Diversity Equity and Inclusion. So, what do these terms mean.
Diversity is about differences, all the aspects that make people unique, including ethnicity, race, age, gender, personality, beliefs, experience, and sexual orientation.
Equity is the process of ensuring that processes and programs are fair and impartial to provide equal possible outcomes for everyone. Equity is ensuring fairness and impartiality in processes and procedures by systems or institutions.
Inclusion is making each person feel valued and able to express their authentic selves and the ability to belong to something bigger / greater.
If you have built an executive team that includes diversity, ensures equity and inclusion for its members there are a lot of benefits to your organization with improved productivity being one. Some statistics around diversity show the benefit to productivity.
Racially Diverse Teams Outperform Non-diverse Teams by 35%
Gender-diverse companies are 15 percent more likely to beat industry median financial returns
So, with these impressive statistics regarding the benefits of building diverse executive teams, it is discouraging to see that only 14% of organizations have diversity and inclusion training.
One of the best ways to start to build high performing diverse executive teams for your organization is to start with your executive hiring team and to set best practices in place for your executive recruiting team to ensure diverse hiring is not only a priority but a process.
Some best practices to look at are educating your executive hiring managers in diversity and inclusion, plan diverse executive role models for everyone in the company, rewrite all your executive job postings to reflect your organization’s diversity values, ensure your executive hiring panels represent the diversity that you are wanting to ensure continues as diverse panels hire diverse executive workforces, and finally set measurements in place to measure the results of your efforts and measure them against an established benchmark.