How do you engage and retain all of these new employees in this particularly fast-paced work environment? How do you make sure they are being developed and advancing at the right pace?

No surprise here — we have some recommendations: 

01.

Train leadership and anyone who will be managing new employees 

Woke folks don’t just belong in HR - in fact, leaders, whether in the C-Suite or middle management, have the most influence on creating positive change in an organization’s culture. When an organization begins to hire more diverse employees, leaders have to exemplify and embody inclusion efforts in order to enforce an accepting corporate culture1. According to a recent study by Deloitte, when a leader practices in, an employee’s feelings of being highly included increase up to 70%, citing experiencing increased levels of fairness, respect, value, belonging, psychological safety, and inspiration. 

So, it’s important firms incorporate diversity and inclusion training in leadership development programs. Doing so can help leaders become aware of behaviors that don’t promote inclusion and prevent them from occurring, acting as role-models for what behavior is not only appropriate but welcoming. Training should also be focused on developing leaders to have an action-orientation towards resolving exclusion that arises from increasing diversity in an organization2. 

02.

Address biases, but then teach your employees how to manage them

Training employees on implicit biases and identifying which prejudices they hold is a great first step in fostering a more inclusive culture. Though, one training session isn’t going to be a cure-all for your employees. As Lily Zheng, an Organizational Consultant and Executive Coach, puts it, “the outcome of any implicit bias training shouldn’t be to cure people’s bias or make them more objective—it should be to make people bias-aware.” It’s more about understanding your own place in society and then course-correcting your behaviors and decisions by questioning if your hangups about other people might be getting in the way of seeing situations clearly.   

However, a concept we love from the CFA Institute is that just being aware of your biases doesn’t protect you from acting on them. It’s important your firm take additional steps in not only recognizing stereotypes but disconfirming them in order to reduce discrimination. 

03.

Hold social events with and without upper management 

Create opportunities for employees of diverse backgrounds to interact with one another in a non-professional setting. People are more inclined to interact with others that they perceive as being similar to themselves, so requiring everyone to hang out after work honestly may be the best way to get things rolling. A range of social opportunities should be offered so that individuals from different backgrounds can find similarities based on interests — because not everyone loves a late-night happy hour.

We also recommend creating events that do and do not include upper management. Allow analysts and their workplace peers to relax around those they don’t necessarily have to be “on” for, but also be sure to invite upper management and leaders to these events as to not create too much distance or disinterest between the two groups. 

04.

Help others develop and enforce inclusive language

For traditionally male-dominated industries (ahem...finance), adopting gender-inclusive language can help facilitate inclusion for women in the workplace. Gender-exclusive language has been found to negatively impact female candidates’ motivation and job identification. Basically, you should speak up if you hear bro-talk. 

You should also be careful of heteronormative phrasing, which happens, usually unintentionally, a lot in this industry (phrases like “happy wife, happy life” can actually make people feel outcasted). Using phrases like “Happy wife, happy life” can actually make people feel outcasted, and could potentially suppress their sexuality at work, while others get to express theirs freely without judgment. Having this sort of double life can have a tremendously negative impact on an individuals’ self-worth and esteem. While employees should feel free to talk about their wives or husbands, other people have very different structures at home, so best not to assume or normalize certain structures. 

05.

Work towards even more representation 

The more diversity you add to your workforce, the less some of your current employees will feel tokenized. The goal shouldn’t be to just hire more women or more POC — the goal should be to diversify the employee population to the point at which any candidate will one day walk through the doors of your firm and feel welcome and accepted by proxy of the culture you’ve created. 

06.

Don’t rely on those employees from historically underrepresented populations to do all the work 

Just because someone is a woman, doesn’t make them the spokesperson for all women’s issues, and just because someone is Black, doesn’t make them the perfect candidate to help lead your internal D&I initiatives. According to the CFA Institute, there is a negative correlation between doing extra D&I related work and getting promoted. Sometimes, the best thing these employees can do for themselves and for the culture of your company is to continue growing their own skills. We love this blog post by Bukky Adebayo discussing this exact topic and we highly recommend reading it: https://medium.com/awaken-blog/obligated-to-d-i-f1d8157b419e. 

If you have individuals who are genuinely willing to assist in your internal efforts — great! Just make sure they are all being recognized for their work and it doesn’t get in the way of their primary career goals.