Naveen Jangir is the co-founder of Incluzon, a start-up that aims to democratise the entry-level workforce hiring process and eliminate systematic bias. Before incepting Incluzon, Naveen has had the experience of working with some noteworthy organizations across sectors. He started his career with L&T Realty as Senior Design Engineer – Structural in 2014 and was responsible for supervising and leading a team of skilled professionals to strategize and design the residential and commercial projects for the company. After serving them for three years, he went on to work with Kalptaru in 2017. During his various roles, he analyzed the disconnect between the college curriculum and industrial requirements. To bridge this gap, he used his experience and business administration skills to grow Incluzon. After earning his BTech and MTech degrees from IIT Bombay, he finished his Micromanagement course online from IIM Bangalore in 2017. During his college years, he volunteered for various social drives like cloth donation (Poorani Jeans), blood donation (Khoon Chala) amongst others.
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) practices incorporate more than policies, strategies, and workforce count. Hiring and fostering an inclusive human workforce for your businesses is the trend for 2022. For example, India makes up approximately 17.7 per cent of the global population, with around 1.40 multilingual people who speak more than 450 languages. Diversity means recruiting more women and employing workers from diverse cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic backgrounds, folks with different sexual orientations, physical abilities, and differently-abled candidates.
A company that claims to have recruited more women in their workforce could not have implemented diversity and inclusion practices unless they employ individuals from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic groups and folks with different sexual orientations and physical abilities.
Unbiased employers surpass their counterparts by respecting each team member’s individual needs, perspectives, and abilities. As a result, employees will be more likely to trust and contribute to inclusive and diverse workplaces. Therefore, one of the most integral elements in employee retention is inclusion.
Diversity Vs Inclusion
Diversity and inclusion are closely linked yet not interchangeable. Diversity refers to an organisations’ structure or representation. Inclusion refers to how effectively different groups of people’s ideas, presence, and opinions are appreciated and incorporated into an organisation’s ecosystem.
A heterogeneous setting with many different genders, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations and identities, but only the viewpoints of specific groups are valued or have any authority or influence, is not inclusive.
What Does Diversity & Inclusion Signify in The Workplace
A diverse and inclusive workspace is where all individuals feels equally included, accepted, and supported in all parts of the workplace, regardless of who they are, where they’re from, or what they do for the company.
The global pandemic is proving to be one of the most significant and demanding tests of company executives worldwide. Organisations must not only preserve the health of their workforce and consumers, but they should also grapple with widespread interruption to their operations, plan for recovery, and prepare to reinvent their business strategies for the next normal.
Best Practices & Benefits of Implementing Diversity & Inclusion at The Workplace
Human resource executives are at the forefront of implementing effective DEI policies in the workplace. Companies whose leadership welcomes varied talent and includes multiple perspectives are more likely to emerge stronger and faster from the crisis.
- With the economy being strained by covid-19, dwindling margins, and tightening up operations, the need to source numerous candidates and hire top talent is at an all-time high. Use of AI-powered solutions to aid DEI in the workplace. Many job seekers now prioritise workplace diversity when considering potential employers. As a result, organisations will develop a more diverse personnel mix by accessing, searching, and removing biases in the selection process using tools such as CV masking. Additionally, in 2022 AI will be used by Learning and Development teams to generate custom training experiences and offer hyper-personalised development programmes.
- It’s imperative to focus on recruiting from a diverse talent pool to manage and achieve true diversity and inclusion in the workplace. For example, consider ‘culture add’ versus ‘culture fit.’ Culture fit” pertains to how easily a candidate can conform to the company, which can result in prejudice and homogeneous culture. In contrast, “culture add” is a mindset that consciously accepts people from various cultures, communities, and demographics to foster an inclusive culture. As a result, teams become far more creative and imaginative in their ideas while building business strategies.
- It is also feasible to have diversity and performance without resorting to tokenism. However, this necessitates strategic thought and action. Identify high-potential diverse applicants, for example. Ensure that leadership is committed to training and providing mentorship, coaching, and growth for high-potential workers who perhaps lack a few required competencies or propose transferring those candidates to a more significant role.
- Organisations got compelled to transition to remote employment by 2020. However, as time has passed, numerous people have chosen a variety of approaches to the job, with several returning to the office and others permanently embracing remote working. However, most companies have adopted a “hybrid” workplace approach.
- The decriminalisation of Section 377 of LGBTQ+ rights in 2018 offered new avenues for firms to broaden their inclusion strategies. Allys of the community has shown immense support, which will only grow stronger in 2022.
Understanding & Voicing Employees’ Issues Will Help Built Effective & Diverse Workforce
Social listening is another critical component of gaining insight into if your current HR practices are all-inclusive and diverse. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, digitalisation in 2022 has reinforced organisations to listen to their employees’ grievances and understand and address their perspectives on what biases they face daily.
Due to technological and unprecedented social changes, every industry’s landscape is constantly changing more than ever due to the global pandemic. To fulfil the full promise of the era’s new technologies, boost agility and inventiveness, and face the problems of a more demanding, loud marketplace, organisations will require the human judgement, empathy, passion, and creativity of all the individuals to reach their highest potential and to work cohesively.