Advocacy News – June 14, 2022
Today’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion event, “Belonging is Good for Business – Building a Culture that Sticks,” explored how businesses and organizations can build inclusion and foster meaningful belonging for every employee and their unique, authentic selves.
Our panel, comprised of Adam Bernard of General Motors, Ayanna Clinton of Dykema and Trevor Thomas of Consumers Energy, discussed many top inclusion tactics, as well as practical tools to implement inside workplaces, regardless of company size. Here were the top takeaways:
- Employees who bring their full selves to work have higher employee satisfaction. When you don’t have to mask aspects of your daily routine or the heaviness of current events around you, work becomes much easier to integrate together. Without this mental and emotional weight of censorship, productivity naturally increases within a job role and across the company. As one example, Trevor shared that at Consumers, each worker has the ability to take two inclusion holidays off per year (i.e., Juneteenth, Hanukkah, Ramadan, etc.), which recognizes each individual’s unique identity.
- Recognize the bias you bring to work. In order to truly belong and appreciate others, we need to understand the background we come from, what our identities are, such as race and gender, how those have impacted us on a daily basis, and how can we show individuals different from us that their voices matter too. This way, we can understand who we most naturally gravitate toward and how we can continue to widen our circles to be all-inclusive.
- Disability inclusion is a highly needed (and too often neglected) area of representation. It’s estimated that there are 61 million people in the United States with a disability, along with 21% of the population as associated caregivers. Research shows that revenue and profit margins raise considerably among businesses once they become accessible and inclusive to all disability types.
- The best way to lead in terms of diversity and belonging is to open space for conversation. This could vary from a one-on-one supervisor meeting to a 20-member DEI team that meets monthly. Nothing specific needs to be said; instead, providing a safe, consistent opportunity where people can speak up on issues in and outside of work affecting them is an essential start. With space to speak, employees feel less like a body filling a job title and more like a valued voice on a professional team.
Here is a General Motors resource to start digging into workplace implementation.
A special thanks to our sponsors, General Motors, Consumers Energy, Frankenmuth Insurance, Lake Trust and Perrigo for helping make this program possible.
For DE&I questions, comments or topic ideas for future programming, please reach out to Stephanie Young at syoung@michamber.com.
Check out the entire discussion here: