Navigating Cross-Cultural Diversity: Promoting Inclusivity and Understanding

Navigating Cross-Cultural Diversity: Promoting Inclusivity and Understanding

Nurturing inclusivity and diversity in the workplace is pertinent as office culture is often superseded by personal differences. These can be overt or covert and lead to incompatibility, unproductivity and worse, lawsuits. It falls under the purview of the HR team to give workplace inclusivity training and provide guidelines to respect diversity and cultures. The management and team leaders carry the responsibility of ensuring that inclusivity is practised across the board in the company. As per a recent Deloitte survey, while choosing an employer, 80% of the employees consider inclusivity as an essential factor.

The first step towards creating an inclusive workplace is to create a diverse company culture.

Actionable measures to promote inclusivity in the workspace

Start at the top

The people holding leadership positions in the company must be trained and made aware of conscious and unconscious biases. This can be done through diversity workshops with the team, cultural training across teams, and educating them about ensuring all including all team members.

Analyse the workplace culture

An unbiased analysis of the work environment will help in understanding how culturally diverse the workplace is. For instance, do people’s sexual orientation affect their inclusion in projects or casual team interactions? Are there covert or unconscious comments about gender, race, ethnicity, or religion?

Create an employee feedback system

These can be anonymous to protect the employee's identity and motivate them to voice their issues. Do not neglect or put off discussions till they escalate and address them through closed-room meetings or open discussions on the floor.

Align workplace policies to accommodate diversity

From recruitment to performance management, evaluate the existing policies and align them to ensure workplace diversity. Some steps for this will be

• 1. Participation in outreach programmes or job fairs to reach out to diverse communities to hire diverse talent
• 2. Ensure pay parity across gender, race, and sexual orientation, focusing entirely on merit
• 3. Create a company calendar to accommodate holidays on different religious festivals and other significant dates

Goals and progress measurement

Make inclusive actions, respect for diversity, and understanding of cultural differences integral aspects of progress measurement. Set inclusion goals and measures to create a safe work environment for everyone.

Inclusivity is a continuous process

Diversity is not a passing phase or a fad, it is a continuous process and with time it will grow, it will change, and turn into new dimensions. In a connected world where more businesses are operating on a global scale, diversity training is important for productive collaborations. If the company creates an ongoing mechanism to ensure its workplace culture is open and prepared to address diversity, then it can be prepared to address the evolving team dynamics in the long run.

Actionable tips to create a comfortable workspace

Leadership that understands inclusivity

Hire managers and leaders who care about creating a safe working space for everyone and building a welcoming company culture. Different cultures, experiences, and ideas strengthen the community and help with business growth.

A safe space for employees to express themselves

Employees must be provided with training that will help them to be receptive to others ideas and patient with different ways of expressing themselves. Boundaries must be respected and irrespective of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or different abilities, people's preferences and backgrounds must be validated. No employee must fear victimisation or suffer the consequences of personal biases.

Make diversity a part of the discussion

Invite discussions on diversity to make everyone feel welcome, rather than avoid it as a taboo topic that can lead to insensitive comments. Acceptance of differences and diversity is a process and won’t happen overnight. Create networking opportunities and invite a range of people to share their experiences by hosting guest talking engagements. Diversity conversations must be ongoing to foster inclusivity in the work culture.

People's faiths and beliefs must be respected

Measures such as flexible mandatory holidays or regular cultural day celebrations are some ways to create awareness of different cultures that coexist and the people from the workplace for whom they are important. Holidays can be given to people from different regions and for those who it isn’t relevant to, local holidays can be made optional. Cultural days can be held for members of different communities and activities can be suggested for interactive sessions that will encourage others to participate.

A modern, inclusive, and culturally diverse workplace can expand into new markets and work with a global workforce easily. Hence, it is important to promote diversity and inclusivity for employee well-being, retention, and a better work environment.