5 Steps to Increasing Diversity at Your Company

Diversity offers many benefits to a company—it attracts more diverse candidates and creates a dynamic pool of employees and backgrounds to generate new and unique ideas. If you feel your company is lacking, consider taking these steps to increase diversity.

Create a Diversity Committee

A good way to start a diversity and inclusion program at your company is by creating a diversity committee to examine its culture and composition. Naturally, the committee should feature a diverse group of employees and be tasked with conducting reviews, compiling reports, and recommending actions to correct imbalances in diversity.

A committee can look for biases or disparities, including hiring practices and workplace policies like the dress code, parental leave, and holidays. They can focus on diversity without taking resources from the business.

Diversify the Hiring Committee

Many companies use hiring committees compiled of multiple employees to create job postings, sift through candidate credentials, conduct interviews, and make hiring recommendations. Diversity starts with who the company hires, so a good place to start diversity reviews and make changes is with the hiring committee.

A committee of people with different backgrounds is likelier to find and recommend different candidates than the company usually hires. Ideally, the committee comprises diverse individuals who vary by sex, race, experience, education, and religion.

Make Job Postings More Inclusive

One of the first steps many hiring and diversity committees take to increase diversity at a company is to make the job postings more inclusive. After all, a job posting is the first thing a prospect sees and learns about your company, so you’ll need inclusive postings if you want to attract a diverse pool.

Some of the best practices for diversifying job postings include using inclusive language, avoiding gendered pronouns, and emphasizing your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Conduct Pay Equity Reviews

Another valuable way to examine the commitment to diversity at your company is with a pay equity review. Laws forbid pay disparities between workers based on sex or race, but a wage gap targets women, especially minority women.

Company negligence or ignorance is part of the problem, and many businesses don’t even realize the pay disparity. Conducting a thorough pay review will ensure everyone working similar positions with similar experience receives fair and equal pay.

Create a Mentorship Program

A common diversity problem for many companies is variety among the lower workers but few minorities in executive and leadership positions. One method for correcting this imbalance is creating a mentorship program between leadership and lower-level minority employees.

The program can range from simply getting lunch with the boss to more intensive job shadowing. Many who have participated in such programs rave about the two-way relationship and learning between mentor and mentee.