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When you hire persons with disabilities, you help create an inclusive workplace that benefits everyone. There are hundreds of thousands of working-aged Canadians with disabilities who are ready and eager to work. They have the skills, enthusiasm and potential to bring great value to your organization.

Building an inclusive culture, as discussed in an earlier section, takes thought, time, and commitment. In order to be attractive as an employer to candidates with disabilities, you will want to be able to demonstrate and communicate your inclusion practices and organizational accessibility goals to job applicants.

Inclusive hiring in British Columbia supports the government’s vision of becoming the most accessible province in Canada for people with disabilities. This resource inventory was created to assist employers in creating more inclusive and accessible workplaces.

While backlash to DEI has challenged how many companies and practitioners approach creating more equitable workplaces, fewer have considered whether DEI work itself has room to improve. A new framework, built around the core outcomes of fairness, access, inclusion, and representation (FAIR) that DEI was supposed to achieve for all, offers a new direction. Instead of the performative, individual-centered, isolated, and zero-sum methods of the current mainstream approach, DEI work must evolve to become outcomes-based, systems-focused, coalition-driven, and win-win. And by emphasizing fairness in policies, broad accessibility, inclusive cultures, and trust-based representation, organizations can better address the needs of all employees and create meaningful, lasting change.

All too often, traditional DEI programming and policy have focused on how not to behave. This focus on the negative can make people so worried about saying or doing the wrong thing that they disengage or get mad and push back. In this article, the authors argue that a better approach is to focus on micro-inclusions — small but intentional acts that include everyone in the actual process of producing work together. They summarize some of their recent research on the effects of micro-inclusions and then offer some guidance on how to foster a culture of micro-inclusion in the workplace.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has served a critical role in advancing accessible and equitable communications for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. As companies race to automate their customer service operations in recent years, many are inadvertently creating new barriers for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Leaders can lean on the vision and spirit of the ADA to create more inclusive and accessible customer service programs in this era of AI.

Despite progress in the past decade, gender equity still remains uneven in U.S. companies. Coupled with recent political attacks on the very concept of DEI and declines in corporate commitments to racial and gender equity, there’s concern that the next decade may not bring as much progress as the last one — which is why we need to keep our foot on the accelerator when it comes to achieving gender parity at work. According to the latest Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey, many of the tactics experts and scholars have been recommending to company leaders for years have been paying off and yielding progress for women in the workplace.

In recent decades, women’s labor force participation has leveled off, men and women remain concentrated into different occupations, and women continue to shoulder significantly more housework and childcare than men. This slow — even stagnant — pace of change is a key finding from the new 2024 Women in the Workplace 10th anniversary report by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company. The report highlights that there’s been even less progress when it comes to women’s lived experiences in the workplace. And most concerningly, there have been almost no improvements across generations. In fact, not only are the experiences of women under 30 similar to those of women 50 and older — in some ways, they’re worse. Companies must do more to address the distinct obstacles that stall women’s progress early in their careers. The authors present some troubling findings from the research, as well as specific actions companies can take to better support the next generation of women leaders.

The word diversity appears to trigger a wide variety of emotions from its equally wide array of definitions. And in our current moment of political polarization, it appears to be getting worse. What if we could frame a value proposition for diversity that emphasizes the return on investment for the organization, benefits every individual and team, and is rooted in science and backed by empirical research? We have this at our fingertips: Diverse teams outperform consistently. This model is better suited to our current social tensions and avoids some of the pitfalls of the common value propositions we’ve discussed.

While DEI has faced significant backlash in the last year, companies across industries are still looking for ways to build healthy, inclusive workplace cultures where everyone can do their best work. New data at shows that even during this year of backlash, companies continued to make progress on many of their DEI initiatives. There are three ways companies should consider shifting their approach to DEI, both to be responsive to the current moment and to achieve greater impact: resetting the narrative, using data more effectively, and moving from siloed efforts to an embedded organizational focus on creating cultures that work for everyone.