5 steps to make sure your company is diverse and inclusive

5 steps to make sure your company is diverse and inclusiveDiversity and inclusivity are major buzz words these days, but for good reason. Culturally, it means embracing differences and understanding that life experience is shared, but varied. Professionally, a diverse employee base can help your organization stay agile and productive, rather than stagnate with the saatkorn old ideas and viewpoints.Lets look at five steps you can take to enrich your diversity hiring initiatives.1. Reconsider what diversity and inclusivity mean to your organization.We all know the textbook definition of diversity pretty well by nowpeople from a broad range of cultural, gender, or religious backgrounds. But if youre looking to truly up your diversity factor, its time to broaden that definition and think about what it means for your company. Consider other types of diversity different educational backgrounds, different experience levels, different physical abilities, etc. Hiring for diversity and inclusi vity may not mean much in the long run if you end up hiring people who technically tick the diversity box because they are in particular racial or ethnic groups, but are in the same educational or experience mold as everyone else in the company. Think about how you can really diversify the perspectives and skill sets in your employee pool.2. Use a committee approach.How do you get more diverse voices in your organization? Start by allowing more diverse voices to help make the decisions. Opening up the process to a committee, instead of putting it all on one person or department, can really help enhance your diversity strategy. If you include team members from various departments or parts of the company, youre also adding a level of perspective diversity as well. Your committee may also bring fresh ideas about where to look for different kinds of talent, helping you move outside the standard job ad.3. Commit to the process.Its one thing to say, yeah, its our strategy to hire for dive rsity, but its another to carve out the time and resources to do that, given that both are at such a premium. If youre prioritizing diverse and inclusive hiring, you need to commit extra time to seek out alternative hiring and marketing methods to recruit that diverse talent. This may mean stepping outside your comfort zone to place ads or do outreach to non-mainstream job boards or resources.