Blog

Marijuana regulators in Denver have formed an advisory group that includes industry officials to recommend licensing and policy changes that could help diversify the city’s cannabis space and provide more equitable access to the market.

The 24-person working group, which also includes city officials, trade groups, activists and others, will start by looking at new state laws allowing home delivery and social consumption licenses, according to an 

“Denver would like to explore options to ensure equitable access to any new delivery or hospitality licenses that the city may adopt, as well as any new sales and cultivation locations that will be available under the cap and lottery system,” the bulletin noted.

The notice refers to a state study, released in February, that found 79% of “key” marijuana licenses in 2018 were controlled by caucasians. In addition, women held only a third of the licenses.

The advisory group is scheduled to meet virtually four times in May and June.

We face the very real possibility of entering a depression. Workforces are displaced and confused. Millions have lost their jobs, and thousands have lost their lives. In what seemed like an instant, we went from discussions around innovation and disruption at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to spiraling down to the bottom of the pyramid, where many of us feel like we are barely able to protect the well-being of ourselves, our loved ones and our employees.

In crisis mode, all hands are on deck to triage the most urgent challenges, including retaining customers, enabling people to work from home, comparing the best options to navigate the dip and planning for the inevitable rocky recovery. Initiatives that were critical to mission, vision and values, as well as to organizational longevity, are now on the back burner. For many HR departments, diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives are sidelined until further notice.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Starting with these four steps, HR can leverage D&I as an accelerator to go from surviving to thriving — with the business outcomes to match.

1. Resist the urge to devalue D&I.

“The tendency to retreat, minimize attention, shift efforts and restrict resources out of fear and scarcity is often the norm. My hope is that leaders approach D&I the way that activist investors approach decision-making,” says Torin Ellis, a diversity strategist and public speaker. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention. Rather than viewing D&I as an option saved for optimal circumstances, creating a newer and stronger normal will require all voices to be represented and heard.

Kent Plunkett, founder and CEO of Salary.com, agrees. “We are in a time of major disruption. We are now in the difficult downward spiral of the dip,” he says. “As we face planning for recovery, we can make major gains by resetting the table.” Diversity, inclusion and belonging can no longer be siloed or devalued. Leaders who actively integrate D&I into their talent strategies will create goodwill and trust with the increasingly diverse talent pool and customer base that are critical to success. Our own in-house research shows that a simple way to start integrating D&I is through a recognition program. Receiving recognition leads to a greater sense of belonging and belief that diversity is valued.

2. It’s time for radical thinking.

Conventional thinking will not get us out of this mess. Rather than telling leaders and employees what to think, let’s upskill to create new approaches to current business challenges. There are a lot of great books that challenge traditional mindsets. Ellis suggests HR leaders use this time to cultivate their business acumen. Blue Ocean Shift, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, expands individual thinking toward achieving results. The authors introduce the ERRC (Eliminate, Reduce, Raise or Create) grid, and diversity strategist Ellis calls it “a must-read for every D&I advocate.”

3. Lay a new, solid foundation.

Diversity is not an option — it is a reality. What are you going to do about it? “It has always been clear to me that the journey of the underrepresented was different, often ignored and had not been made a priority in far too many corporate corridors,” says Ellis. He believes right now is the ideal time to reinforce how your company approaches diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

He suggests igniting leaders to lead by deconstructing demographic representation, creating inclusive models of employee personas for hiring managers, challenging the value of merit-based decisions and partnering with business leaders to redefine HR practices along the employee lifecycle. Ellis further suggests that this crisis represents an important catalyst for HR to infuse transparency and value-based decision-making into people practices.

This can be done by analyzing and sharing insights about people resources in terms of representation and redundancy, creating value at every decision point, evaluating the employer brand-value proposition starting at the point of talent acquisition and increasing the capabilities of cultural inclusion and emotional intelligence as a core cultural construct.

4. Set a new table for equity in your workplace.

This pandemic will leave its mark on how we live and work. HR leaders are already considering new workplace designs and tools that will help their leaders and individual contributors to more easily collaborate and stay connected whether they are working from home or the office.

Plunkett sees an additional opportunity for HR: to rid discriminatory behavior from current people practices and procedures, including pay inequity. “Over the next three to six months, companies will be looking for ways to cope with the economic hit,” he says, “including potential decreases to salary ranges across organizations and industries.”

