How Policies can Help Improve Diversity Efforts

Is your organization promoting diversity and inclusion through its policies? Your organizations needs to be kept up to date with diversity and inclusion best practices and be proactive in providing both general equality and diversity training and implementing effective policies.

Diversity, inclusion, and equality remains a major concern for organizations all over the world. Recently the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved a new rule for Nasdaq, mandating that any organization trading on Nasdaq has to have two directors at the very least that provide diversity to the organization (one woman, one minority) on the board or will have to provide an explanation on why they don’t.

As a result, it is essential for your organization to ensure that:

• The Code of Conduct is the highest policy in the organization. Organization needs to ensure their code of conduct has the proper language to address diversity.
• Policies are current and relevant to manage diversity and discrimination within the workplace and ensure that requirements are met. This helps your organizations filter through policies and create more detailed policies that support the code of conduct, such as the diversity policy itself which can also reference harassment and discrimination policies.
• Employees are trained on diversity, equality, and anti-discrimination policies
• Your organization addresses how policies are approved and how they are written. Particularly in context of personal pronouns. All policies should be reviewed across the org to make sure they are written in a way that supports diversity. Your organization needs to develop a policy on writing policies and the style guides for policies need to reflect how to write policies for diversity requirements.
• Your organization has overall policy awareness, training, and enforcement.

Organizations today have a vested interest in taking diversity seriously in their policy management, and in including diverse voices throughout the organizations operations and decision-making processes. The Policy Management Capability Model is an effective resource to leverage. A well-documented set of policies and training helps the organization to prevent compliance violations and reduces management time and effort.