The following are five business practices that can help make your workplace more diverse:
- Hire a genuinely diverse pool of employees.
- Place a high value on critical thinking, new perspectives and different ways of doing things-all this leads to innovation.
- Encourage everybody in your organization to identify things in their backgrounds and experience what set them apart and help them better understand, connect with, or maximize particular segments of the population.
- Recognize and accommodate nontraditional lifestyles and preferences (provide domestic-partner benefits; allow people to work in the middle of the night as long as they meet deadlines and need not be available during the day; let people dress as they wish if they don’t come into contact with clients or customers; serve vegetarian entrees in the cafeteria as an option).
- Reflect diversity in the leadership of your organization so that people of diverse backgrounds have realistic role models, supporters and proof of their opportunities for advancement.
Source: Bruce Tulgan, RainmakerThinking, Inc.