Rather than conducting this exercise with an inkling toward efficiencies in spend, Plunkett suggest HR factor in closing the pay gap through new salary models. Research from Workhuman has shown even investing 1 percent of payroll into peer-to-peer rewards can have a significant impact on equity in your organization. This is not only because rewards will directly address equity by compensating those who deserve it, but also because the data gleaned from crowdsourced rewards and recognition — when triangulated against pay and performance data — gives deep insights into the current equity in your company.

Everything HR does moving forward matters more than ever. HR leaders and practitioners have a choice to make: Reinstate antiquated people practices that perpetuate a downward spiral or create a new reality where everyone can thrive.

Note: This meet-up occurred on February 25, 2020. Calendly and Joonko are adhering to shelter-in-place measures at the time of this publish date.

“The trouble with Diversity & Inclusion goals is that it’s hard to convince leadership that adding different perspectives and experiences to our business ties to the bottom line.” 

One of the participants at a Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) meetup at Calendly Headquarters was able to sum up the issue with getting budget and resources for hiring goals: the trouble is gaining leadership buy-in. 

Or, as many other participants echoed, leaders say, “We know we want to expand our D&I program, but…what do we do differently?” 

Joonko, a Birmingham startup that’s passionate about making D&I actionable, filled the Calendly all-hands space with recruiting professionals from nation- and worldwide organizations with offices in Atlanta to talk about what challenges they’re facing in their roles and how to solve for them. 

The CEO & founder of Joonko, Ilit Raz, crafted the mission of the company from her experience in the military and technology worlds. She had gotten used to being the only female in the room and found her route to success limited. 

Ilit shared with the group that this roadblock is what made her want to use her passion for product marketing to build an action-based process to create a more equitable workplace for all.

Why is D&I Important?

One important thing to note is that usually, lack of diversity and inclusion is not from malintent. Your hiring managers have open roles and they want them filled as quickly as possible. 

As one participant put it, “We keep recruiting from the same pools, so they don’t even realize how they’re impacted by affinity bias, and how it trickles throughout the organization.” 

Hiring similar thinkers with similar experiences over and over again may eventually lead to a homogenous workforce where it becomes harder to recognize the absence of other perspectives. 

So when we talk about diversity and inclusion goals, it depends on what stage your organization is in. 

For some, just increasing diverse hires is the place to start. By increasing perspectives and representation, you’ll make more money – as outlined by this McKinsey article about why diversity matters.

If you’ve already got a diverse hiring pool and staff, you may need to do some digging to find the heart of your goals. 

Your employees might be craving belonging and camaraderie. Focus on building community within your culture. 

Others may be concerned with mobility and growth opportunities. Your D&I program might need to focus on exposure and education instead of just getting more diverse hires in the door. 

Maybe you’re only diverse in some ways. Maybe you have a lot of employees from different parts of the world, but maybe they all identify as one gender or orientation. (Read our Calendly employees’ thoughts on what it’s like to be women in technology.) 

It could be that you’re diverse, but not inclusive. Assess your employees in different bands; is diversity consistent across every direction? Does your leadership team reflect the diversity of your organization? Is your diversity reflected in every meeting? 

Wherever your organization is at, the product marketing process will help you identify where your next area of focus should be.

Product Marketing for Recruiting

Ilit’s workshop is centered around the strategy of building a digital product and how that can be adapted to D&I.

The event “What if D&I was an app?” forces you to think about recruiting through the lens of a Product Manager. The differences are that your product is your D&I program, your audience is internal, and your go-to-market strategy requires the same tremendous amount of research and benchmarking as any other product build. 

All the steps you’d take in creating a new software – define the problem and personas, conduct qualitative and quantitative research, and define metrics to measure success – can be applied to finding a D&I solution.

Problem Definition

Discovery

Solution Definition

Solution Validation

How Some Professionals Are Solving for D&I

The hiring, recruiting, and HR professionals in Ilit’s workshop shared a number of fresh solutions.

“We’re in Atlanta, which is one of the most diverse cities in the country, and we don’t have a single diverse candidate for a leadership position.” 

One issue raised was around the existence of diversity within a recruiting area. If the hiring organization isn’t willing to hire remote employees or help with relocation, organizations located in places that are less diverse may not be able to meet D&I goals. 

