An inclusive workplace is one where people are able to join in, speak up, and do their jobs without being held back by avoidable barriers. There are a number of practical ways to improve inclusion, from making the workplace more accessible to improving how managers communicate and make decisions.
What Is an Inclusive Workplace Culture?
Inclusion in the workplace is when everyone:
- Feels they have a voice
- Can be themselves at work
- Has influence over decision-making processes
- Has access to information and resources
- Faces no obstacles to fully participating and contributing
You will also hear the term ‘diversity’ often spoken in connection with inclusion. Diversity and inclusion, though, are different:
“Diversity is making sure that every sector in society is represented and inclusion is making sure that everybody has a voice and is included.”
Dr Valeria Lo Iacono
Diversity, though, is a key consideration in workplace inclusion, particularly because diversity makes up our individual identity.
How Do Diversity and Identity Affect Workplace Inclusion?
Before giving you tips on how to improve inclusion, let’s first look at the dimensions of diversity that can exist in a workplace.
As individuals, we are shaped by various dimensions of diversity, which form part of our identity.
These dimensions of diversity can include:
- ethnicity
- age
- education
- abilities or disabilities
- socioeconomic status
- cultural background
- sexual orientation
To make a workplace more inclusive and give everyone an equal opportunity to participate, it is worth considering the different dimensions of diversity above.
These dimensions of diversity can sometimes be connected to the barriers that prevent full inclusion in the workplace.
With disability, for example, the failure of a company to make a building accessible in all areas for those who use a wheelchair can mean that the person involved does not have access to the same facilities and opportunities at work.
Inclusion efforts must also consider intersectionality in the workplace, the idea that individuals may face overlapping forms of discrimination or disadvantage based on a combination of factors like gender, race, age, or disability.
Recognizing this helps create a truly equitable environment.
1. Provide Diversity Training for Managers and Employees
As we grow up during childhood, we develop certain preferences and ways of doing things based on the people, places, and cultures we grow up around. These influences help to shape who we are.
In the workplace, though, we must work with and sometimes manage other employees and colleagues from different backgrounds than our own.
Training in topics such as Unconscious Bias can be especially useful because we all have biases, in that we naturally tend to mix with people with whom we feel we have things in common.
Diversity training, though, can be used to help us see how our own preferences can impact our decision-making at work.
As a manager who is interviewing people for a new role, you can learn, for example, to be more conscious of the need to put your own interests and preferences aside and to make fairer, more consistent hiring decisions.
Learning how to avoid unconscious bias in hiring is something you should seek to achieve as a manager or as anyone involved in the hiring process.
2. Make Your Workplace More Accessible
Even though the need to treat those with disabilities equally in the workplace has been embedded into law in many countries (including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the UK’s Equality Act 2010), far more needs to be done on a practical level.
In the United States, employers covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act may be required to provide reasonable accommodations for qualified employees with disabilities, unless doing so would create undue hardship for the employer.
These accommodations can include changes to the workplace, equipment, schedules, communication methods, or the way work is normally carried out.
What Is a Reasonable Accommodation at Work?
A reasonable accommodation is an adjustment to the job or workplace that helps an employee with a disability perform their role or access the same employment opportunities as other employees. What is considered reasonable will depend on the circumstances.
Whether or not your company has a DEI lead or HR representative (if you are a small company, you probably will not have one), doing a disability compliance audit is recommended.
Accessibility should also include neurodiversity inclusion.
This involves accommodating employees with neurological differences such as autism, ADHD, or dyslexia, such as by offering quiet workspaces, flexible communication formats, or alternative instructions.
These small changes can make a big difference.
If you are a small business and just getting started, you can begin by creating a checklist (start by creating one in MS Word) and do regular monthly checks to make sure that you provide the basics.
If you are a small business, you could, for example, start by checking entrances, workspaces, restrooms, signage, and digital tools that might present barriers that could make access more difficult.
Have you painted the nosings (the edges of steps, i.e., the nose) in yellow paint so that people with low vision can more easily and safely see the edges of the steps?
3. Build Psychological Safety and Open Communication
Emotional Intelligence and psychological safety at work are important concepts to understand when attempting to create an inclusive workplace environment.
