What steps can you take to make your team more inclusive?

I agree with the first step for inclusion is assessing the organizational culture. Most people think the first thing you do is train your staff. No matter how much you train people, transformation does not happen without change the organizational culture, and changing the culture cannot happen without talking an assessment of the culture. The assessment allows you to identify equity gaps in the culture. Once the gaps are identified then you train and change policy.

Conducting a full assessment is definitely a good starting point/the best approach. Having that information is crucial to establish a clear diversity and inclusion strategy while encouraging open dialogues about these very same topics and actively seeking input from diverse team members. Work towards creating a safe space for everyone within your team to share their thoughts and experiences, ensuring that diverse voices are heard, valued, highlighted, and celebrated.

While there are many strategies to create an inclusive environment organizationally, managers can start this immediately in two easy steps: - Prepare for your meetings! Set an agenda and allow every person on your team to contribute to the conversation. For those who prefer not to be in the spotlight, ask for their thoughts and input prior to the meeting and share those ideas with the team while giving them credit. - Add a question of inclusivity to your performance evaluation check-ins with team members. Ask them directly for feedback and areas to improve. Do they feel like the belong on the team? Do they feel they belong in the organization?

I've found it most efficient to look at your currently available data on hiring/promo/leadership sorted by race (rather than bogging folks down in a new survey). Then see which areas need further pushing - with listening sessions or a super-targeted survey.

I think we must go beyond self-assessments within organizations and strongly encourage bringing in voices from outside to help with the assessment process. The reason for this is that it can be difficult to truly evaluate your own systems, especially for organizations that have long histories and are steeped in tradition. We do not know what we do not know and just because people currently within an organization are included doesn't necessarily mean that the organization is inclusive.

It's especially important to provide separate educational opportunities for those who are *beginning* on an inclusion journey and for those who are marginalized and/or have been pushing for changes. Teaching "bias workshops" to BOTH beginners and advanced practitioners - in the same room - means you will leave one (or likely more groups) deeply unserved. Beginners need solid proof that bias exists, plus strong direction on the business case for change. Individuals who have directly faced marginalization, along with those actively involved in inclusion efforts, require more advanced strategies for personal resilience and pushing transformation initiatives in male/white-led and majority workplaces.

I ensure that the team is educated about the importance of diversity and inclusion. This may involve training sessions, workshops, or even bringing in external speakers to share insights. The goal is to raise awareness about unconscious biases and promote understanding.

From my experience, training should not be an one off endeavor. It actually should connect back to organizational assessment. In fact, the assessment will lead you to what areas you need to focus your training. Also, when I provide training, I am looking at shifting mindsets, relationships, language and behaviors.

It's critically important to view this inclusion education as an ongoing process. The consistency needed to build psychological safety in a team or organization is difficult to achieve; even more so when the members of the team and organization are ever-changing. Revisiting the concepts - especially through different mediums as recommended - helps to reinforce an organization's commitment to having inclusion be an integral part of their culture.

DEI training is often top down and didactic, with a focus on awareness raising and educating staff on how to be more inclusive. Participatory approaches assume learning is not unidirectional, and provide space and opportunity for staff to learn from each other and leadership to learn from staff. This goes beyond raising awareness, and instead focuses on listening to staff at all levels, prioritizing the voices of marginalized groups without tokenizing them, taking a collaborative approach to defining institutional DEI goals, and establishing pathways to success for staff who are currently experiencing barriers. True inclusion requires leadership to trust their staff to take an active rather than passive role in improving company culture.

I encourage team members to share their perspectives, ideas, and experiences. This includes creating a safe space for individuals to express themselves without fear of judgment. Diverse perspectives lead to more innovative solutions.

Wow! You got this right!!!! Creating a safe and secure environment is the precursor to GREAT things (building a high trust, solution oriented culture for starters). We can too often assume that, as adults, we: 1) Know how to communicate in the work place 2) Will speak up and share what we need for success 3) That our team members trust us and each other 4) That our leaders are positive and encouraging with their teams It's not always so! Let's seize the opportunity to create workplaces where we can talk to each other - about anything. Lets commit to positivity, inclusivity, and being real with each other. Like any worthy endeavor, it takes work (and time), but it pays off big!

I think a key facet of this point is genuinely listening. The more comfortable your team is with their ability to share, the more likely you are to hear really meaningful ideas and thoughts, but none of that matters if those ideas fall on deaf ears! A second-order effect of good listening by the leader is that your team will both appreciate and emulate that themselves.

This is particularly important for your staff actually feeling inclusion. Words without action are meaningless. Look for opportunities to call upon the particular skills of each team member. Show you value their input and participation in team projects and assignments.