However in diverse locations, there are still roadblocks. One participant shared that when they had organization-wide D&I goals, no one person felt like it was their duty to help reach those goals, so they weren’t accomplished.

The next year, they got their entire leadership team on board with how diverse hiring can impact their departmental goals and were clear about what the expected benefits will be. By assigning individual hiring goals to each branch of the organization, each team then felt accountable for playing their part and could see the impact.

“My management team already knows who they want to hire before they even know the job parameters or have looked at a resume. How do I remove that bias and open them up to viewing new opportunities?” 

One solution presented was to pass along resumes and portfolios without a name, location, photo, or education dates (to remove age bias). By masking the work from any potentially prejudiced identifiable features, there’s a greater possibility that diverse candidates in the pool will be level-set against familiar candidates. 

Taking a step back, one participant’s organization encourages reverse mentor pairs to help remove bias for viewing new opportunities. Someone from the ground level of the organization is matched with someone from the leadership level to discuss how D&I goals are actually being implemented to increase visibility and understanding.

The result is a leadership team that’s held accountable for what goes on at every level of the organization, and prompting from employees to broaden hiring pools. 

“We have a few diverse employees, but it takes a community to feel welcome and safe in the space. Are there ways we can build community now, while we work on finding more diverse hires to join the team?” 

One professional in the room said their organization has Slack channels that congregate around similarities. 

They established one for LatinX employees, people who enjoy cycling, women who have chosen not to have children, etc. to create smaller families, comfortability, and belonging within their organization at large. 

Another participant shared the space they’ve created for their LatinX community is called “Nosotros somos,” or “We are.” This group and all other groups are assigned a leader-as-sponsor to be their voice at the management level. 

But too much safety in affinity can be a challenge too. The other extreme outcome is isolation and cliquing. 

Another recruiting professional said they hang flags on the wall to represent each employee’s country as a reminder of each individual’s impact on the whole organization. 

Another proposed solution is what we do here at Calendly: we create employee “bands” or randomly assigned cross-functional social groups. This helps us create bonds across teams and leadership levels during community-building events. 

Resources to Help 

One participant said, “The world is changing. It’s not waiting on us.” 

There are organizations to help hiring and recruiting professionals reach their diversity and inclusion goals. 

Joonko is a service that works with your current Talent Management System to help augment and manage diverse candidates to support Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) goals. 

Check out Joonko’s website to learn how they can partner with your team. 

“Joonko is so important now because we’ve noticed that this is an emerging revolution and we’re excited to be a part of it. We’re here as a resource and as facilitators for the future of D&I strategy in your organization.” – Ilit Raz, CEO & Founder of Joonko

And we know recruiters have to focus on finding candidates and there’s little time to spend on the tedium of scheduling. 

One participant declared, “Calendly is an actual lifesaver,” so they could spend more time finding candidates to diversify their culture versus sending 10 emails to get one onsite interview scheduled.  

Sign up for your free Calendly account today. 

Diversity in the workplace is essential to create a thriving business, especially when it comes to employee engagement. Workplace diversity encourages creativity and innovation because every team member, from leadership to frontline employees and mobile workers, brings a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to the table. Those unique viewpoints have a huge effect on your business and workforce, and impact every aspect of your company.

Learn how a digital workplace can support a diverse workplace with features like inline translation. 

Actively cultivating a range of employee engagement and internal communication strategies places diversity at the core of everything you do throughout the workplace, and demonstrates sustained commitment to employee connection for all.

What Is Diversity in the Workplace?

What exactly does it mean to have a diverse workplace? Here’s a hint: just because you’ve shown the cultural orientation video from 1995 on “diversity in the workplace” doesn’t mean that your company is actively promoting diversity. 

Diversity occurs at the beautiful intersection of different people from different places with different experiences. It includes cultural diversity in the workplace, gender diversity, religious diversity, language diversity, different education levels, different viewpoints, and unique abilities. It’s all of that. It’s people who think differently, act differently, and look different working together to solve complex problems. 

Why Is Diversity Important In the Workplace?

Having a diverse workforce goes beyond an HR Seminar or workshop. When done properly, there are actual benefits of diversity in the workplace. For example, more diverse workforces have proven to be more creative, faster problem solvers, more innovative, and better at decision making.

Simply put, diversity isn’t just a topic of discussion among HR professionals. Diversity in the workplace creates a more well-rounded employee experience that gives companies a competitive advantage. 

