6 Steps for Creating an Inclusive Workplace Culture
Teams who feel valued outperform their competition. Here are proven steps to creating an inclusive workplace culture with insights from cultural change experts Clarissa Peterson and Joe Mazzenga.
Imagine stepping into a workplace where innovative ideas flow from left to right. Trust and support abound, and colleagues engage authentically with one another. Altogether, the environment radiates optimism and inspiration leaving you satisfied.
By comparison, if your current workplace doesn’t reflect this, you’re not alone. Millions report unhappiness and a sense of exclusion at work stemming from prevalent exclusionary practices. As a result, inequity drains business success and harms team morale, productivity, and employee retention.
The good news is that leadership can transform organizational culture. In fact, studies show that companies embracing diversity and celebrating differences have happier, more productive employees who feel valued and, subsequently, outperform their competition. Moreover, an inclusive workplace drives innovation, supports collaboration, and improves employee and customer satisfaction.
So if you aim to turn your workplace into a thriving environment that values DEI, here are six ways to foster inclusion at work.
1. Understand your current culture
Transformation requires courage. Before change can take place, leaders must uncover the current culture and its impact on employee engagement. Organizational culture is deeply ingrained in unconscious and conscious behaviors, rituals, biases, and language. As a result, the environment may be hindering creativity, making people feel unwelcome, maintaining biases, and perpetuating outdated thinking.
First, define your current culture by conducting surveys and holding focus groups to gather perspectives that identify common perceptions of leadership and the organization. Without a clear understanding of your current state, making meaningful progress toward creating a better one is impossible.
2. Define what DEI means for your organization
Inclusion won’t happen by wishing for it. It takes intentionality—planning, strategy, execution, accountability, and measurement— to create lasting change. Therefore, leaders must set a clear vision and goal for what encompasses a psychologically safe, diverse, and inclusive workplace culture.
Be brave and ask your team:
- Which behaviors will no longer be tolerated moving forward? Which will be rewarded?
- What are the organizational values around safety and inclusion?
- How do we define a safe and inclusive environment that embraces diversity?
- What does success look like?
Powerful questions help create goals and clarify how to measure and sustain these goals.
3. Set clear goals and implement inclusive policies
To clarify vision, executives must develop a roadmap and ensure the organization stays on track and moves forward in the right direction. It is up to leadership to recognize and remove barriers while providing the resources, tools, and training teams need to succeed.
Guard rails that protect DEI might include:
- Providing harassment and emotional intelligence training for all employees
- Addressing and dismantling pay gaps across positions
- Conducting routine company policy and DEI audits
- Establishing actionable DEI success metrics
- Developing anti-discrimination policies
Specific guidelines and procedures should be well-documented and communicated to all employees.
4. Facilitate open communication and feedback
Authentic feedback is critical to measure culture change results. But how do organizations measure progress if team members fear retaliation? Ultimately, it’s up to leaders to provide safe places for employees to voice their opinions, suggestions, and concerns.
Some ways to gather authentic feedback include:
- Anonymous suggestion boxes
- Organizational leadership surveys
- Transparent performance evaluations
5. Create a safe environment
In a psychologically safe work environment, leadership is transparent, solves problems, and is open and curious with a non-judgmental attitude. As an added benefit of feeling secure, safety enables others to be their authentic selves. Employees who feel safe engage deeply and openly share thoughts and ideas for improvement, thus accelerating team performance.
When trust is abundant, teams take more risks and learn from failure without fear of negative consequences. Friction reduces, and team members have more positive experiences. Moreover, long-term relationships and loyalty are established.
Creating a psychologically safe environment necessitates that leaders:
- Promote open communication with respectful dialogue
- Provide multiple channels for feedback and involvement
- Demonstrate they are open to and are actively learning
- Use active listening
- Practice empathy
- Recognize and celebrate contributions
- Provide training on emotional intelligence
- Hold their leaders and team members accountable for sustaining an inclusive workplace to help increase understanding and give empowerment to employees.
6. Start with leadership
Leaders have the most influence in shaping the environment because sustainable change requires systems, tools, planning, strategy, and ongoing operations. With such a pivotal role, actively championing inclusivity and demonstrating a commitment to diversity and equity sets a powerful new standard. Leadership must go first in modeling the behaviors they want to experience in others.
Employees look to leaders for guidance and direction. And when they observe leaders taking action toward inclusivity, it inspires and encourages others to do the same.
Building an inclusive mindset should be the top priority for any team seeking to build a thriving workplace and future-proof their organization. Instead of waiting for an event to strike, be proactive and make lasting, incremental improvements now.
Remember that creating a culture where everyone feels valued goes beyond profit and performance. Creating an inclusive workplace is simply the right thing to do.
Recently, we provided a mini workshop on unconscious bias at the National Center for Healthcare Leadership‘s All-Member Conference. During the session, we asked participants, “What will you do to practice conscious inclusion?” and handed out blue paper to record their responses.
Below, we have included those notes to help you on your journey. Use the report along with the steps outlined above to construct a successful culture change strategy that will help your organization thrive today and beyond.