Communication is critical to building strong, effective, and inclusive team. When we say communication in teams, often times communication in teams is subconsciously perceived as a one way communication between the manager and the reports. Many organizations are still lacking the infrastructure that allows communication and feedback to flow in a dynamic fashion. i.e. performance reviews and feedback that goes from reports to manager, manager to reports, and colleague to colleague in a lateral fashion. Having a 360 perspective of our communication and our performance could make us much more effective in conducting our day to day jobs.

I have to push back on this step because inclusion should be a reward in and of itself. Having a work environment that values all employees based on their ability to successfully accomplish the goals of their position and strengthen an organization's ability to achieve it's mission is the reward. When we start rewarding and incentivizing being inclusive, we are not normalizing it in my opinion. Inclusion should be the base expectation.

Celebrating and acknowledging staff when they overachieve is very important to boost staff moral. For managers to be able to celebrate achievements, they must first have the ability to recognize when their staff exceed expectations. And to do that, we must have measurable performance metrics for staff. What I am trying to say is; we must have clear performance measures for staff in order for them to know what is expected of them and how to exceed expectations. Many organizations fail to create those performance measures for staff, which dilutes the definition of achievement itself. Which results in having employees feeling invisible and underappreciated or having employees who expect a raise and a celebration for merely doing their jobs.

The best way to "recognize and rewards" those leading inclusion initiatives is with pay for their added work and promotions (i.e. including this work in performance reviews).

I would add that organizations can go beyond the reward system. A specific objective in the evaluation system could be dedicated to inclusion in some cases. Staff members could be evaluated against this objective. This will establish a comprehensive mechanism based on both incentives and obligations.

If you are on the long path of culture change celebrating the small wins helps. I love flipping the idea of catching people doing something wrong into catching each other doing the hard thing. The inclusive thing. The thoughtful thing. You can create visual metaphors for this like adding leaves to a tree or blocks to build a foundation. It is important to reward rest and saying no to another project too. In our busy culture, especially in purpose driven work, we often expect and even celebrate unhealthy work habits of overwork leading to burnout. Inclusion is all about caring for and about each other. Celebrate that care.

This is the continuous improvement that we can all implement. Relentless incrementalism. We start with this change and thanks to our baseline assessment we can measure our growth. Then we can make that change and do the work, and measure our growth. Also, it is never that clean and straightforward. We will encounter unintended impacts, we will learn something new that we have to attend to immediately. This is where we need to give ourselves and one another grace. Grace to mess up. Understanding that each person's best will look different every day depending on multiple competing variables and factors because we are imperfect beings. humans like to think we are thinking beings who feel, when in fact we are feeling beings who think. Usually.

This may sound harsh, but just as it's important to recognize and reward the inclusive behavior we want to see, leaders who are serious about a commitment to inclusion should also reflect on what they would do to address exclusive behavior. Inclusion doesn't mean everything is acceptable, it means we permit behavior that promotes inclusion and we stop behavior that doesn't. This doesn't necessarily have to escalate to anything punitive right away, but it's important to have a plan and the emotional fortitude to address harmful and exclusive behavior. Where can someone go to share feedback about their own manager? What strategies do you have for repairing harm? What does accountability and growth look like? These are just as important.

It all depends on the values of the non-profit organization. Some organizations don't embrace diversity by default such as religious and ideological ones. If the non-profit has a secular, impartial and human rights oriented values, then one of the best ways to enhance diversity in its workplace is to make sure that the organizational values are well understood and adopted at all levels. Training, awareness raising, one-on-one discussions and refreshers are needed. In the UN we always make sure that the code of conduct sessions are organized and training on some important topics are mandatory. There is still a lot to be done!

Mentorship and Support Recognising the potential within each individual is crucial for fostering an inclusive environment. By organising events, seminars, or sessions where they can meet and interact with industry leaders, peers, and professionals from diverse sectors, you not only enhance their professional horizon but also infuse fresh perspectives into the organisational ecosystem. By pairing experienced professionals with emerging talents from diverse backgrounds, we can create pathways for knowledge transfer and personal growth. Such initiatives go beyond mere training; they empower individuals with advanced techniques and industry insights, propelling them toward leadership roles and innovative contributions.

Just as fiction movies affect our perception of reality and what futures are plausible, teams can collectively create imaginaries of pluriversal futures, where inclusion is the norm. Activating our team's imagination toward the future will validate the multiple ways of existing and experiencing the world. Pluriversality acknowledges that there are diverse knowledge systems, cultural perspectives, and ways of being that exist alongside and independent of dominant norms. When teams consider pluriversal futures, they elevate voices and knowledge systems that have historically been excluded. This practice challenges the idea that there is one universal way of knowledge or being and instead promotes the coexistence of diverse perspectives.

In my expertise, it’s about learning to lean in more, in other words, ask thought provoking questions. Don’t just take the first candidate that shows up for the interview. Define a process, stick to it, and evaluate regularly for any needed changes.