Top Strategies for Managing Employee Diversity and Inclusion in Remote Teams

In recent years, diversity and inclusion in the workplace have received greater focus, especially with the expansion of remote working. Strategies for Diversity and Inclusion in remote teams are crucial for building a culture of collaborative innovation and success, as well as ensuring top talent is retained. In this article, we delve into the most important components of a DE&I strategy for remote workplaces as well as how to accurately track its performance.

Why Diversity and Inclusion in Remote Teams Matter

According to People Management, 72% of the 300 HR directors and C-suite professionals surveyed stated employee demands for an EDI strategy were a major concern for their business and 83% claimed increasing business costs have pushed them to reduce their investment in EDI.

With this in mind, it’s a non-negotiable that the investment your organisation is able to funnel into a Diversity and Inclusion strategy is put to good use. This means HR teams will have to really dig into the results of past initiatives as well as what research says about how employers can make a tangible, long-lasting difference instead of just looking at Diversity and Inclusion as a tick box training exercise.

Genuine Diversity & Inclusion should home in on addressing disparities in the workplace. From the motherhood penalty to traditionally ‘non-british’ names causing CVs to be discounted, Diversity and Inclusion is about building a fairer space where people are judged for their character and contributions rather than their socio-economic background or skin colour.

Key Strategies to Enhance Diversity and Inclusion in Remote Teams:

Recruitment Practices

It all begins with recruitment. How you conduct your hiring process can have a significant impact on the talent that is inducted into your organisation, as well as the first impression you give of your culture.

Luckily for remote businesses, virtual working has been linked to encouraging equity and diversity as it provides flexibility for people who may have caring responsibilities, live with disabilities that make a commute challenging, and other various factors that can play into a person’s life.

To further improve the inclusivity of your organisation, your team should research how to write inclusive job adverts. Language matters. Overtime, certain words have picked up gendered connotations. For example, if you say you are seeking an ‘assertive leader’, research has found that not only are men in general found to be more assertive, but women may also have experienced their assertive behaviours perceived more negatively than their male counterparts, causing them to distance themselves from the word.

When examining CV’s, a CV anonymisation tool that blanks out information that may prompt bias and only leaves relevant experience and skills visible to the reader may also prove useful. Additionally, when conducting interviews, sharing the questions before hand may help neurodiverse individuals or those who suffer with anxiety disorders to prepare their answers fully so that they are able to show you their best.

Cultural Competence

In a remote workforce, your employees may come from various different cultures with different norms, who will need to work together within their teams and cross-departmentally.

Firstly, organisations should ensure their HR team and leadership understand the cultural celebrations and activities that matter to their people, to ensure the same accommodations are made for everyone.

On a day-to-day basis, training should be made available for your remote workforce to ensure good understanding between different cultures. Teaching and maintaining cultural competence among your remote employees should be made engaging. However, while webinars or quizzes educating people of the food and music of different cultures can be fun, meaningful team building activities, your Diversity and Inclusion strategy should go deeper than this.

Sarah A. Lanier, an author who grew up in the Middle East and served in Europe for 20 years as a consultant with NGOs wrote a book about direct versus in-direct cultures, describing how she had found different communication styles across different cultures can cause friction when they come together without an understanding of each other.

Direct communication was found to be the preferred style in countries like the U.S and the Netherlands, with a task-orientated and straightforward style. Meanwhile, in-direct communication was favoured in South Korea and Japan, where communication is relationship-orientated and less straightforward.

Educating your workforce on cultural differences such as in communication, can allow remote employees to be more considerate of each other and spot areas where friction due to miscommunication may be a risk so it can be addressed before things escalate.

You may be interested to learn about How to Make C-Suite and Middle Management More Diverse

Visibility & Recognition

In a remote working environment, it’s important to train employees on how to share their progress with projects and professional achievements to ensure they aren’t overlooked for promotion or recognition.

The National Bureau of Economic Research found women consistently rated their performance on a test lower than did men, even though both groups had the same average score.

Even more glaringly, a study by the Ascend Foundation discovered that when it came to advancing to executive level, white women fared worse than white men but much better than all Asian, Hispanic, and black people. The study found that on average, black and Hispanic employees rated their performance 30% lower than their managers did (whereas white male employees scored their performance 10% higher than their managers did).

Therefore, in remote teams where visibility is decreased it becomes incredibly important that line managers not only regularly check in with their team members to discuss their goals and ongoing work, but also that employees are given the opportunity to learn how to self-promote confidently, as well as gain visibility with various stakeholders across the organisation so they are not isolated within their team.

The Harvard Gazette also suggests looking at the system critically. This should prompt HR teams to consistently review their performance processes, especially how or if self-assessments are conducted.

To provide further data on employee capabilities as well as compensate for the visibility that can be compromised by remote work, it’s important that people teams have access to technology that not only plugs these gaps, but also takes the extra step to support inclusive strategies and enrich HR’s knowledge of their people.

HR Tech: Your Greatest Obstacle or Asset

When your workforce is remote, excellent people technology is a must-have, as almost the entire employee experience is digital.

Your HR software plays a key role in supporting your Diversity and Inclusion strategy. A robust solution will provide best-in-class HR reporting and analytics, allowing you to track the metrics that matter to your organisation and easily access necessary information so that you can seamlessly pull together reports.

Every organisation is different, and remote organisations especially tend to focus on making their culture flexible for their people. This ethos should extend to your technology. Workflows, dashboards and processes should be highly configurable to that it fits around the needs of your people strategy.

Ninety One has been a long standing client with xcd, choosing the xcd solution because of its scope for customisation and how it supported the needs of the organisation’s global workforce located across Europe, Africa, Asia, North Ame rican and Australia.

“The xcd platform has allowed us to build a global system that is accessible to all our employees and managers to manage their requirements all in one place.” says Denise Moss, Human Capital Project Manager at the global asset management firm. “We’ve been able to configure many different modules to meet our unique requirements.”

Read the full case study to learn more.

By adopting these strategies, your organisation can cultivate a more inclusive and diverse remote working environment, leading to enhanced collaboration and success.