How Diversity Management Makes Employees Healthier
As our society becomes more diverse, companies experience the consequences of increasing psychosocial stress on employee health. Diversity and health management are both increasingly important while pursuing similar goals. How can companies benefit by recognizing the links between these areas?
We are facing good news regarding Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) recently: The share of women in boardrooms has finally increased a little, members of the LGBTI community can be more open with their sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, while people with migrant backgrounds make up a growing percentage of our workforce. Organizations have started to realize the potential benefits here, and the need for D&I management.
At the same time, working hours steadily increase while flexible working conditions continue to blur the lines between professional and private lives. We feel stressed out, overworked, even burned-out by everyday strain. This reflects in numbers: In the last few years, sick leave with these symptoms increased significantly. To minimize the resulting financial damage, organizations must nurture a healthy work environment more than ever.
Improving corporate health with D&I management
Traditional health management already offers numerous strategies and methods to strengthen physical and mental health, such as regular feedback talks, ergonomic workstations or sports groups in the workplace. However, comprehensive studies show that D&I management measures can also help to improve corporate health.
One core goal of diversity management is to provide social support to disadvantaged groups. Many measures of D&I aim to strengthen corporate culture regarding openness and respect, as well as to reduce bias and discrimination. At the same time, social support is a powerful factor for health: When we feel that our colleagues and leaders have our back, stress can become far less overwhelming.
For example, members of the LGBTI community that can be open about their identity at work without fearing discrimination suffer significantly less often from somatic or psychosomatic illness. They are also considerably more productive when compared to employees who hide their true selves.
How to successfully link health and diversity
At second glance, you might realize that both management approaches are quite alike and pursue similar goals: To promote employees’ happiness, motivation and productivity. Happy employees will not hesitate to recommend their employer, strengthening a company’s reputation and brand, increasing the number of applicants. So it makes sense to stop planning and establishing health and diversity measures separately — but to maximize the positive effects by combining both approaches.
Blueprint instructions for merging both concepts do not exist, and the integration can be kicked-off from either side. However, you should always take the company-specific context into account, because every organization has its own goals, individual needs and unique resources. In any case, all measures need to be coordinated across departments and management levels, advised by experts in the respective field, and actively involve all employees.
Diversity management means managing intersection points, too. Simple actions can already be very effective to benefit from the numerous synergies between D&I and health management. For example, have you heard about interculturally-educated health guides? Or the fact that conflict management training or fostering an empathetic and inclusive leadership style can also improve corporate health and diversity. In the next part of this series on diversity and health management, we will cover these and other concrete ideas to successfully launch the integration of both approaches.
