How to Create Gender Diversity in the Workplace
Diversity is crucial to all workplaces. People with different backgrounds and experiences working together as a team, can develop innovative ideas that will keep your company productive and profitable. Many studies conducted in recent years have shown that companies with higher levels of gender diversity perform better relative to the wider stock market. Ensuring equal representation of women in the workplace can have positive impact and here are a few examples of how you can create gender diversity and why it is good for business:
1) Build an inclusive workplace that harbors different perspectives — Having both men and women creates a multiplicity of perspectives that can spark creativity and innovation thus help organizations to spot and seize new opportunities. It can also encourage organizations to challenge gender stereotypes.
2) Provide your team with unconscious bias training — Before you aim to address forces that impact your team’s behaviors and decisions, you must understand the concept and recognize that all team members experience this phenomenon. Understanding unconscious bias helps to reduce the negative impacts of everyone’s invisible prejudices.
3) Write better job descriptions — This enables your recruitment teams to proactively source a diverse pool of talent and attract them to apply for the opportunities available in your organizations. Female millennials look for employers with a strong record on diversity, according to research by PwC, with 85% saying it’s important to them.
4) Implement fair compensation practices — Fair compensation does not mean that everyone at the company is paid the same amount, Rather, it means paying employees an appropriate amount according to their performance, experience, and job requirements. (Some companies have attempted an across-the-board equal pay strategy — spoiler alert! It did not work.) Explain your compensation offer with each employee and provide development opportunities so each employee understands how they can earn salary increases and promotions.
5) Learn from exit interviews — Having an inclusive culture in your workplace boosts morale and opportunity. Inclusive workplaces tend to have lower employee churn rates — which represents big savings in terms of money and time spent on recruitment. If, for instance, you learn that women are less satisfied with compensation than men, then this provides you with an opportunity to remedy this case in your organization — hence you can take steps to improve your compensation strategy. Using the exit interviews as a platform to learn how to improve group performance allows for enhanced collaboration within the human resources in your organization. Researchers have observed that women have stronger skills reading non-verbal cues.
While this is by no means an exhaustive list, these are all things you should consider when working towards gender diversity in the workplace. Let your current employees guide your efforts, as they can provide valuable insights into what your organization is doing well, and whether there is room for improvement. If you want to build a world-class team, you will want to see gender diversity make progress across the board.
Thanks to all who shared their contributions on this article.
