Promote dignity throughout the employee lifecycle

Recruiting

1. Communicate the importance of dignity, including inclusion, to the recruiting team and hiring managers.
2. Use inclusive job descriptions and applications that don’t discourage qualified applicants.
3. Expand the pool of talent you are actually seeing and considering.
4. Prioritize the candidate experience and offer process.
5. Reduce challenges that people with impairments (e.g. to sight, hearing, mobility, cognition) might face during the process.
6. Invest in the dignity preparedness of your interviewers and interview process.
7. Be prepared to pivot when external events (public health crises, acts of violence against a community, economic downturn) encroach on the work experience.
8. Appreciate those who support recruiting efforts.

Onboarding

1. Be timely; plan ahead.
2. Be inclusion-conscious.
3. Engage the team.
4. Be supportive, particularly in the case of remote employees.
5. Cover the basics and get feedback.

Performance Management

1. Educate managers about effective performance management.
2. Educate employees and managers about effective self-evaluations.
3. Have a process!
4. Ensure that the process allows for recognition of contributions to organizational culture and values.
5. Encourage ongoing management of performance.
6. Factor the relevance of external crises and other stressors into individual assessments and the overall structured process.
7. Use data to analyze diversity and inclusion trends in performance reviews, then act on the results.

Promotions

1. Create transparent, easily understood promotion criteria that are as objective as possible and are regularly applied across all levels of the organization.
2. Incorporate information about unconscious bias into guidance and training about the promotion process for direct managers and any promotion committees.
3. Encourage sponsorship.
4. Ensure that promotion inputs are fair and inclusive.
5. Anticipate the impact of absences, leaves, and external crises on promotion.
6. Consider other opportunities for recognition, too!
7. Review the data.

Separation of Employment

1. Audit practices, communications, and forms to ensure that they advance dignity.
2. Prioritize the impact on employees when layoffs, furloughs, or other large-scale terminations become necessary.
3. Focus on remaining employees on the team.

Establish dignity-conscious working methods

Internal Communications

1. Prioritize inclusion and diversity both in terms of speakers and messaging.
2. Invest in the dignity awareness and competences of all professionals who have internal communications responsibilities.
3. Look for opportunities for communication tools and messaging to be more inclusive and dignity-advancing.
4. Communicate with the workforce about the impact of business decisions or external events, being cognizant of disproportionate effects on certain groups.

Policy

1. Develop and articulate easy-to-understand policies with an eye toward inclusion.
2. Make sure discrimination and harassment policies effectively promote dignity.
3. Help your employees travel with dignity by enacting thoughtful travel policies.
4. Prioritize workplace safety.
5. Consider dignity issues that relate to a range of other policies.
6. Strategic Values, Goals, and Governance
7. Prioritize employee stakeholders (not just shareholders or their equivalents).
8. Focus on workplace priorities not just more “traditional” business or organizational goals.
9. Create opportunities for employee voice relating to organizational values and strategic planning.
10. Be intentional and not performative about people-related values (like inclusion, diversity, community impact).
11. Focus on the board of directors and senior team.

Grassroots and Other Employee Efforts

1. Actively and visibly support these efforts.

2. Encourage operational rigor for ERGs and related efforts.

Compliance and Other Training and Education

1. Effectively (and inclusively!) design, communicate about, and deploy training related to workplace compliance and other topics.

Physical, Remote, and Virtual Workplaces

1. Focus on the physical workplace.
2. Remember to focus on virtual and remote workplaces.
3. Use data to better understand work trends in remote, hybrid, and physical locations.

Promote economic dignity

Compensation

1. Pay employees fairly and give special attention to lower-wage earners.
2. Focus on pay equity, fairness, and achievement of values-based goals.
3. Approach external pressures on compensation with a fairness mindset.

Benefits

1. Refine benefits-related communications.
2. Prioritize inclusion and economic dignity in benefits development and design.
3. Audit benefits utilization and delivery.
4. Be flexible in benefits design and offerings, with an eye on well-being.

Align external engagement and the extended workplace with dignity best practices

Procurement and Supply Chain

1. Recognize the dignity-advancing opportunities in procurement.
2. Leverage the dignity-advancing opportunities in the workforce supply chain.

Community Engagement, Public Policy, and Philanthropy

1. Deepen dignity intention around community, public policy, and social justice issues.
2. Approach philanthropic decision-making and engagement with a workplace dignity focus

External Communications and Data Transparency

1. Use public-facing communications to advance transparency, diversity, and other dignity-related commitments.
2. Transparently share data relating to workforce diversity and inclusion or other dignity drivers.

Analyze people metrics

Use people metrics to better understand the workforce and drive accountability

1. Ask for your employees’ input in structured ways that encourage trust.
2. Make sure diversity-related data and goals are collected, analyzed, and shared.
3. Tool: Assessing Psychological Safety