How Do You Build an Inclusive Workplace?

Empower Employees Improve Employee Health and Safety

When people picture unsafe working conditions, they usually think of faulty wiring or dangerous machinery. One risk that offices overlook is failing to create an inclusive environment where employees feel comfortable being who they are. Ask yourself: does your culture actually include everyone, or does it just look diverse on paper?

Building an inclusive workplace starts with an effective diversity, equity, and inclusion policy, but a policy on its own changes very little. What moves the needle is a set of deliberate, repeatable steps that leaders actually follow. Here are 10 steps for building an inclusive workplace that treat inclusion as real work, not a slogan.

What Is an Inclusive Workplace?

An inclusive workplace is one where every member of the office feels comfortable being who they are and comfortable contributing to the company’s work. Inclusion is not just diversity. It takes diversity one step further: creating an inclusive workplace means making everyone in the office feel included and welcome, and not just comfortable working and being there, but comfortable shaping the organization’s direction. Treated seriously, inclusion is part of creating safe working conditions for everyone.

10 Steps for Building an Inclusive Workplace

Creating an inclusive workplace is less about one big gesture and more about many small, accountable changes. These 10 steps move an office from good intentions toward inclusivity you can actually see.

Identify Current Leadership Demographics

One of the easiest ways to build inclusivity is to diversify the perspectives at the top of the workplace. If your office is hiring new leaders, from management to executive, think about hiring underrepresented leaders. While they may be underrepresented at the top, chances are their perspective represents a significant office demographic. With a leader who has those interests in mind, the whole office makes more progress toward inclusivity.

Diverse leadership team discussing inclusion and reviewing an organizational chart in a conference room

Look at Current Policies and Identify Discriminatory Practices

As with most workplaces, there are likely outdated policies and practices that many workers and executives accept without thinking about them. These types of policies are very likely holding your office back from being truly inclusive. Practices tied to pregnancy discrimination, ageism, and gender or sexual orientation-based discrimination are still frequent, yet they are extremely easy for workplaces to leave behind. The EEOC’s guidance for employers lays out what federal law already prohibits, which is a useful baseline when you audit for discriminatory practices.

Encourage Employees to Voice Their Opinions

These changes include revamping the complaint system. Whatever system your office currently has in place, no matter how forward-thinking it might be, it could probably stand to be updated and made more inclusive. Employees feel more comfortable in the workplace when they also know they can safely discuss issues that might be present. Connecting with employees on a personal level makes them more likely to feel they can trust you with their concerns. Employee-level concerns are more likely to represent what actually needs to change in the office than the issues management and executives assume exist.

Make the Workspace More Inclusive

Creating safe working conditions also means making the workspace physically more inclusive. Desk and office spaces need to be disability accessible, and bathrooms should be gender-neutral. The ADA’s small business compliance guidance is a practical reference for accessible design. These are all fast, and frequently easy, ways to keep office members from feeling excluded.

Employee using a wheelchair working at an accessible sit-stand desk while a colleague chats nearby

Analyze Which Suggestions and Ideas Are Being Heard

Look at all the suggestions your office has accepted and implemented over the past year. Whose ideas does management select for improvement opportunities? Are they coming from a specific group of people, or from across the entire office, across demographics and seniority levels? You could even try an experiment. Have employees give suggestions anonymously, with a way to link each idea back to its author, and choose the best ones. Are these the same employees whose proposals were selected before, or a group that is more representative of the office as a whole?

Educate Employees and Offer Diversity Training

Offer diversity training to employees and managers without making it a requirement. That consideration means employees are more willing to undergo training and more likely to keep practicing what they have learned after the module is over.

Engaged employees attending a workplace diversity and inclusion training session

Make Events Inclusive

Making events inclusive covers everything from how you give employees recognition, to ensuring there are food options for all dietary needs, to respecting cultural boundaries that might make an event difficult or inconvenient for some groups.

Provide Training or Mentorship Opportunities

Inclusivity also means ensuring that everyone stands on the same foot and receives the same tools and opportunities. One of the most critical tools in the modern workplace is providing a good training program. Training opportunities such as workshops and software courses are excellent ways to level the playing field for workers, and they set the stage for new workers to enter higher positions. Mentorship programs, whether from management or at a corporate level, are an excellent and effective way for all employees to explore upper-level careers and think about the work that might interest them.

Experienced mentor guiding a younger mentee through documents at a desk

Make Inclusion a Metric and Hold It Accountable

What do your business metrics say about your company? Some companies have gone so far as to tie executive and management bonuses to inclusion implementation in the workplace. Executives receive their full bonuses only if inclusion goals and metrics, like management diversity, physical workspace changes, and idea implementation, are met. This step is a great way to make real strides, because it is easy for upper-level management and executives to ignore or put off material changes when there is no reason for them to act.

Start From the Top

Management and C-level executives stepping forward to promote safe working conditions goes a long way toward making these changes permanent with staff. Once employees see that their bosses are committed to making a change, and more importantly committed to enforcing those changes, they are far more willing to follow suit.

Building an Inclusive Workplace

Inclusion has been identified as one of the top trends that will shape HR. Building an inclusive workplace is one of the surest steps toward creating safe working conditions for everyone in the office and ensuring that all workers feel heard and welcome. Try some of these steps to make positive, lasting changes to the workplace.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is an Inclusive Workplace?

An inclusive workplace is one where every employee feels comfortable being who they are and comfortable contributing to the company’s work. It takes diversity one step further by making sure everyone feels included, welcome, and heard.

What Is the Difference Between Diversity and Inclusion?

Diversity is the mix of people and perspectives in the office. Inclusion is what happens next: making everyone in that mix feel comfortable, included, and able to contribute. Diversity without inclusion leaves underrepresented employees present but not truly heard.

How Do You Make a Workspace More Inclusive?

Make desk and office spaces disability accessible, provide gender-neutral bathrooms, revamp the complaint system so concerns are heard, and offer diversity training and mentorship. Small physical and procedural changes keep office members from feeling excluded.

Why Is Building an Inclusive Workplace Important?

Creating an inclusive workplace is part of creating safe working conditions for everyone, and it helps all workers feel heard and welcome. Inclusion has been identified as one of the top trends shaping HR.

How Do You Measure Inclusion in the Workplace?

Make inclusion a metric and hold leaders accountable for it. Track measures like management diversity, physical workspace changes, and whose ideas are implemented, and some companies even tie executive bonuses to meeting inclusion goals.