Are we beginning to see Diversity and Inclusion fatigue?

Diversity and Inclusion Fatigue

Across the globe, diversity and inclusion is now spoken about in board rooms and strategies are being revised an implemented. This is driven from an increasing body of research identifying the financial and social benefits to increasing the diversity in organisations.

However, the practical changes needed to promote a companies D&I have only been implemented in recent years. What this has resulted in is years of D&I talk with no practical application. Millions have been lost by companies to promote their diversity strategy through their organisations without any results.

This was followed by a couple of years of marked improvement in companies D&I statistics. There were double figure rises in reduction of pay gap, BAME and women in executive boards & take up of publication of diversity figures.

Gender Pay Gap

However, recent results coming from the Australian market is worrying, in the year April 2018 to March 2019, there was a reduction of only 0.5% in the gender pay gap.

The concern is that we are now facing a D&I fatigue, the years of speaking about D&I and not implementing practical policies has resulted in diversity being a box to be ticked by staff rather than something that is part of a company culture.

People working in D&I and their partners now need to take practical steps in order to get back on track. We need to be showing what are the benefits to leadership of organisations but also to the staff. We have been focused on trying to make changes at the top (and rightly so) but we need to devise a strategy to communicate the benefits to people lower down in the organisations.

D&I groups & networks, rather than track attendees and responses to events to determine success, should define success by new engagement and bring people who traditionally would not participate. We should change the narrative and should be asking people why they don’t participate. This is the group of people we need to engage with and will be the key to ensuring that the D&I agenda will be implemented throughout organisations.  

Promoting Diversity & Inclusion

At Ohcul jobs, we promote diversity within the workplace through removing the opportunity for people’s unconscious bias to reflect in the recruitment process.

Employee diversity provides a number of benefits to any organisation (large and small). Ethnically diverse companies perform 35% better than their industry median and gender diverse companies are 15% more likely to haver returns above the industry median. With the national customer base becoming more diverse, it is important that a company is representative to fully understand its clients’ needs and, according to the latest research, 67% of employees cite a diverse workforce is a key factor when looking at a role.

At Ohcul, we remove the opportunity for hidden bias from a CV review stage. Our unique tool removes identifying data from a clients CV allowing a recruiter to progress the best candidates.

If you would like some more information you can contact us on info@ohcul.com or visit the web site www.ohcul.com