8 Best Practices for Changing your Culture
1.Develop a sense of belonging for differences and everyone
Individuals cannot be a stranger to the organization. To capitalize on their unique and creative capabilities, the individual must have a sense of belonging. How much creativity and problem solving is lost due to fear of interacting? How many people have you lost due to not feeling like they belong? Having a connection leads to better engagement and hence better solutions.
2.Empathetic leadership is key
Diversity and inclusion are often treated as a single initiative owned exclusively by HR. But for real change to happen, every individual leader needs to buy into the value of belonging — both intellectually and emotionally. D&I initiatives will fail without C-suite ownership.
3.A top-down approach isn’t enough
Top-down approaches drive compliance, not commitment. From senior leaders to frontline employees, every individual must see and understand their role in company culture. This means identifying differences in employee experience and values across the organization so that change can be made relevant for each person and knowing that lasting change must activate different parts of the system — top down, bottom up, and middle out — in different ways.
4.Quotas don’t automate inclusion
Hiring goals may boost diversity numbers, but this won’t automatically create an inclusive culture. Too often, leaders focus diversity and inclusion efforts disproportionately on the employee pipeline, but the employee experience continues far beyond an offer letter. To retain and nurture top talent, it’s critical to take an honest look at the end-to-end employee experience, with an eye toward creating conditions that promote inclusion on a daily basis and designing ways to measure the impact.
5.Inclusion is ongoing — not one-off training
It isn’t enough to teach employees what it means to be inclusive. Like any form of behavior change, inclusion requires individuals to identify key moments in which to build new habits or “microbehaviors” (daily actions that can be practiced and measured). And when these habits are put into action in an environment that supports honest conversations and healthy tension, real change becomes possible
6.Maximize joy and connection, minimize fear
People are wired to react with fear and distrust when their beliefs are challenged. While fear can be a powerful motivator, it also encourages people to narrow their perspective — the opposite desired effect for creating a more inclusive workplace. Finding ways to frame challenges through a lens of possibility — and elevating the power of shared experiences and storytelling to do so — creates greater potential for positive change.
7.Forget ‘fit’ and focus on helping individuals thrive
The norms, power structures, and inequities in society can easily become embedded in an organization — optimizing to hire, train, and reward people who “fit.” Creating a culture where every individual can contribute their full potential requires investigating the systems and processes in your organization to uncover sore spots and blind spots, and then finding ways to reimagine them.
8.Consider your brand
In the journey toward building a more inclusive organization, it’s important to consider the relationship between what’s happening inside and outside your company. What is your brand saying about who you are as a culture? In what ways is your employee base not congruent with your customer base? What experiences are being left out or misunderstood?
F. Luis Buentello is the President and Owner of Beacon Associates, LLC and is an expert Global HR Executive with 20+ years of world wide experience working with large and mid-tier organizations. Additionally, Luis is an Adjunct Professor at Villanova University’s Graduate Program in Human Resources Development and University of Maryland.