14 ways to improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace

Diversity and inclusion in the workplace are two linked but distinct practices. Diversity is the representation of different identities across a workforce, spanning race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and national origin. Inclusion is whether those employees can contribute, be heard, and shape decisions once they are hired. A diverse and inclusive workplace requires both.

Promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace is one of the most important commitments a company can make to its employees. Beyond the moral case, the business case is clear: a diverse and inclusive workplace improves engagement, retention, innovation, and decision-making. Below are 15 practical ways to improve it.

• Women hold just 29% of C-suite roles in corporate America, and only 7% of those seats go to women of color, according to the McKinsey and LeanIn Women in the Workplace 2025 report.
• Inclusive cultures drive engagement and retention. When employees trust they will be treated fairly regardless of background, they are far more likely to stay with the company.
• An estimated 15 to 20% of the global workforce is neurodivergent, making needs-based and neuroinclusive design one of the fastest-growing areas of workplace inclusion.
• Strong workplace communication drives engagement for 52% of managers and 49% of corporate office workers, but only 35% of hourly employees, per the Firstup State of Employee Engagement in North America report. The gap is widest where inclusion matters most.
• Diversity without inclusion stalls. Representation alone does not create belonging if voices are not heard, valued, or built into decisions.

A diverse workforce, spanning age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and national origin, brings a wider range of viewpoints into the company. Those viewpoints feed product development, customer understanding, and decision-making.

The business case is well-documented. McKinsey’s annual research on diversity and inclusion in the workplace shows that companies with greater representation in leadership consistently outperform their peers on financial measures, and diverse teams report higher innovation and stronger problem-solving.

A diverse and inclusive workplace produces several specific benefits: higher revenue, more innovation, better decision-making, equal access to opportunities, fair treatment across groups, higher rates of job acceptance from qualified candidates, and stronger performance than less diverse competitors.

That is why so many executives now embrace policies and tools designed to increase diversity. But a diverse workforce is just the first step. Diversity does not automatically produce inclusion. Diversity is about who is hired. Inclusion is about whether they can contribute fully once they are. Both are needed to maintain, not just create, a diverse and inclusive workplace.

For more details on what drives engagement across roles, download our State of employee engagement report here.

The makeup of your executive team signals your culture to the rest of your workforce, your customers, and your partners. So it is essential to have a diverse top team across gender, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age, and more. Are men and women equally represented? What about people from various cultural and religious backgrounds?

According to McKinsey and LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace 2025 report, women hold just 29% of C-suite roles, unchanged from 2024, and women of color hold only 7%. The “broken rung” remains: for every 100 men promoted to manager in 2025, only 93 women were promoted, dropping to 74 for women of color.

If you can make a case to the C-suite about diversity and inclusion in the workplace, you should. You can also help executives communicate with employees transparently and attract diverse talent at the same time.

Introduce a policy for honoring a variety of cultural and religious practices. An inclusive workplace culture depends on it. You can do this by accommodating holidays and celebrations. SHRM’s guidance on inclusion and diversity highlights practical steps such as designating a refrigerator to keep Kosher food separate. Many companies offer floating holidays so employees can take time off for the religious occasions that matter to them. When employees see their organization as committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace, employee retention rises.

Many employees quit when they feel their authentic self is not appreciated. Create an diverse and inclusive environment where they feel connected to the company and its people, and free to express their unique perspectives. Make sure employees feel included and respected regardless of their:

• age
• gender
• race
• religion
• sexual orientation
• physical conditions
• cultural background, or
• country of origin

To build an inclusive culture in the work environment, do not play favorites, practice basic courtesy, and embrace non-discriminatory practices and policies. Employees feel included when they can voice concerns and opinions without fear. That is how a company puts diversity and inclusion into daily practice.

One practical lever: deliver communications on every channel your workforce already uses. Firstup, for example, reaches corporate, hybrid, and frontline employees through employee app, email, intranet, digital signage, and Microsoft Teams, with unified analytics that show where inclusion gaps are forming.

Want a culture of inclusion built on trust? Talk openly about gender and potential pay disparities, and be prepared to reveal some compensation data.

Workforce trust is built on transparency in policy and communication. Where pay imbalances exist, open the channels so employees can share their views, then explain clearly what the company is doing to close the gap. Avoid being defensive. Where data is skewed by factors such as maternity leave versus untaken paternity leave, explain that in a straightforward way.

Pay transparency is now a legal requirement in a growing number of jurisdictions. The European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive, with member-state transposition due by June 2026, requires employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings, bans questions about salary history, and mandates gender pay-gap reporting for companies with 150 or more employees.

For everyone to feel included, language barriers and preferences need to be taken seriously. Many employees work in environments where the dominant language is not their first, and that shapes how included they feel every day.

Global companies handle this routinely. When teams across different countries are invited to a virtual event, the host plans for translation, captioning, or simultaneous interpretation. The CEO’s speech, the Q&A, and even the chat may need multiple language paths.

