inclusivity. They’ll see it and believe it. A diverse hiring panel can also help provide a less culturally confined assessment of candidates.
Implementing Inclusive Business Practices Pays Off
In a globalized society, even the smallest business niche can benefit from a multitude of inclusive practices. That’s because inclusivity builds upon itself, blossoming into increased diversity with every new hire and every new sale. Small, internal changes soon expand to the larger network, making brands respectable, recognizable, and useful to a surging customer profile.
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