​As 2020 comes to a close we now know the true meaning of digital transformation. Every organization, every employee, and every industry experienced transformation like never before. As we look to 2021, many ask what will the future of work look like almost one year into this pandemic. Many expect that the work from home era will continue as there is a high probability that many organizations will have employees work remotely well into 2021. A recent survey from the Wall Street Journal suggests that only about 25 percent of employees have returned to physical office locations across 10 major cities. Many expect that remote work will continue even after the pandemic crisis passes.  As you create your organizational priorities and strategies for 2021consider the following:

• Real Estate
  • What opportunities exist to repurpose real estate expenses (dollars spent on facilities)? Could these funds be used to help employees improve their home workspace?
• Employee Wellness
  • Many wellness programs were not fully leveraged by employees during this pandemic. Are there opportunities to further adopt employee wellness for the work from home era? Should additional wellness benefits be offered (physical, mental, financial and spiritual)?
• Virtual training
  • What opportunities exist to further virtual training in 2021 for employee development?
• Technology Infrastructure
  • What investments need to be made to further support streamlined technology for employees and customers? How can we continue to innovate at a pace to keep up with the digital economy?
• Flexible Work Models
  • Evaluate staffing models to see where there are opportunities to create or further expand on flexible work arrangements. 

As business activities restart and reset amid the ongoing pandemic, HR leaders are revising their priorities for 2021. Not surprisingly, the future of work now tops the list as organizations grapple with shifts in work trends driven by the response to the pandemic. The implications for HR are broad and substantial, as they drive imperatives such as the need to equip leaders to manage remote teams over the long haul, preserve company culture with a more distributed workforce and engage workers in a cost-constrained environment. To successfully navigate the post-pandemic environment, HR leaders expect to focus on each of the following five priorities.

Future of work. Leaders need to consider the predictions for what the future of work will look like and assess the likelihood of each trend impacting the organization. Understanding the future of work is about understanding the permanent workplace shifts post-COVID.

​Critical skills and competency development. To adopt a more dynamic approach to managing shifting skill needs, HR leaders should first identify areas of the organization with significant changes in priorities and related changes in skill needs. Next, the roles and projects that need support should be broken into individual skills and outcomes. Learning and development leaders can partner with managers to upskill a select cohort of motivated and influential employees to provide personalized learning support to colleagues.

​As communities and organizations continue to face systematic racism and injustices, you might be asking yourself, “what can I do?” As human resource professional, you are in a unique position to engage in the demanding work to shape changes within yourself and in others. As a starting point consider the following:

• Work to educate yourself and others about the pervasive issues of racism and the structures that perpetuate the status quo.
• Embark on difficult conversations with individuals, coworkers, and community leaders as a step in the journey toward an equitable and just society.
• Utilize tools and other resources to learn about your intercultural mindset.

​If you think you need to change the culture of your organization, it is essential to first understand the employee experience. This means taking a snapshot of the behaviors and mindsets that are the norm in the organization. By recognizing the current culture, you can then determine the extent to what needs to be addressed.

As a female college student who is currently pursuing an education in business, I never fully grasped how women were viewed in the workplace. It wasn’t until I traveled to a business conference during my junior year that I fully understood the extent of the gender gap. I distinctly remember looking at a photo of a company’s board of directors and sitting there motionless. The board was filled with 10 white males and one white female. It was a surreal moment of disbelief. Remind you, this doesn’t consider the possibility of if I were a woman of color in a corporate company.
 
Women in Leadership is a big topic of conversation in today’s business workplace. The conversation can be geared towards pay gaps, the ability of women to successfully perform leadership roles, and how this often directly impacts the family’s lifestyle. While we do not have time to do an in-depth discussion on all of those areas, I will highlight a few main points that are heavily backed by shocking statistical data.
 
