To promote inclusivity and support minority communities, businesses, both large and small, are becoming increasingly diverse. Put simply, being a diverse business means employing individuals with different characteristics, including, among others, religion, age, gender, and race. Keeping this in mind, diversity, and inclusion for small businesses is important for a number of reasons. For instance, it helps to attract and retain talented ethnic minority employees, according to a recent study by Glassdoor.
Additionally, it helps reduce workplace discrimination and/or harassment and broadens the scope of experience at the C-suite level. That said, you, too, can build a culture of workplace diversity and inclusion in your small business. To achieve this goal, you simply need to be intentional. Here are three tips to help you embrace diversity within your startup.
Diversity within Startups – Diversify Your Contact List
Your contact list likely consists of your family members, friends, former schoolmates, friends of friends, colleagues, and associates. If that’s the case, your contact list is not a particularly diverse one, meaning you should take deliberate action to make it diverse. In other words, you need to be intentional.
While this may seem like a tall order, it is actually a relatively easy goal to accomplish. For instance, you can leverage the power of social media and other related platforms to not only create diversity within your business but also expand your business network and professional contact list. Social media strategies you can use to achieve this goal include:
• Joining a mastermind group
• Joining the relevant Facebook groups
• Following like-minded individuals from across the world on Twitter and LinkedIn
Implement Diversity Marketing
Unless your startup focuses exclusively on a niche market segment, you should endeavor to cater to the different market segments with the same zeal. This is where diversity marketing comes in handy. Broadly speaking, diversity marketing is a form of marketing that aims to reach and connect with new customers in different cultural, ethnic, racial, or social groups. For your diversity marketing campaigns to work, you should avoid tokenism and appropriation or stereotyping and cultural insensitivity. If you fail to avoid these things, your business is likely to come across as insincere, patronizing, and ignorant. To avoid these problems, you should assign such campaigns to a diverse team.
Diversity within Startups – Diversify Your Team
As your startup grows and flourishes, you will likely find many opportunities to develop and promote workplace diversity and inclusion. For example, you can leverage freelancers and contractors to achieve this goal. To put it another way, beyond your in-house team, you can have a diverse external team supporting your business’s operations. By working with other businesses that promote diversity and inclusion, you’ll be able to gain more insights into minority groups, allowing you to develop the right strategies to cater to such groups.
Use these three tips to promote diversity and inclusion in your small business. For all your business insurance needs, contact the experts at Weeks & Associates Insurance Services in Thousand Oaks, California, today.
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