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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Leaders may mean well when they tout the economic payoffs of hiring more women and people of color, but there is no research support for the notion that diversifying the workforce automatically improves a company’s performance. This article critiques the popular rhetoric about diversity and revisits an argument the authors made 25 years ago: To fully benefit from increased racial and gender diversity, organizations must adopt a learning orientation and be willing to change the corporate culture and power structure.

Helps companies understand the unique circumstances that frame the legal and business enviornment in British Columbia, and provide practical assistance and observations for building lasting relations with First Nations.

Focus on forestry-specific challenges

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Presentation at the Women in Forestry Virtual Summit

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

La boîte à outils – Ce qui fonctionne est une boîte à outils en ligne conçue pour les organisations canadiennes qui cherchent à adopter des initiatives favorisant l’équité et la diversité. Cette trousse comprend des ressources qui les aident à mettre en place des politiques et des méthodes de recrutement, d’encadrement, de promotion et de maintien en poste pour les membres du conseil et les employé.e.s, de même que des stratégies visant à lutter contre le racisme et le harcèlement et à favoriser un milieu de travail inclusif, ainsi que d’autres activités et initiatives connexes pertinentes. La boîte à outils comprend également des exemples d’organisations canadiennes afin de mettre en évidence leurs réussites en matière de diversité.

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Sector-specific recommendations

Adapts safety practices for diverse workplaces

Online training for forest sector workers and employers