Three new ideas to diversify your diversity initiatives

Diversity may be the popular initiative right now, and that doesn’t make it any less important than it’s ever been. It’s a shame the conversation is only really starting to be heard. What we can all do now is listen to what’s being said and realise that there’s more to diversity than hiring a certain quota of the population

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At Reward Gateway, we believe in three key reasons why diversity and inclusion are key to our success:

1. Fundamentally we believe that creativity and innovation come from diverse teams with varied backgrounds who constantly challenge each other and what they see.
2. We’re in a competitive business and we can’t afford to have false barriers between us and the very best talent that can help our clients and our business.
3. Our user base is highly diverse. If we are diverse ourselves, we’ll understand, empathise and serve them better.

Throughout the week, we’re celebrating our first-ever Diversity and Inclusion Week at Reward Gateway, hosting a variety of activities and sharing stories of Diversity and Inclusion around the world.

We’ll share more about these events and stories on our social media channels, but I wanted to take a second to talk about how we’re making diversity less of a phrase and more of the norm.

Here are three ways to diversify your own diversity and inclusion ideas:

Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons

Been told to look into diversity so your company can tick the box and claim to be a diverse employer?

Then stop.

If you’re only trying to conform to make it look like you’re doing the right thing then you’re adding to the problem.

Really get down into your employee demographics, identify the imbalances, and then find out the 'why' to these imbalances existing in the first place. Only then can you begin to fix them and address the issue of diversity.

Think about diversity beyond race

Yes, race is a large part of diversity, and there are even more subtle areas which you need to pay attention to as well.

For example, when planning a team get together, do you throw money behind a free bar and hope for the best? Not everyone enjoys drinking and can often feel left out on the fringes at social events. You can still have the free bar and maybe choose to do an activity beforehand which caters for those who still want to be involved and also want to get home at a reasonable hour.

How about catering for people’s different work modes? At Reward Gateway, we’ve designed our offices to work for our employees, rather than telling them this is where they must sit and that we never change the radio station. We encourage our employees to hot-desk and give them the options of a buzzing zone and quiet zone. This allows those who like to be more animated during work can be, and those who like the peace can work undisturbed.

Attract a diverse range of people

You’re no doubt doing your best efforts to ensure you’re interviewing an equal amount of people from the gender spectrum, and you might not even realise that you’re putting a slice of people off from the tone of your job advertisement.

Try running your listings through this Gender Decoder to find out if your ads have subtle linguistic cues which can be off-putting for some.

On top of that, think about how accessible and inclusive your job adverts are and whether or not they appeal to those with visual / hearing impairments. If your job adverts can’t be reached by those people then you’re – albeit inadvertently – saying they can’t work for you. Think about including an audio reader on your website or using video to accompany what you’ve written.

I’m curious, how does your company approach diversity?