How To Create A Culture That Welcomes And Celebrates Women
Creating A Culture That Welcomes And Celebrates Women - How?
Plenty of workplaces I know claim they champion gender diversity but in actual fact women who are part of them don’t feel they are welcome and championed to succeed. Very few of them occupy senior leadership positions or have a board seat. What are the foundations of a culture that truly supports and motivates women to rise up the ranks and excel just like their male counterparts?
Firstly, women get attracted to workplaces that have a proven track record of being egalitarian and having a good representation of women amongst their workforce already - ideally occupying a wide variety of positions on different levels. If that’s not the case in your company, you will need to work extra hard to build the trust of female job candidates.
Secondly, according to research and when it comes to cultural characteristics, women tend to value relationships, recognition and respect, communication, fairness, equity, collaboration, and work-family balance. If the above isn’t important building blocks of your culture already, it’s time to look at how to prioritise them. What this might mean is that, as an example, you introduce a new training programme to help your team communicate better (at GrantTree, we placed a lot of focus on giving and receiving difficult feedback).
Some women - though, importantly, not all - that are your existing or prospective employees will make a decision to start a family and, potentially, become the primary caretaker of a child. Naturally, what will be very important to them is the way you look at rights and benefits connected to maternity. A lot of women tend to be concerned in particular with making sure their job is safeguarded and with smooth reintegration into the workplace after their maternity leave is over.
On top of this, female team members tend to value having a support network at work, including buddies or mentors that can assist with career development and progression. If you don’t have an existing peer-to-peer support structure in your workplace, it’s worth building one, not just for the benefit of female employees. A good place to start is a simple buddy system my cofounder and I implemented at GrantTree where people pair up to touch base with each other on pretty much anything that relates to work - and, in some cases, personal life - on a regular basis.
The above is a shortlist - definitely non-exhaustive - of where you may want to start if you want to create a female-friendly workplace or transform an existing one to accommodate women’s needs. The encouraging statistic is that the number of women on FTSE 100 boards rose by 50% in the last five years. This points to the fact that more and more companies are open to creating opportunities for women to build successful careers within them. I hope the advice above has been useful to help your workplace become one of them.