Research: the continuing drive towards greater workplace inclusivity

Being able to bring your ‘whole self’ to work has been on the agenda for a while, but what real progress are companies making in ensuring inclusivity?

At the beginning of year, two major surveys suggested that employers were placing greater emphasis on ensuring their benefits offering was inclusive. Willis Towers Watson’s Benefits Trends Survey revealed that 60% of organisations are prioritising inclusion and diversity in their benefits design. It noted that social, economic and workplace factors were combining to shape employee expectations around health, wellbeing and benefits.

This combination of factors can also be seen in its other findings, where 50% of businesses are looking to improve flexibility and choice with benefits, and 43% want to enhance core benefits.

This drive to ensure benefits are diverse – to cater for employees’ differing requirements – was something picked up by Aon’s Benefits and Trends Survey. It revealed that the second most common challenge with online and flexible benefits was “offering enough benefits to satisfy diverse employee needs”.

The report also notes: “An increased awareness of recognising and embracing diversity, inclusion and multi-generational needs is also challenging organisations with how to offer benefits that address this.”

Similar to Willis Towers Watson’s findings, the Aon report highlighted that there is growing awareness that the workplace has become more of an extension of our daily lives. As such, employees’ expectations are now that employers need to play their part in ensuring work-life balance, more effective use of technology, mental health support, and diversity and inclusion.

This drive towards diversity and inclusion can be seen in Stonewall’s latest Workplace Equality Index, which is used to select Stonewall’s top 100 employers. The Index is a voluntary, annual exercise which enables employers to measure, verify and improve their inclusion practice. It has been running for 16 years, and in 2020 it had its best year yet, with 503 organisations entering. This alone suggests that more companies are seeing the value and importance of diversity and inclusion.

This year’s Index also included a survey of employees. It revealed that more non-LGBT employees support equality today than in 2019, and 80 per cent of LGBT employees said that they feel able to be themselves at work. However, there are still issues with inequality. More than half of trans respondents (65%) and bi respondents (73%) said they don’t feel confident disclosing their identity at work.

The benefits of an inclusive workplace are enormous, from increased engagement and higher productivity to improving the employer’s reputation. Yet, it is clear that there is still room for improvement when it comes to ensuring that employees feel able to bring their whole self to work.

The most important thing is that employers are on the right track, and that during this pandemic, businesses should not lose sight of the goal to improve workplace diversity and inclusion.

The author is Dawn Lewis, content editor at REBA.