When embarking on developing a comprehensive and meaningful diversity and inclusion strategy for your workplace, it is critical that an initial assessment of the organisation’s current diversity position, highlighting key areas for improvement is critical.

The areas of diversity you should consider include (but are not limited to):

  • Culture
  • Ethnicity
  • Race
  • Gender
  • Nationality
  • Age
  • Religion
  • Disability
  • Sexual Orientation
  • Education

There is a range of tools that can be used to evaluate your organisation in relation to diversity and inclusion. A survey of your current team and their thoughts on diversity and inclusion in their workplace is a useful tool to gather honest feedback on how your staff view, understand and consider diversity and inclusion in the current work environment. You can use the survey here as a guide to the type of questions to ask.

These tools can be used to understand how your organisation is performing in relation to diversity and inclusion, identify any gaps and where your organisation can improve with an aim of integrating diversity into the core values of the organisation. Using these results you could run a SOAR analysis (strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results).

Core areas of a business and its workforce that can directly reflect the current level of diversity and inclusion include (but are not limited to):

  • Recruitment processes – does it consider diversity; how do you manage unconscious/conscious bias during recruitment?
  • Representation – e.g. % of females to males
  • Retention – what are your retention rates, how does this compare to your industry norms?
  • Compensation – pay parity
  • Advancement – % of women or minorities in leadership positions
  • Culture – Do you understand your company’s potential biases both as an organisation and individual staff members?

In order to progress and successfully implement a Diversity and Inclusion Policy within your business it is important to identify key people within your business:

  • Who is going to be fundamental in progressing and implementing the strategy for your organisation?
  • How are you going to get buy-in from the organisation to enable the successful implementation of the strategy?

Identifying these ‘champions’ early will lead to a more successful process.