As we round out Black History Month, it seems fitting to hit on inclusivity. As a white woman, I can not, and will not pretend to act like I can even begin to understand the struggle associated with being a person of color. But, as a woman and what I would like to consider a highly empathetic person, I do understand what it’s like to feel like your voice or opinion isn’t a welcomed one. 

I spent most of my career in environments that were, and still are very male-dominated. As I grew in my career, I became less tolerant of some of the “practices” in the office and would start speaking up. While some environments may respond kindly to this, most don’t. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of leaders that are resistant to adopting more inclusive strategies into their operations. Even though their HR department is probably crying in the corner because they can’t attract and retain good talent because of it. 

The world has changed, but it still has a long way to go. Leaders can no longer continue to move their companies forward and pretend that the environment around them is unchanged. Read the room, folks! The following are some very basic changes you can make organizationally that will show your people that you’re prioritizing inclusion. 

Schedule Regular Meetings with Your Teams

As the leader and the person developing the operational structure for the organization, one of the most basic things you can do is to make sure that managers and members of leadership have regular meetings set up with their teams. Writing that sounds silly, but I can tell you that in every environment I’ve worked in (prior to the one where I was making the rules) I would have bosses that would tell me they had an “open-door policy” only to schedule time with me that would be rescheduled enough times that I would either do what I wanted on my own or just drop the idea altogether. 

Not having regular meetings can create significant issues for your people and your operations. The first one is displayed above. You don’t hire stupid people, you’ve made the hires you have for a reason and those people have ideas and perspectives that could fundamentally change the business. But if you don’t give them the opportunity to share those ideas, they could either be lost or taken on independently instead of with the organization backing the efforts. The second reason these meetings are important is that it creates a sense of connection and lets your team know that you care about them. These meetings give your team the chance to share accomplishments, struggles, and opportunities that may otherwise never come up. It gives an equal opportunity to every voice in the organization to share. At the end of the day, scheduling regular meetings with your team (that you don’t move) demonstrates that you prioritize them the same way you would a customer or client.  

Create an Inclusion Council 

Another way to make inclusion a priority in your organization is to create a committee or council focused on inclusive efforts for the organization. It’s important in the development of this group that you have members from all levels of the organization involved. A council with uninvolved leadership will fall flat. By not being involved in the council you’ve already demonstrated your lack of conviction to inclusion. 

In the development of this group, it’s also important that it becomes a group based on voluntary involvement. What I mean by this, is, don’t start an inclusion council and then look around the room and nominate members from your team that are part of a marginalized group to participate. 

This group can be tasked with a number of things, but it’s important that any suggestions for policy or process changes that come from the group are discussed with the groups that would be affected before any actual changes are made. This group may also be tasked with putting together some of the company’s team activities that encourage collaboration, which is discussed further in the next section. 

Creating Opportunities for Conversations

Depending on the size of your organization you may have numerous teams that don’t ever collaborate. Even on small teams, there can be diversity amongst team members where they don’t often actively seek conversations with one another. For remote companies, this is an even more significant issue as there aren’t opportunities to run into each other walking to the bathroom, or in the break room. 

In all of these instances, it’s important on an organizational level that you are investing in and creating opportunities for teams from diverse backgrounds to connect. These don’t have to be anything that would create a significant investment but could be as simple as doing company-wide lunches, happy hours, or volunteer activities. If you’re in a large company you could do monthly lunches with members of the leadership team and 10-20 team members from a variety of departments within the organization. Create conversation starters for these types of meetings to encourage authentic connection, and you will see an entirely new level of connectedness and cohesion through your organization that only leads to loyalty and job satisfaction. 

I feel very safe in saying that there is no negative impact to adopting inclusive strategies into your organization. While I’m not an HR professional, I am a person that fundamentally respects and appreciates people. And I know that when leaders respect and appreciate their people it only has positive outcomes for the organization. If your teams are struggling to be heard, I’d love to chat about how to establish respect and accountability throughout the organization. Otherwise, if you’re not quite ready to take that leap yet, you can always follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, or sign up for my newsletter in the footer to stay connected.