Inclusive Workforce: 6 ways to boost Diversity & Inclusion performance

1.Unbiased job requirements: the Four Eyes principle

Inclusive recruitment starts with having unbiased vacancies. E.g. full-time jobs could preclude parents, particularly mothers. And are these personality requirements actually must-haves? Or do they sub-communicate a preference for a male or female person in a role?

Consider implementing a standardised set of bias assessments within your recruitment procedures. Utilise the workflow engine of Nétive VMS Suite to apply the Four Eyes principle and make sure in that manner, you take your vacancy descriptions to the next, unbiased level.

2. Unbiased shortlisting: Automated rankings

With your exceptionally well written and unbiased vacancy, you can start recruiting and shortlist your candidates. Nétive VMS’s automation can help you rank the candidates based on the amount of matches their resumés have with the job requirements. Totally unbiased. This doesn’t mean you blindly hire whoever the machine tells you to hire. But an option is to log why you didn’t hire the highest ranking person, to self-police personal biases. A next step could be to report and review these decisions. Or let the machine report possible biases when comparing the hired persons vs. the long list.

3. Include D&I questions in your worker satisfaction questionnaires

For permanent workforce, measuring worker satisfaction is quite common. For the contingent workforce, it’s not. In times of talent scarcity, that’s an opportunity. Normally, worker satisfaction is measured at least yearly at a specific moment in time. That will probably not work for contingent workforce, as the population of that particular moment is not representative of the entire population. The content of your questionnaire might also not be completely relevant for a contingent worker. Technology solves this. Nétive VMS Suite allows you to send out questionnaires relative to a certain event. E.g. a month after somebody is onboarded; every three months or at the end of a tenure. Putting this in place, allows you to effortlessly gather your evaluations continuously and report on the results instantly.

4. Awareness as a compliance requirement

Your freelancers and suppliers probably already need to adhere to your compliance demands before they can do business with you. So including a D&I policy, and having them sign it off, is easy, but very necessary. You might do well in unbiased shortlisting, but do your suppliers also select without bias? Let them at least attest to that.

5. Supplier diversity performance

Let’s complete the loop regarding your supplier network. Within their compliance documentation, they’ve committed to conducting  an unbiased selection process. It’s essential to verify their adherence by assessing their performance. Integrate Nétive VMS’s diversity and inclusion (D&I) performance widgets into your supplier dashboard and factor their performance on these metrics into your supplier evaluation.

6. Pay-gap analysis

With step 1 until 5, you can  create a more equal landscape of opportunities, quite literally. But what about income equality? Most clients and partners use standardised job profiles and job categories. With that, you can report on the average wage within those groups and divide those groups in diversity subgroups. In that way you can see if e.g. you are paying a particular gender, age group or ethnicity significantly differently to the other.

You can actively look for opportunities to take your D&I performance to the next level, especially when it comes to creating a more equal world of work. So, if you have a particular strategy to improve your D&I performance, we would happily discuss with you how technology can support that.