Let’s begin with the misrepresentation of women at the senior level leadership position. A report released by Catalyst in December 2011 showed that women held just 14 percent of the executive-level jobs at Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. While the explanation is not simple or easy, it can be explained by culture and norms. Sophie Black, a principal for Mercer’s executive remuneration team calls it a “pyramid of invisibility” for women in corporate life. Women are often not considered for senior level leadership roles because of unsaid workplace bias, “lack” of skills, or being considered emotionally too connected. 

​The second point of focus is the pressure on women to maintain a certain image of motherhood while sacrificing a career. This tends to be a pressure dictated by society but is supported with a cycle built by a male dominated workplace. The cycle comes through a lack of female mentors who can guide younger female employees who are currently facing the same difficulties in the workplace. Another fear for women is how they are viewed by their peers. Women often receive harsh criticism by the community if they are not always present at their child’s events. An article from Forbes states that working women who drop off their kids frequently received critically toned comments, such as “we haven’t seen you in a while.”

Ensuring people from underrepresented communities are recruited and advanced is far more beneficial for an organization than any one individual. Diversity, equity, and inclusion attempts to level the playing field to allow the best ideas to flourish, connect talented individuals from underrepresented backgrounds with opportunities that those in the majority often have unfair access to, and empower the best organizations to thrive. Done right, creating diverse, equitable, inclusive organizations yield greater profitability, innovation, and smarter teams.
 
When employees who are different from their colleagues are allowed to flourish, the company benefits from their ideas, skills and engagement. The retention rate of those workers also rises. Here are five practical strategies for creating an inclusive environment.

1. Educate your leaders. Your organization’s executives and managers will be instrumental to your D&I efforts. Leaders—especially middle managers—must be held accountable for results. Leaders should be expected to demonstrate a commitment to inclusivity and, importantly, to be responsible for the environment in their respective departments. Ongoing feedback from their own managers will help to hold them accountable, as does tying the goal to their performance evaluations.
2. Form an inclusion council. Consider forming a council comprising a dedicated group of eight to 12 influential leaders who are one or two levels below the CEO. Carefully select them for their passion and commitment to inclusion. They need to be “a channel for communication” between the rank and file and the C-suite, and that includes advocating for inclusiveness in discussions with top executives when necessary. Ideally, councils should be involved in goal-setting around hiring, retaining and advancing a diverse workforce and in addressing any employee engagement problems among underrepresented employee groups. 
3. Celebrate employee differences. One of the most important ways to show employees that you respect their backgrounds and traditions is to invite them to share those in the workplace. It’s well-known that diversity in teams leads to better decision-making, greater innovation and ultimately higher returns.  Inclusion is what connects people to the business, and we believe it’s one of the core reasons that diverse employees stay with organizations that recognize and celebrate diversity.
   
4. Listen to employees. Conduct a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s demographics and people processes to develop specific strategies to promote inclusiveness. Think about the culture you want and how you can create one that is authentic to your brand while meeting the needs of your employees. 
5. Communicate goals and measure progress. Establish and clearly communicate specific, measurable and time-bound goals as you would with any other strategic aim. Every company should first benchmark their culture before they begin investing in it. Here are some actions to follow:

• Conduct a full audit of your people processes—from recruiting and hiring to developing and retaining employees. Couple the data with engagement and other workforce survey data to gain a full measure of your climate.
• ​Identify any shortcomings and measurable discrepancies around inclusiveness in your organization.
• Instill rigor into inclusion strategies with data-driven plans, and measure the results. 
• Establish a clear business case for how the company will benefit by having a more inclusive culture by asking:
  1. What are our inclusion goals?
  2. What are the reasons for those goals?
  3. How do we quantify inclusion?
  4. How will inclusion impact our mission, brand or bottom line?

 
When you can answer these questions, you’re speaking the language of your stakeholders, legitimizing the business of inclusion and making inclusion a ‘verb’ versus an ideal.
Instead of trying to change some people to fit the organization, we must focus on transforming our organizations to fit all people. To get workplace diversity and inclusion right, you need to build a culture where everyone feels valued and heard.
 
Adapted from SHRM.