Ensuring Optimal Retention When Creating an Inclusive Culture

As the leader of your organization, you need to manage your diverse workforce to achieve your organizational goals efficiently. Develop guidelines for your employees to work as a team and train them to coordinate well with each other.

Developing and maintaining an inclusive workplace is an ongoing process. If you don't handle your diverse workforce well and ensure those guidelines are followed, your employee turnover may increase. Overall, people stay in organizations that invest in them and provide a safe, inclusive working environment - that means allowing people to show up as their whole selves, without having to hide aspects of their experience or identities in the office. Inclusiveness is easy and happens naturally when you work with a group of similar people, but it becomes more difficult with people who have different backgrounds, gender identities and diverse abilities.

Only when the variety of experiences come together to form one team over the long-term do you reap the benefits and improved performance that a diverse team can achieve for your organization. So, what management strategies can you use to improve employee retention in a diverse team?

Feedback works both ways. By creating an environment of trust and openness, your employees can address their concerns with you directly, which gives you the chance to make necessary changes in your organization before they become a liability. Some cultures that are more hierarchical discourage direct employee to supervisor feedback, so you may have to take initiative in sourcing feedback from your staff. Ask your team how they are performing, and you'll find which areas you need to work on. Encourage your team to give constructive and positive feedback. Constant feedback can help you improve your delegation and work environment.

Most organizations take retention actions based on emotional decisions, which is the reason these actions sometimes fail to deliver the desired results. A data-driven approach to optimizing the retention of a diverse workforce is necessary. Data collection should include periodic surveys, identifying issues faced by a diverse workforce, and their overall progress. Use the collected data for making decisions, alterations, and taking action to achieve desired results for diversity retention and recruiting in the workplace.

Stay interviews are the number one tool for employee retention. They are easy to carry out and effective for reinforcing the reasons your retention target should stay. Stay interviews call for a one-hour interview at least twice a year.

These interviews allow the manager and their employees to talk about their progress, expectations, and the reasons why the employee adds value to the organization.

It's a well-known phenomenon that you can execute what you measure, and further, that you can improve efficiency by rewarding employees. To make your executives and managers prioritize retaining key employees, set rewards for retention. Retention of employees can be added as a key performance indicator for their promotion and bonus metrics.

The measure and reward technique worked quite well for high profile firms, like Intel. The company managed to bring their diversity turnover below the average.

Having a diverse workforce won't be effective for an organization if diversity retention isn't up to the mark. Key indicators include how well your diverse employees interact with others. You must find how settled and comfortable they are in the workplace. Take feedback from time to time and derive important data for retention actions. Include 'Stay interviews' in your retention programs. Set rewards and bonuses for employees who are a part of your retention team. 

Manpreet Dhillon is the CEO and Founder of Veza Global