Resource Centers:(News, information, and tools to support your practice)
November 2009
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Creating an inclusive culture
Use diversity education to enhance your practice's bottom line
By Keith Curran
You invest in diversity education programs for your staff in an effort to understand your existing patients, expand to new demographics, and reap the benefits of a diverse workforce.
But what can you do to create an atmosphere in your practice that will enable you to reap all the benefits of diversity in your office staff?
An alternative approach might be to create a more inclusive “culture of diversity” through a long-term, relational approach that emphasizes an attitudinal and cultural transformation in which you break barriers by moving away from “managing diversity” toward “managing for diversity.”
Research indicates the organizational culture of your practice directly impacts how it performs, and therefore, directly impacts your bottom line. Creating an inclusive culture of diversity in your practice will provide a realistic opportunity for a culture that promotes diversity and inclusion, and will give you the opportunity to capitalize on the contributions of a diverse office staff.
And it’s exactly that type of culture that will provide facilitators the best opportunity to present diversity education programs to your staff without evoking negative emotional reactions such as guilt, shame, defensiveness, stereotyping, and/or resentment.
Culture of diversity
Managing for diversity (i.e., creating an inclusive culture) provides the best chance for lowering turnover among diverse employees, attracting new employees, and realizing the benefits from such a labor force. It creates a culture in which your staff can be proud of their unique perspectives and are willing and even eager to share them.
Without such an atmosphere, you can’t incorporate these perspectives into improving your practice and you’ll miss opportunities to capitalize on these insights and improve your bottom line.
You can create this inclusive culture by:
• Building a culture that utilizes the unique perspectives a diverse workforce can bring to your practice;
• Establishing a culture in which your staff feels proud of their own uniqueness, while becoming socially integrated into a larger group;
• Maintaining an inclusive culture within which your staff are intrinsically motivated to take ownership of the practice and to learn from each other so they can discover and appreciate multiple perspectives; and
• Incorporating an organizational strategy that capitalizes on the multiple perspectives of your staff contribution to creativity, productivity, and the marketability of your practice.
Creating this inclusive culture will require a change in the way you currently think about and conduct diversity education programs. Managing for diversity is a proactive, ongoing strategy that creates a culture within which people appreciate and can capitalize on individual differences — regardless of changing legal, demographic, and economic conditions.
Your diversity education programs must focus on more than visual identities (such as gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) that might hinder the emergence of an inclusive environment by overemphasizing differences rather than commonalities and/or collective identities at the expense of individual identities. They
Making an approach
One approach to a different kind of diversity education program is the use of life stories coupled with food in a socially inclusive setting. Because the sharing of food is typically viewed as a simplistic way to create awareness of other cultures, emphasize the life stories portion with food serving only to tempt participation.
The stories will prompt the explorations of differences, which will result in an atmosphere of openness and dialogue within which participants will share aspects of themselves that might otherwise be overlooked in the collective identity of the practice.
You may want to consider using teams to tell the stories; some staff might be reluctant to participate as an individual but may feel more comfortable participating on a team.
Set aside time for this on a regular basis, such as at the beginning of a meeting, during lunch, or on an afternoon or morning break. The stories should be structured around something of general interest to all participants — perhaps on music, a book, art, or favorite quote.
This provides the storytellers with structure while still giving them the choice of what they want to share as well as the intensity or shallowness of what they choose to share.
You should have an experienced facilitator available to “tease out” and adapt the stories to key issues in the practice. Facilitators must be open-minded, allowing discussion topics to emerge from the questions, comments, and enhancements that members present.
Facilitators can ask leading questions such as “What issues can we identify for further discussion toward understanding the nature of human beings?” “How can we apply the lessons learned here to our practice?” “What issues introduced in this story can we capitalize on in an effort to honor and make comfortable every member of our workforce?” and “What issues introduced in this story can we capitalize on in our practice?”
Your staff might just be surprisingly insightful!
Whose up first?
It is imperative that you be the first to present a story. Doing so sends the message that you support the program and defines the scope of the exercise, such as the size of the food snack and the length and intensity of the story.
Likewise, by demonstrating open and sharing behaviors, you portray a cultural expectation that staff would more likely be willing to replicate.
Following your presentation, invite your staff to schedule and share a story at future meetings. Sharing must be voluntary and volunteers must choose what they want to share.
Not all participants will volunteer, while others will seek multiple opportunities to share. However, most staff will look forward to the presentations and learning something about others. Once sharing activities become an expectation or cultural norm, volunteerism tends to increase.
Managing for diversity can provide you a competitive advantage and directly impact your bottom line through the attraction, retention, and leveraging of the unique capacities of a diverse workforce by creating a relational culture of inclusiveness in your practice.
Your diversity education program can help you get there by creating a learning experience that your staff is intrinsically motivated to take ownership of — thereby giving you a diversity education program that really works.
BIO] Keith Curran is a partner with Harkcon, developers of the Chiropractic Competency Toolbox and authors of [ITAL]The Chiropractic Hiring Guide[/ITAL] and specialists in chiropractic human resource solutions. He can be reached at 800-499-6456 or through www.harkcon.com.
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Comments
Location: Silver Spring, MD
Great insights. Thanks for sharing. I particularly like your emphasis on creating diversity culture, not diversity programs. One point, using food as a focal point of a gathering can be problematic culturally and also for compulsive overeaters. We need to be aware that not everyone has a health relationship with food. We also need to recognize that different cultures have different eating practices.