The most progressive organizations understand the importance of focusing on improving their employee experience by fostering employee engagement has on retention. 

Owing to a shrinking labor market, workers have far more alternatives and are changing jobs to accept diversity in lifestyles. Those are the jobs where employees feel they have opportunities to grow and advance their careers. 

To retain high-performing employees, some companies have focused on expanding their employee experiences by encouraging engagement opportunities that reveal their employee's value.  Beginning with the initial interview, onboarding to departure, and any other processes an employee undertakes with an organization, is the employee experience. The engagement aspect is the relationship the employee feels with their manager who represents the organization. This usually changes throughout an employee's career. 

Research has revealed that employees who have benefited from their company's authentic commitment to diversity equity and inclusion (DE&I) are two times as engaged as disgruntled employees. Our work at Woods Kovalova Group has shown that diverse and inclusive organizations increase performance by 12%. Their employees are 19% more apt to remain with the company and work together 57% more efficiently in teams.

Your Culture Determines Your Turnover

Diversity is considerably more than gender, race,, and origin. Many organizations employ a workforce that comprises differences in sexual orientation, physical capability, knowledge, religion, education, politics, and economic status. We know those organizations with diverse workforces improve revenue, improve trust, and increase performance individually and collectively. The best managers know they represent the company to their employees. They generate trust and profit from increased engagement and employee retention by optimizing the experiences of all employees. 

Companies lacking proactive retention strategies are taking the initiative by using their resources to attract and retain diverse talent. Despite pointing recruitment efforts towards recruiting diverse talent, many are losing talent at an alarming rate because of their continuing struggles with inclusion.

What are the common barriers to inclusion?

These would be systematic biases stemming from the organization's culture. This could be revealed by an organization not walking the talk for DE&I initiatives from leadership or unconscious bias around projects, performance evaluations, promotions, and recompense. 

Disproportionally underrepresented employees frequently face microaggressions and are more prone to being reviewed unfairly for their contributions or ignored for mentorships and promotions. A study by the consulting firm Mckinsey states that women in unstable conditions can expect to have their judgment questioned and face demeaning comments.

Workplace culture is the vehicle that drives turnover.

High turnover rates for diverse employees can impugn your customer service, assuming your workforce does not reflect your customers. This can also hinder your expansion into new marketplaces. One's reputation can strain relationships with suppliers. If diversity increases innovation, it follows that a lack of diversity and inclusion reduces innovation and adversely impacts product development.

Businesses with better than average diversity among their leadership teams made more than half of their revenue from pioneering products and services.  This reflects nearly 20% more growth than those with less than the median for diversity management teams.