Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging in the Workplace

Diversity today is much more than just race and gender. Today’s employees prefer a workplace that has multiple facets of diversity, like race, ethnicity, religious inclination, sexual orientation, age, disability and most importantly, diversity of thought and leadership styles. Having a sense of inclusion and belonging has become a key influencing factor for employee engagement and satisfaction. Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) is a key aspect that organizations should weave into their culture and leverage the merits of a diverse workplace to achieve competitive business advantage.

Companies across the globe are evolving in multiple ways in their understanding of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. This includes best practices around implementing DIB as an organizational strategy, data-driven ways to assess the effectiveness of that strategy, and  internalizing that a thoughtful DIB strategy can have a positive impact on business outcomes. Change is happening, but at a slow pace. The DIB ecosystem and supporting industry, started pretty much as just a combination of HR policies and specialized training. It is now evolving into an ecosystem that includes diversity laws, policies that push for collection and sharing of diversity data and thoughtfully designed AI-based D&I practices and assessment. Companies have started acknowledging that DIB needs to be a well thought out corporate strategy and an integral part of a company’s culture fabric, for longer term success.

In this document, we present an introduction to DIB, followed by a look at why DIB matters for businesses and then a summary of where the industry is now. We then present some detail and analysis of the DIB industry landscape, followed by recommendations.