How to Increase Your Company's Bottom Line Through Diversity & Inclusion

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Previously published on permission.

Here are 6 tips for how you can immediately increase your company’s bottom line through diversity.

Lean In: Lean into the idea of diversity as not only good for your community but good for your business. Create strategies, rewards, and incentivize your team to hire, train, and promote African American professionals.
Commit to Mirror your Community and Measure Your Progress: Find the demographics of the communities you serve and are based in. Your organization demographics should attempt to mirror or do better than your community. Measure, analyze, and report on this every quarter.
Poll Your People: Do a quick pulse survey and ask for your existing employees to share their ideas on how to improve diversity inside of your organization. Provide a place to be safe and to be heard. Listen carefully to those voices you’ve never heard speak up before.
Create an Advisory Board: Create a diverse advisory board to lead your diversity initiatives. Make sure this board reports into someone who is impartial and who sponsors diversity, and is not just ‘checking the box.’ Identifying top ideas allows the advisory board to be an integral part of the implementation.
Create Fair Hiring Practices (for real): Don’t settle for check the box activities. Allocate volunteer time and financial sources to your local NAACP or BLM Chapter and send them every single one of your job openings. Ensure referrals from these organizations get a chance to be interviewed. Do active outreach to your black professionals for additional training, mentorship, and promotional opportunities. Ensure all interviewers understand that cultural fit is not the color of someone’s skin. When candidates are equally weighted and all things are considered fair and equal in experience and qualifications, we should see diversity as an additional qualification. Strive for inclusion, not assimilation.
Share the Success: Share stories of promotion and achievement of marginalized employees. Give them a platform to share their success with their peers and the leadership team.