Business Support Toolkit 4.0 released by World Economic Forum

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Toolkit 4.0, published by the World Economic Forum, guides restarting businesses to create fair, equitable and diverse workplaces. As business leaders seek to take greater responsibility for addressing social justice, an integrated approach to diversity, equality and inclusion in the workplace can provide a key route.

The toolkit suggests that as companies recover from the crisis of COVID-19, they have a profound opportunity to ensure that equality, inclusion and fairness constitute the “new normal” and tackle inequality, racism and bigotry due to race, ethnicity, capacity, sexual identity and all other aspects of human diversity.

Technology has advanced so greatly that they have the potential to ensure equality. For instance, the latest tools available to review candidates for a job can do it in much more detail than before and this can consequently reduce bias and bring in transparency.

However, WEF highlights that technology alone cannot achieve this equity. Only an integrated approach where advanced technology is paired with human-centric approaches has the capacity to eliminate such biases and ensure inclusiveness.

Promoting diversity and equity is not just the right thing to do but also offers many benefits for the businesses. The toolkit cites research that suggests “well-managed diverse teams significantly outperform homogenous ones over time, across profitability, innovation, decision-making and employee engagement. Conversely, companies that fall behind their peers in diversity, equity and inclusion are less likely to achieve above-average profitability”.

“Successful organizations are powered by the diverse opinions, skill sets and life experiences of their employees. Ensuring racial justice, gender parity, disability inclusion, LGBTI equality and inclusion of all forms of human diversity needs to be the ‘new normal’ in the workplace set to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis and it is clear that technology can be leveraged to help rapidly make this a reality,” said Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director, World Economic Forum.

The toolkit specifically mentions that the efforts to achieve diversity equity and inclusion should begin with the senior management in any organization. The three key areas to focus are talent sourcing and selection, organizational analysis and monitoring and employee experience, reward and development.

The toolkit is developed in collaboration with leading experts and practitioners from the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Equality and Inclusion Agenda.

The comprehensive toolkit can be viewed and downloaded from a dedicated link within the official World Economic Forum page on https://bit.ly/WEFToolkit