Diversity should be inclusive
What if all your colleagues were exactly like you? No one would disagree with you, all conversations would become predictable and you would learn nothing new.
That sounds like one hell of a boring office.
Thank goodness for diversity. Interacting with different kinds of people with different perspectives accelerates our learning and broadens our mind. Yet we tend to hire people like ourselves. In HR, it is called Similarity bias. It is human tendency to gravitate towards people who are like ourselves, be it gender, language, culture, ethnicity, social & economic background, political beliefs, or a combination of many more.
As HR professionals, we are mindful of people’s tendencies towards groupism and are also aware of the benefits of employing a diverse workforce. There are too many proven benefits for it to be tagged as yet another HR gimmick. Diversity hiring has become a hot topic of discussion everywhere. Yet, to my dismay, almost everyone equates diversity with achieving a more balanced gender ratio. I agree that despite the many feminist movements, women are still under represented at the workplace. It is important that we make our workplaces inclusive enough for women to be able to work without having to struggle with balancing personal and professional life. However, it is just as important for us to open our eyes to other equally important diversity and inclusion candidates. Ethnicity, religion, economic status, disability and the LGBTQ community have largely been ignored in the diversity hiring agenda of most companies.
Eureka Forbes has been a path breaker in employing disabled people in their call center, EuroAble. Theirs is an inspiring story on how such an initiative can change the lives of the employees and benefit the company.
I have been working on my company’s diversity integration program for the past couple of years, I find two main reasons why organisations do not actively increase their scope of diversity hiring despite growing evidence of its positive impact on the company and community.
- It requires a lot of effort to integrate these candidates into the workforce. Hiring a physically challenged person requires a carefully thought through infrastructure. Hiring any of the other category candidates requires a huge shift in mindset and attitudes that take a long time to work on.
- If it is difficult to find a large pool of talented and qualified women to shortlist candidates from, imagine how much more difficult it is to find a sizable number of highly qualified candidates from marginalized communities to shortlist from. I have known talent acquisition managers go through sleepless nights trying to find more women to hit their diversity hiring targets. How does one go about achieving targets on diversity hiring that has a broader scope?
In a business environment where cost cutting is the predominant strategy, is it possible or even practical to set aside time, effort and money to support a diversity hire? Each diverse hire requires a different kind of support, can we afford professional assistance for each of them?
Before you jump onto the diversity hire bandwagon, think if your Organization has the heart and the finances to be able to walk the talk. Diversity hiring is not a short term, once a year project. It is a culture building initiative. And we all know that building and maintaining the right kind of culture is a journey down a long, winding road.