Tags Share As our friend and partner, Donna Hicks, recognized in Leading With Dignity, “the stated focus of many organizations is accomplishing their strategic goals, and if honoring dignity is not woven into these goals, dignity of employees may be seen as distracting from the organization’s interests.” Centering dignity in core values enriches a brand…
Tags Share Policies impact employees in a systemic way. They reflect what organizations reward and what they discourage, which affects dignity-honoring elements like safety, inclusion, fairness, and accountability. This means policies must cover a broad range of workplace behaviors and practices, and be visible, periodically and clearly communicated (including from senior leadership), consistently enforced through…
Tags Share The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer found that regular communication with employees plays an increasingly central role in how much employees trust their employers. They are an important driver of workplace culture and how employees feel, whether through intranet site postings, all hands/all staff/team meetings, internal bulletin boards, or organization-wide announcements and emails, including…
Tags Share When employment comes to an end, the organization can honor dignity through straightforward and transparent communication that prioritizes empathy, nondisparagement, mindfulness of the remaining team, and thoughtful exit interview/processes that are open, safe, and designed to leverage authentically sought feedback. Former employees can also be helpful brand ambassadors; don’t squander that opportunity by…
Tags Share Recognition is a core element of workplace dignity. Any organization-wide practice that involves employee recognition through promotion and advancement is therefore a systemic opportunity to advance dignity. A dignity-centered promotion process empowers workers, advances inclusion, and demonstrates fairness. Poorly formed processes, or decision-making that punishes flexibility and caregiving or injects bias, on the…
Tags Share Performance reviews should be part of an ongoing process of giving transparent feedback consistently to all team members to encourage employee growth. Year-end or other scheduled reviews give managers structured opportunities to advance dignity elements like recognition, fairness, and accountability. And they give organizations important performance trend data, by functions and demographic groups,…
Tags Share In any workplace, it’s important to give special care to a new employee’s acclimation—and to do so consistently for all similarly situated employees. Inclusive new hire paperwork, introductions to new colleagues, check-ins with a supervisor, an explanation of the overall team or organization and its operations, arranging for lunch or break buddies—each of…
Tags Share Hiring processes offer a clear starting point for advancing workplace dignity. The dignity-honoring element of inclusion is a key factor here—organizations should consider where they look for talent (seeking to reach untapped labor pools), how they reach out to potential candidates, what signals they send with the application, how they conduct interviews, and…
Tags Share When new members join the team (whether as new hires or transfers from another part of the organization), you have an immediate opportunity to signal the ways you honor and promote dignity. You will be forming the basis for relationships that will develop and an understanding of what is important and valued in…
Tags Share Fostering an equitable environment of inclusion and belonging, where people of all identities can flourish and thrive, is at the core of honoring dignity. But many managers and colleagues tend to gravitate toward people who seem the most familiar to them—even in the hiring process. This often leaves those who are perceived as…
Tags Share Many organizations’ policies, values statements, and codes of conduct cover workplace behavior and can help advance dignity in a structural way. But they don’t exist only on the pages or screens on which they appear. They are given practical life based on how colleagues work with one another, how managers lead teams and…
Tags Share A culture of robust feedback—about team performance, operations, and individual performance, as well as about perceived dignity violations—promotes the dignity elements of fairness, learning, recognition, and acknowledgement. Poor delivery of feedback undermines dignity at work and stands in the way of team and growth, empowerment, and retention. The manager must make clear to…
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