Many companies put DEI initiatives in place and think that’s enough. Unfortunately, unconscious bias runs deep and people need to learn how to identify their own biases to prevent future discrimination. We must discuss preventing discrimination in the workplace.
Protect All Employees
It’s important for organizations to provide a safe space for its employees. We all want to work in an environment where we all feel comfortable and safe. This is especially important now that both mental and physical health are being discussed in the workplace. This starts with a strong anti-discrimination policy. You must include firm guidelines for the consequences of violating such a policy. Without consequences, you will embolden those who are offensive to continue to be offensive and perhaps even up their game.
You must protect all employees and customers from discrimination and harmful behavior. You cannot undo harmful behavior. If you’re like me, the memories of times when people were harmful to you resurface from time to time. This happens especially when the harmful behavior was reported but nothing was done.
Identify Harmful Behaviors and Unconscious Bias
Before you can prevent workplace discrimination from happening in the first place, you must learn how to identify harmful behaviors and unconscious biases. Discrimination is a negative action or attitude towards a group or a person based on their characteristics. These can include: race, gender, age, religion, nationality, disability, gender identity, and other marginalized groups covered by applicable law.
Some examples of workplace discrimination include:
- Denying promotions or benefits
- Being given impossible tasks
- Exclusion or isolation by co-workers
Harassment is also a form of discrimination. This often occurs when someone offers unwanted sexual advances to someone they work with. When you enforce your DEI initiatives, you must ensure that any employee who discriminates or harasses another colleague will face serious consequences.
So, how do you prevent discrimination from happening at all in the workplace? If you’ve read this far, you are on the right path. You need to learn about this issue with videos just like this one. This will help you to see things from other people’s point of view as well as raise your own self-awareness.
Prevention Measures
You should encourage each other to respect each other’s differences. This needs to happen at the leadership level which will then trickle down to each individual employee. If anyone in your organization is experiencing discrimination, advise them to contact HR to address the complaint promptly and confidentially. When you have guidelines for handling harmful behavior, this gives your employees a level of trust that the issue will be taken care of.
You have to work together with your team to ensure that no discrimination or harassment happens in the workplace. You cannot roll out DEI initiatives without feedback from your employees, they should help you to shape an inclusive company culture.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace – Courses on Pluralsight
I teach diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace in several of my Pluralsight courses: Increasing Mental Health Awareness for Improved Inclusiveness, Managing Technical Professionals, and Launching Successful Teams. These courses include animated scenario-based training following the same cast of characters from course to course as they learn to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Visit my Pluralsight author page to get started with these courses today!