The same care matters in smaller companies. Make sure employees feel comfortable communicating in whichever language they prefer, particularly in common areas or at company-sponsored events. Over the long term, a multilingual workforce may justify offering language-learning opportunities as an investment that pays off over time.

When you hire for diversity, you put your company in a position to think in culturally diverse ways. But for diverse viewpoints to stick, you have to account for inclusivity. Workplace diversity only pays off when paired with inclusion.

This matters because people from different backgrounds and generations sometimes have very different perspectives, from what they wear to work, to how they compose an email, to the feedback they give on reviews, to the ideas they pitch in meetings. It is not just important for an individual or small team to understand thinking patterns. It matters that people across the company understand how others think.

Welcoming diverse thinking generates ideas and useful feedback. It also creates an environment where everyone feels relevant and part of a shared mission.

Today’s workforce spans five generations, from Baby Boomers through Gen Z. Millennials remain the largest single generation, but Gen Z is projected to make up roughly 30% of the global workforce by 2030 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). A workforce that accommodates multiple generations is essential to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Different generations communicate differently — some prefer social channels or group chat, others email or in-person updates.

Internal communications teams can address this by reaching every employee on the channel they actually use. Firstup’s intelligent delivery targets by role, location, and preference, then routes the same message across employee app, email, intranet, digital signage, or Microsoft Teams. A multigenerational workforce is one of the most overlooked dimensions of workplace diversity.

Edited. Replaced a dated source and its associated statistic with a current analysis; rewritten to reflect the updated source.

A SHRM analysis of bias and inclusion practices finds that surface-level training and symbolic programs fail to produce real change unless leaders actively examine how bias shapes policies, hiring, compensation, and promotion decisions. Every organization is different, so a tailored approach makes sense.

A large body of research shows that hiring and promotion decisions are full of bias. Much of it is unconscious bias — sexism, racism, ageism that managers do not see in their own decision making. Left unchecked, it harms the company. Iris Bohnet, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of What Works: Gender Equality by Design, explains: “Seeing is believing… If we do not see male kindergarten teachers or female engineers, we do not naturally associate women and men with those jobs, and we apply different standards when we hire, promote, and evaluate job performance. Managers have to learn to de-bias their practices and procedures.”

Some strategies to combat bias include:

• Rewriting job descriptions so they are gender-neutral and use words that strike a balance of gendered descriptors and verbs.
• Creating a blind system for reviewing resumes so demographic characteristics are removed.
• Setting diversity goals as an organization to track progress.
• Auditing AI hiring tools for disparate impact, since automated screening can amplify the same bias it was meant to remove if it is left unchecked.

The annual pulse survey is common, but it often neglects to segment data by gender, generation, ethnicity, or geography. By looking only at total numbers, HR teams miss the whole picture and a chance to identify issues affecting specific groups. Segmented surveys are one of the most direct ways to measure inclusion in the workplace.

Focus groups are a strong way to collect qualitative data and gain deeper insight from employees. An outside facilitator makes employees more comfortable speaking freely and keeps the conversation neutral. Use what you hear to refine your approach to inclusion in the workplace.

One of the best ways to learn what employees care about is one-on-one conversations with their manager. For these to be effective, managers need an open-door approach. Workers have to feel comfortable speaking honestly, especially about diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Managers and leaders can support this with authentic executive communications. When leaders show they are also human, employees feel more comfortable speaking up and trusting their leadership.

When companies adopt a new digital tool, they need to consider the needs of every worker: the warehouse associate, the nurse, the truck driver, and the firefighter who do not work at a desk and lack easy access to the tools office workers rely on. Reaching every employee requires putting the end user at the center of every technology decision.

The access gap shows up in the data. Firstup’s 2026 State of Employee Engagement in North America report found that 60% of hourly workers have never used AI at work, and 64% cite lack of access, even though hourly workers see AI’s potential to improve communication more clearly than corporate office workers (42% versus 30%). When the workforce segments most affected by communication breakdowns are also the least enabled, inclusion strategies underperform.

Finally, look at the language used in your company documentation. Anything that can be made more equitable should be. Inclusive language is one of the most visible signals an inclusive workplace sends about who belongs.

Improved diversity and inclusion policies mean better engagement, stronger retention, and a more durable diverse workplace. Inclusion is the work of every team, every day, not a one-time campaign — and lasting diversity and inclusion comes from sustained behavior, not slogans.

One direction shaping inclusion work in 2026: needs-based and neuroinclusive design. An estimated 15 to 20% of the global workforce is neurodivergent (SHRM). A needs-based approach lets any employee request adjustments — written instructions, noise-canceling headsets, flexible hours, quiet focus spaces — without a clinical diagnosis. Roughly half of workplace accommodations cost nothing to implement, and a diverse workplace that includes neurodivergent professionals is measurably more productive on focused work.

For practical actions you can take to improve engagement and inclusion across roles, download our State of employee engagement report here.