Every day, media outlets and social feeds around the world report cases regarding racial, religious and gender issues. It’s clear that respecting and celebrating differences is essential for society to grow.
And it’s not just the morally right thing to do – it applies to the workplace as well. For the best employers, the strength lies in the differences of the employees. Studies show that when a company embraces diversity in the workplace, it can become more innovative and competitive.
It is a constant challenge for companies to identify conscious and unconscious biases that may exist in hiring processes, and to educate HR professionals and executives to embrace the diversity in the workplace in their overall business strategy.
Companies with the highest gender diversity among their executive management are 21% more likely to show above average profitability than competitors with the least gender variance in management, and companies with wider ethnic and cultural diversity outperform those without by 33%, according to McKinsey’s report ‘Why Diversity Matters’.
Compared with the global average, Brazil is ahead when it comes to hiring people of disadvantaged socioeconomic status: 72% of companies do so in the country, compared to 64% worldwide. However, regarding female equality there is still much to improve: only 66% encourage the promotion of executives to leadership positions, compared to 82% worldwide (Data: Top Employers Institute – 2017).
One of Sherlock Communications‘ clients, the job search engine Indeed, is dedicated to helping people get employment, and supports companies to increase diversity in the workplace. As part of this mission, Indeed recently partnered with three inclusion-focused review sites – Fairygodboss, InHerSight and Comparably – to provide enhanced information on Indeed‘s Company Pages. This free space on Indeed’s website brings together the company’s history with employee ratings and reviews on key workplace satisfaction criteria such as work/life balance and pay/benefits. With this action, via Fairygodboss and InHerSight, applicants have female-to-female ratings and, with Comparably, they can see a diversity score for employers.
Through Indeed’s new partnerships, Company Pages will now include more women-centric ratings and diversity scores for employers.
Working to increase gender, geographic and generational diversity and to include people with disabilities is a constant effort and reflects the cultural enrichment of a company. In the case of Sherlock Communications, as a PR agency in Latin America, it is our purpose to bring together people with different backgrounds, beliefs and ethnicities, who represent the general market population in which we specialise. Only in this way can we share such rich and different ideas and visions that open up a bigger picture and find solutions that would be hard to find if we were all part of a specific group of people with similar life experiences.
