Diversity Strategy Development

Setting diversity goals for your organization is the first step toward developing a strategic plan.

The primary goal is your diversity mission statement, which should clearly communicate your commitment to diversity.

A sample statement is: “We strive to respect and embrace individuals from different age groups, classes, ethnicities, genders, abilities, races, sexual orientations and religions.”

With a mission statement in place, the next step is to develop smaller objectives to help achieve the mission.

Objectives in the strategic plan should relate to your employees, your customers and your community.

An employee-related objective could be to recruit and hire workers from a diverse talent pool.

A customer-related objective could be assess your customers’ demographic information and train your staff to develop communication skills specific to your customers’ needs.

A community-related objective could be to contribute volunteer hours and funds to a local nonprofit organization that serves a diverse segment of the population.

The goals and objectives of the diversity strategic plan should be designed to serve as a vehicle to help move the organization from its current state with regard to equity and inclusion, practice, and representation toward the future state to which you aspire.