leadership matters
The Next Steps
in the Diversity
Dialogue By Karen Stone, CHRE
I am very grateful (as a proud aunt, HR practitioner and active
member of my community) that conversations and actions fo-cused
on diversity in the workplace are realized as important
contributions to business strategy success.
Today, most of us would be hard-pressed to find a workplace
that does not have diversity on its radar and as part of an HR
strategy thinking/work for their organization. In fact, the very
definition of diversity has evolved and expanded, to include more
than gender, race or ethnicity. Diverse workplaces are composed
of “employees with varying characteristics including, but not lim-ited
to, religious and political beliefs, gender, ethnicity, education,
socioeconomic background, sexual orientation and geographic
location,” according to Miranda Brookins, writing on HR and
workplace diversity.
The conversation around diversity has truly evolved over the
past decade, and we’ve seen many organizations put significant
effort into adopting diversity as a further way to create strong,
healthy, creative and productive teams. Even organizations that
may not currently score highly on diversity are learning about the
importance of this shift – some high-profile companies like GE
are even introducing ambitious targets around diversity recruit-ment
practices.
Although we have made some great progress, there is still much
opportunity to do more. There are still many organizations that
TRUE DIVERSITY IS NOT MEASURED IN
NUMBERS; IT IS ALSO ABOUT INCLUSION.
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