DEI strategy to achieve a culture of positive inclusion in the organization

Living in a multicultural environment, with wide diversity of people from their gender, age, skills, nationality, etc., it is natural that when talking about work, companies are also diverse in staff; however, in many cases this is not the case.

According to the Survey on Discrimination in Mexico City 2021, among the main causes of discrimination in general, the poverty (16.4%), have skin morena (16.2%), as well as people nativesto be woman in different fields (9.4%) and people from the LGBT+ community, who also face challenges when being hired.

People with disparity also experience challenges, as well as those over the age of 40, who have more obstacles in finding a job.

Regarding people with disabilities, in February of this year, the Senate Plenary approved reforming the article 132 of the Federal Labor Law, which seeks to reduce and remove the barriers that impede the access of people with disabilities to the work environment. For this, the topics of hiring, training, training and professionalization of jobs, as well as labor relations policies, were regulated.

Although many companies are already working more on this issue of inclusion and diversity, sometimes there is a lack of an adequate method or it is believed that by meeting a quota one is already diverse, when this is not the case.

“Even relatively diverse companies face significant challenges in creating work environments characterized by inclusive leadership and responsibility among managers, equal and fair opportunity, and openness and freedom from prejudice and discrimination,” says the Diversity Wins report, prepared by Mckinsey Consulting.

One way to help have a healthy strategy is to follow the DEI methodology (of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), which consists of several phases, from the search for talent, recruitment, contracting and monitoring in the company.

Given this, Udemy Business, a learning platform for companies, considers that this type of work goes beyond results, it is about taking care of the most valuable element of the organization: people.

“Implementing a DEI strategy in companies implies recognizing and protecting the most valuable asset of any organization: the diversity and integrity of people in their differences”, explained Raphael Spinelli, Regional Director of Udemy.

Given this, he recommends the following points to create a healthy DEI strategy:

when recruiting

When looking for talent, interviewing and having the selection process, you should start by posting vacancies with language that is not biased or exclusionary, and be sensitive to cultural nuances. Preferably avoid gender and age, depending on the needs of the vacancy.

Also, you have to search for talent on multiple channels such as web pages, social networks, job boards, physically, the company itself, job fairs, among others. Thus, people who do not have access to any digital channel, will be able to attend the offer in person.

When requesting and reviewing resumes, avoid seeing names, school of origin or other information that refers to gender, race, among others. Thus the evaluation will focus on experience and skills. For this there is softwares that can hide this information when reviewing it.

when hiring

Once the collaborator has been hired and begins their experience in the company, attention should be paid to different aspects of their work life cycle, from the initial incorporation to regular communications about the benefits they offer and the initiatives they support.

To do this, efforts should be focused on the following points:

• Evaluate the benefits provided by the company and policies that are more inclusive and equitable. For example, paternity leave in the same way as maternity leave, flexible hours, among others.
• Form groups of employees who share a purposemission or social cause related to a minority, to work to meet those needs.
• evaluation of the inclusivity in work meetings, that is addressed from the equitable presence of gender, by conditions, to the format that is hybrid, remote or face-to-face, and that each person there has a key task.

During the stay

Over time, the company must work to give the employee a good work experiencewhere you can grow regardless of your origin or other characteristics, but only your skills matter.

In this sense, we must work to generate continuous learning and development opportunities, offer training on how to evaluate employee performanceespecially for managers, and offer work alternatives such as remote or hybrid models.

“It is about building an organizational culture that encourages coexistence and respectful and constructive exchange from diversity to broaden the vision of its employees and thus enrich their own lives, which at the end of the day translates into plural, inclusive and more human”, concluded Spinelli.