Here are five clever ways to improve employee engagement through diversity-focused initiatives and operational processes for your workforce.

1. Educate Managers on the Benefits of Diversity in the Workplace

The relationship between managers and employees is a critical one. Most people quit their jobs specifically because of a disconnect with their managers. 

Don’t assume that managers understand the importance of workplace diversity, or that they know how to hire and manage a diverse group of employees. Empower them with the skills necessary to grow and nurture a diverse team. Scheduling cultural and other sensitivity training is a great first step.

Also, assess reporting structures and employee feedback mechanisms to ensure there is a clear, communication channel between managers and their direct reports.

When workplace diversity is celebrated, and management is empowered with the appropriate resources, the potential of your workforce becomes unlimited.

Pro tip: Promote from within so your team of managers reflects your company’s core values that embrace and celebrate diversity. 

2. Create More Inclusive Workplace Policies

As you move to become a more diverse organization, do a deep-dive of your current practices and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of your workplace. Facilitating workplace diversity may mean creating new policies or amending current ones system-wide, from recruitment to performance evaluations and promotions.

For example, when posting job openings, position descriptions should be tailored to reach broader audiences. Consider posting these position descriptions and sending recruitment specialists to a wider range of job fairs, community hiring offices, and outreach programs.

Other inclusive strategies that support diversity in the workplace include:

Hopefully, your company already is an equal opportunity employer (EEO) approved by the Federal EEOC. If not, you should meet their standards and seek approval immediately.

3. Communicate Clearly and Create Employee-Led Task Forces

Creating workplace diversity policies isn’t enough. Clear communication and follow-through is necessary to ensure initiatives are effective. That means policies should reflect the unique needs of everyone in your organization.

Employees should feel comfortable coming to their managers with any concerns, especially about their treatment in the company due to their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or other factors.

Managers should feel confident in their internal communication with employees by avoiding making any assumptions, and using inclusive language. This is a great initial way for managers to set up open and respectful internal communication channels.

Regularly ask for feedback from your workforce and create dedicated diversity task forces with team members from every department for candidate recruitment and training. This ensures transparency as well as ownership and buy-in from the whole team.

Recognizing that not everyone feels comfortable speaking up through traditional internal communication channels, these task forces can assist with ongoing efforts in strengthening workplace culture and employee engagement for everyone.

Pro tip: Give employees agency over diversity initiatives.

4. Offer Meaningful Opportunities for Employee Engagement

If your company has multiple locations, consider allowing employees to visit other locations in another city, state, or country. Poll your workforce with an employee survey to find out where they like to spend free time or volunteer, and arrange both work-based activities and external employee engagement outings.

Additionally, they are able to see how other locations deal with similar problems and situations in a completely different way. This may encourage your employees to learn to think outside the box—and bring that thinking back to their own teams.

Some companies, like Salesforce, have their employees volunteer together in their communities to give back as well as to forge deeper connections with one another. This kind of exposure is a great way to let employees experience and participate in other environments and creates opportunities for your workforce to understand each other better.

5. Create Mentorship Programs

Hiring a diverse workforce is important, but mentorship programs are a key component of workplace diversity programs to ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to advance.

Employees with high potential should be offered mentors regardless of their age, race, sex, or other factors. If a company-sponsored mentorship program isn’t feasible for your company, there are other ways of providing similar opportunities, including:

While these are all great ways to promote workplace diversity, it’s always important to set a good example from the top down. When the C-suite is directly involved in workplace diversity programs or initiatives to improve inclusion, employees take notice.

CEOs in particular can help their company attract the best—and most diverse—talent by being involved in diversity promotion. Prioritizing diversity in the workplace through intentional, focused, employee engagement programs supports recruiting efforts. It improves overall satisfaction, performance, retention, communicates your company’s core values, and bolsters your brand identity and reputation.

6. [BONUS] Offer Workplace Flexibility

OK, I know we promised you five ways to promote workplace diversity, but we’re throwing this one in as a bonus.

Workplace flexibility includes employees having more agency over when and where they work. Offering this to your team can help make your workplace more inviting and accommodating to working moms, commuters, or folks who may need to work remotely part time.  

Actively and intentionally investing in diversity in the workplace will create a happier, more engaged workforce that will benefit a company on every level.

Download our 15 Best Practices for Employee Engagement eBook and improve internal communications throughout your organization.