All the financial equity reports look great for your business, but what about human equity reports? How do those look? A recent report found that about 70% of workers in high tech and other businesses hold leadership responsible for workplace diversity. Human equity reports that look at inclusive leadership stats find that many companies are failing at inclusive leadership. What do your equity reports look like?

Inclusive Leadership By Design

Creating a workplace where there is inclusive leadership requires intentionality when creating, maintaining and shifting organizational culture. Inclusion by design, a philosophy that builds inclusion into the design process of new systems, can support companies to create and sustain real change. In other words, the corporate culture has to be designed to account for all different people. There are several steps any business, tech or otherwise, can take to improve inclusivity in the workplace.

Changes Start with Learning

CEOs and other company leaders are the ultimate culture carriers in any organization; team members will take their cues from the top. Leaders have a responsibility to model inclusivity by challenging their own biases, broadening their perspectives and educating themselves about life experiences that are not similar to their own. The willingness of current leaders to learn and address biases within the corporate culture is imperative.

Identify and Correct

If everyone on your leadership team looks the same, you likely have a diversity problem. Compare your leadership team to the rest of your organization. Does it proportionately reflect senior management? Middle management? Or entry-level hires? If not, do some digging to understand why. Identifying barriers to entry into your organization for some groups will help you diversify your workforce, but equally important is recognizing that there may be barriers to development and promotion for team members already in your organization. Understanding patterns using demographic data may help you identify larger systemic barriers for some underrepresented groups and ultimately create a plan to remove them.

Do Not Ignore It

If you notice inequity or a system that allows bias to creep in easily, do not sweep it under the carpet. Improving diversity in leadership takes an honest assessment of the workplace. Any leader that wants to truly create a culture of diversity needs to learn how to recognize inequity and mitigate bias.

Change takes time, but if you’re intentional about diversifying your leadership team, progress can happen. Diversifying your leadership is good for your business, your team members and the future.