Sheakley Updates

Maintaining Workplace Diversity

Ella Baker
Maintaining Workplace Diversity
Reading time 4 Mins
Published on Jun 20
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Retain your diverse workforce with these tips

Workplace diversity means a commitment to valuing and accepting cultural differences, while remaining compliant will laws established to ensure equal employment opportunities. Embracing diversity is not only the right thing to do, it also makes your company stronger if your workforce is more representative of society as a whole. It isn’t enough to recruit and hire diverse talent for your company, you must develop a culture and strategies that allow you to retain those employees.

Examine your culture

As you hire a more diverse workforce, evaluating your existing company culture is a critical step in ensuring that you are creating the ability to maintain that talent. Be open to change and listen to your employees to create a culture more welcoming of diversity of experience, culture, race, sexual orientation, gender, age, disabilities, and so on.

Begin by looking at the existing leadership team of your company. Your management and board members should be a broad reflection of the diversity you seek to create in your workforce. Evaluate the way you promote and mentor your next generation of leaders to more deliberately focus on creating more diversity in management and senior-level positions.

One way to help promote the importance and understanding is to offer educational opportunities, trainings, and professional development to all employees, not just management, that focus on unconscious bias against marginalized groups. Maintaining the diversity of your workplace only works if everyone within the company understands and accepts the change.

Embracing diversity may mean disruptions to the existing status quo of your company. Create policies that are equitable to diverse groups of employees and ensure that you communicate the importance of diversity to your management team, your regular employees, job candidates, and the community at large.

Inclusion and commonalities

One of the most common statements of employees from diverse backgrounds is that they often feel like a ‘token’ employee. Rather than calling out the differences between your employees, celebrate the unique perspectives that each employee brings to the table while looking for opportunities to recognize commonalities.

Create employee resource groups that allow your employees to learn more about each other’s backgrounds, perspectives, and culture. These groups should also extend beyond the differences between employees to look at career development goals and needs that employees have in common. Foster opportunities for genuine interaction between employees that helps create camaraderie and understanding.

Welcome and celebrate the value that different ideas and experiences bring to your company. Encourage employees to use their voices to contribute to discussions within the workplace. Recognize employees for the work they do and reward their loyalty to your company in ways that make them feel comfortable and appreciated.

Finding ways to make employees feel less isolated should be a priority. Consider developing paid-time off or flex policies that are responsive to a more culturally diverse workforce, which has the added benefit of promoting a greater work-life balance across your entire workforce.

Personalized retention plans and stay interviews

While all businesses should incorporate personalized retention plans (PRP), for those wishing to maintain a diverse workforce it is mandatory. Understanding why employees stay or leave requires efforts, so investing time in PRPs and stay interviews will allow you to not only target employees for retention but will also help you avoid relying on broad stroke presumptions.

Typically conducted twice per year, PRPs and stay interviews help you identify the reasons that each employee stays with your company while also allowing you to address frustrations before they lead to resignation. Additionally, these sessions can be used to identify larger scale failings in your company culture that cause employees to leave.

Managers should use these sessions to gain a better understanding of each employee’s career goals and to identify opportunities for professional development, growth, and recognition. Not only do PRPs and stay interviews help reduce turnover, they allow you to identify and reinforce the positive aspects of your company while providing targets to address for deficiencies.

Maintaining a diverse workforce doesn’t have to be a challenge

In an increasingly diverse work world, establishing and maintaining a diverse workforce seem like a big task – especially for many small and mid-size companies unsure of how to navigate the waters of diversity and HR compliance. You don’t have to do it alone – Sheakley’s human resources experts are here to help.

Reach out to Sheakley’s HR professionals today for assistance developing practices that can help you attract or maintain a more diverse employee base. Stay up-to-date on all things Sheakley by subscribing to our blog and following us on social media. Join in the discussion by commenting below.


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