Championing workplace diversity and inclusion initiatives can prove to be quite advantageous for all businesses. A robust diversity and inclusion strategy can significantly aid modern organizations to magnetize and retain top talents, drive innovative results. Conversely,Audrey Gellman points out that not putting enough emphasis on proper inclusivity practices and career growth can lead to a company losing out on important employees. There are several companies whose staff members left them prematurely due to an oversight in career path and growth opportunities, as well as the way employees treated each other in regards to diversity.
Diverse and inclusive companies have the capacity to drive superior, more innovative results. However,a lot of modern businesses still struggle in this regard, and fail to attract diverse talent due to inclusivity issues in the workplace. While speaking about her company’s journey, Audrey Gellman had mentioned that not putting enough focus on inclusivity and diversity is among her biggest setbacks as a CEO. Even though her company started off with a diverse customer base and workforce, there still were many gaps in diversity and inclusion training, as well as hiring processes in the firm.
For a CEO, it is crucial to set expectations strongly among the team members and company staff, especially in regards to how they treat one another. However, a lot of fast-growing companies face issues here, and end up losing employees in the process. Most of these businesses just emphasize on business scaling, while forgetting the cultural aspects of new hires. To improve on these failings, and progress towards better business prospects, a company must try to explore effective diversity and Inclusion practices.
One of the practices undertaken by Audrey Gellman and her team was to conduct listening tours of the company to gain a better understanding of the desired changes from the staff members. The inputs gathered, and the discussions conducted during these tours encouraged her to develop a formal culture code for her firm. The leadership team of the company was also appropriately adjusted and expanded to include more women of color. These simple, but important changes can significantly help entrepreneurs to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace. Rather than ignoring the importance of inclusivity altogether, CEOs and management teams should try to understand their failures and learn from them. They should subsequently work towards being better, and search for the best means to make their workplace more welcoming, transparent, and diverse.
Change and evolution can be challenging at first for companies planning to shape up their diversity and inclusion programs and policies. But doing so can ultimately be extremely rewarding in the long run. The majority of companies tend to enact change with the aim of delivering better business value. Subsequently, many of the firms launching diversity and inclusion initiatives ultimately end up outperforming the ones with a more homogeneous workforce. Hence, such a change can be fruitful for any business.