Culture isn’t just about the differences in food preferences. To build a connection in the workplace, employers need to put effort into fostering the differences of each employee. That said, leaders must be mindful and intentional in bringing a workforce together.
Establishing a strong company culture is essential because this organizational ability significantly impacts how your employees and customers perceive your brand. However, since remote teams have more extensive geographical distances, incorporating a company culture can be challenging. Organizational leaders need to plan a firm culture because there are fewer in-person interactions.
When building an inclusive remote workforce, you’ll have to reassess previous and existing business processes, career paths, and performance reviews. So, in this article, you’ll learn several strategies to build an inclusive remote team effectively.
1) Provide Training For Organizational Leaders
Like any face of company culture, building and promoting a sense of belonging within the workplace starts from the leadership level. The organization’s founders and stakeholders should develop a desire to create a robust and diverse culture online. Moreover, company leaders need to be open in working with individuals from different nationalities, genders, skin colors, and sexual orientations.
That said, business owners must consider providing diversity training to the executive members of the organization. This training will give your team enough knowledge to understand its meaning to have a diverse and inclusive organization. In addition, diversity training will provide examples of a company’s best practices and real-world scenarios.
2) Encourage Thought Diversity
Allowing employees to speak up during online meetings can produce multiple organizational benefits, such as better customer service, greater engagement, effective operations, and reduced turnover time. Furthermore, as you allow your workforce to give recommendations about specific projects, you might gain enough knowledge to enhance your business practices. With that, you can further develop your product offerings, attract more significant markets, and improve market share.
To give your employees a chance to share their perspectives and expertise, you can encourage them to disagree and set the expectation that opposing the views of organizational leaders is acceptable. That said, you must celebrate the diversity of thought and recognize your virtual team for making contributions, especially if they disagree with you. Thus, you can build an inclusive remote workforce by allowing your team to share their thoughts.
3) Be Sensitive About Pronoun Usage
A pronoun is a vital factor in a person’s identity. Using proper pronouns to address someone in your workplace demonstrates inclusion and respect. Therefore, to actively promote an inclusive virtual team, you must communicate to your employees the importance of adequately addressing their fellow members.
To make the process easier, you may consider following these tips in addressing gender pronouns in a remote workplace:
- Create social media profiles: Social media platforms recently started allowing users to add their pronouns to their bios. Remind your employees to use this feature so their teammates can address them using their preferred pronouns.
- Insert pronouns to corporate resumés and bios: Other than social media platforms, you can encourage your remote employees to add their pronouns on these avenues. By doing so, you show your team that your organization prioritizes the well-being of your employees, which promotes inclusion.
- Add pronouns to video call software: Since remote teams communicate online, you usually use instant chat and video calls to attend to the needs of your employees. That said, you can ask your workforce to add their pronouns to their profiles right before their names. This strategy allows their fellow employees to view their pronouns without regularly asking about sensitive matters.
Pronouns play an essential role in determining a person’s identity. Therefore, you and your employees must learn to address the team members correctly. By following this practice, you show that you respect your remote teams and create a more supportive environment where your employees can feel comfortable being themselves.
4) Adopt Inclusive Recruitment Practices
An inclusive hiring process recognizes diversity and embraces a wide range of perspectives that candidates may bring to the company. This strategy automatically translates to enhanced productivity and improved employee retention. So, here are six inclusive recruitment practices you can adopt to develop your remote workforce:
- Identify what inclusion and diversity mean to your company.
- Build a career website that is easily accessible to remote candidates.
- Use inclusive job descriptions when releasing hiring advertisements online.
- Make inclusion a part of your company’s brand.
- Provide additional opportunities to existing remote employees.
- Establish diverse interview panels.
Key Takeaway
Adopting inclusive remote workforce practices can be beneficial for your organization. So, even if you can’t overhaul your entire process at once, begin by implementing tiny changes with your existing remote employees.
Remind your organizational leaders and remote employees to know the importance of sensitivity when addressing their fellow teammates. By doing so, you actively promote inclusion in your organization’s day-to-day remote operations.