Psychological safety at work means that employees feel secure enough to take interpersonal risks, such as voicing a dissenting opinion or admitting a mistake, and doing so without fear of humiliation or retaliation.
It is common for a few employees to dominate team meetings and for others to feel afraid to speak up openly.
For employees who always feel excluded and not listened to, certain individuals might belittle them and fail to listen, even, for example, in a brainstorming session where all ideas should be welcomed.
The employees who do not feel heard often have the very best ideas and often come up with innovative ways of doing things.
Likewise, it might be that some employees just do not listen to others’ ideas, or they belittle certain people when they attempt to speak up.
I recommend providing employees (certainly managers at the very least) with ‘Emotional Intelligence’ and Psychological Safety training to give them the tools to create what feels like a safe environment for employees to speak up, share ideas, and where they can feel valued – and, importantly, included.
4. Encourage Inclusive Leadership Practices
If you manage other people at work, there are numerous ways in which you can become more inclusive as a leader.
As a manager, you can become more aware and embrace diversity by reflecting and working on the following, for example:
- Reflect on your own identity and its advantages and disadvantages
- Ask employees from diverse backgrounds about their experiences of inclusion: good and bad
- Elicit feedback about your leadership
- Find out about other cultures
- Practice active listening
Active listening skills (see the free listening skills activity) are an especially useful skill to try and develop, particularly so if you manage other people.
How often do we fail to listen to others because we are too busy thinking of the next thing we want to say?
Managers can also encourage workplace allyship, where employees actively support colleagues who may experience exclusion or bias.
5. Establish Clear Inclusion and Diversity Policies
One of the very best ways to create a workplace culture where inclusion is taken seriously is to have inclusive practices laid out in your company’s guidelines and policies.
If you manage such policies, then write out in clear language exactly what you aim to achieve as a company in terms of an inclusive workplace culture.
Create clear goals as a company and work to instill these inclusion guidelines into the everyday practice in your company.
This leads us nicely to point six below.
6. Include Inclusion Training in New-Hire Onboarding
The time to instill the company culture and inclusion policies into employees, if you can, is when they join the company.
Onboarding is a great time to make clear the standards you expect from new employees in terms of being part of an inclusive workplace culture.
Likewise, it can be a great time to make these same employees aware of the ways in which they can reach out to HR for support if the employee needs help in being fully included at work.
An onboarding questionnaire can be used, for example, to understand any needs that the employee has, which can aid the inclusion process.
7. Train Managers on Generational Diversity
One area within inclusion that is becoming increasingly important is that of Generational Diversity.
Many of us are working now into our 70s, and this is creating a bigger generational divide in many workplaces.
It is not unusual anymore to experience five different generations within the same team.
This mix of generations can sometimes work extremely well.
A great example is when younger employees guide much older employees in how to use and operate certain technologies.
Likewise, older employees with their work and life experience can often be fantastic mentors for much younger employees.
The generational divide, though, can also sometimes be an issue because of very different ways of viewing the workplace and of doing things.
How Can You Measure Workplace Inclusion?
Looking at how employees actually experience the workplace is one of the best ways to measure inclusion. Rather than relying only on policies or training records, find out whether employees feel included, listened to, and able to speak up.
You can also look at:
- Employee inclusion surveys to find out whether staff feel respected, valued, and treated fairly.
- Psychological-safety feedback to check whether employees feel comfortable sharing ideas, raising concerns, or admitting mistakes.
- Participation levels in meetings, projects, training, and workplace initiatives.
- Retention and promotion patterns to see whether some groups are leaving more often or progressing less frequently than others.
- Whether employees feel able to speak up without worrying that they will be ignored, embarrassed, or treated differently.
It is worth reviewing these measures regularly, as inclusion can change over time as teams, managers, and working practices change.
Bonus Tip: Implement Inclusive Recruitment Practices
Inclusive workplace cultures begin at the hiring stage.
Using inclusive recruitment practices, such as blind resume reviews, diverse interview panels, and bias-aware job descriptions, can ensure you’re attracting and selecting a diverse range of talent from the outset.
✓ Explore our Unconscious Bias Training Activity to help reduce recruitment biases.
Further Resources
- If you’re looking for more tips to build an inclusive workplace, this article shares practical actions you can implement.
- Learn more about managing generational diversity.
- More DEI guides for corporate trainers.
