Championing inclusion: 5 steps to making an impact

Many organisations are committed to creating environments where employees feel valued and respected. But even with the best intentions, it’s easy to overlook how complex and varied people’s identities and experiences can be, and how that shapes what inclusion looks like.

It goes beyond race, gender, sexuality, or socio-economic status. It’s about recognising that every employee is an individual, and there may be factors that impact their experience within work in a different way to others.

It’s about understanding what someone might need when they’re dealing with anything that may impact their ability to feel fully included. This could be anything from a neurodivergence to going through the menopause, undergoing fertility treatment, or being a carer.

Inclusion starts with building relationships with your employees that enable them to be open about any aspect of their unique needs and any accommodations that may need to be made. The first step to improving inclusion is to create a culture of openness, empowering managers to build close personal relationships with their direct reports.

Here are 5 tips on how to ensure your organisation prioritises inclusion:

Assess policies for inclusiveness

Creating a genuinely inclusive workplace takes more than well-meaning policies; it requires a clear understanding of where gaps exist in knowledge, training, communication and documentation. Often, these gaps only become visible when viewed through the lens of employees’ lived experiences.

For example, do your onboarding processes set the right tone from day one? Are managers equipped to recognise when someone might be struggling? Are communication channels accessible to everyone across the business?

Questions like these can uncover how inclusive your current approach really is, and where policies or practices may unintentionally exclude. This might include areas such as menopause, gender transition, pregnancy loss or domestic abuse – topics that employees may not always feel comfortable discussing with a manager; but having clear, inclusive policies can offer vital support and demonstrate a genuine commitment to wellbeing.

That’s why expert assessment can make such a difference. Our HR specialists will review your existing policies with an ED&I lens, identifying where updates are needed, highlighting inclusive language opportunities, and recommending additions where there are gaps. You’ll receive professionally marked-up documents, making it easy to implement changes with confidence.

Alongside policy wording, we also assess the wider people experience – including recruitment, demographics, pay equity and career progression – to help you build a strategy that’s progressive, practical and tailored to your workforce.

Improve inclusivity with technology

Your people data holds powerful insights that are often overlooked. Used effectively, it can highlight where inclusion is breaking down, such as gaps in manager capability that make employees feel unsupported and more likely to disengage or leave. Spotting these patterns early allows you to take targeted action before they become bigger issues.

The data captured by empower® helps brings HR analytics to life, giving you clear visibility of people matters across your organisation. By combining employee relations data from the platform with your organisational and people data, it brings to light the key trends, pressure points and behaviours that shape employee experience. The result is a set of intuitive dashboards that help you spot issues early, track progress and make evidence-based decisions that drive inclusion forward.

empower® can also be complemented by deeper analysis from our in-house people analytics team. Alongside the self-serve dashboards, our experts provide quarterly review packs that identify meaningful themes and highlight where focused HR interventions could have the greatest impact.

We look beyond surface-level metrics, by benchmarking activity across your organisation, and, where appropriate, comparing your profile with similar employers. It’s a blend of technology and human insight designed to help you take confident, evidence-based steps towards a more inclusive, engaged workforce.

This analysis of employee relations data enabled Wickes to identify the root cause of an issue that required additional manager training to improve the support of neurodivergent employees.

Using these insights, they partnered with the National Autistic Society to provide specialised training and raise awareness around the unique strengths and challenges of autistic colleagues, helping to build a more inclusive and supportive workplace. You can read the full case study to find out more here.

Provide equality, diversity and inclusion training

Offering learning and development that helps employees understand how different identities intersect and shape experiences builds awareness, encourages respect and creates a genuine sense of belonging at work.

Employee engagement and satisfaction are vital for any organisation, and teams that appreciate the value of different perspectives are more likely to be productive and collaborative. A wider range of views brings innovative ways of thinking to problem-solving and decision-making, helping organisations meet their objectives more effectively.

Our eLearning programmes are designed to embed ED&I strategies into daily practice, ensuring that everyone plays a part in shaping a safe, inclusive culture – from recognising unconscious bias to strengthening communication and leadership practices.

This extends to neuro-inclusive training. Research shows that 37% of managers lack any kind of neurodiversity training, missing a key opportunity to unlock unique strengths and drive performance. Watch our on-demand webinar Manager empowerment and the value of neuro-inclusion here for insights and strategies for raising neuro-inclusion awareness and supporting neurodiverse talent.

Continuously monitor and adapt ED&I initiatives

Maintaining an inclusive workplace isn’t a one-time exercise; it requires regular review, adaptation and action. Ongoing monitoring of ED&I strategies helps organisations respond to evolving legislation, societal expectations and the growing understanding of what true inclusivity looks like.

As of October last year, an amendment to the Equality Act 2010 placed a greater duty on employers to proactively prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. Failure to comply could lead to financial penalties, reputational damage and legal action — reinforcing the need for a robust, continuously evolving approach to creating safe, inclusive environments. Download this useful checklist to assess your organisation’s compliance.

Proposed changes in the Employment Rights Bill will add further requirements, including annual equality action plans for larger employers, wider pay gap reporting across ethnicity and disability, and making employers liable for third-party harassment across all protected characteristics.

Staying ahead of these changes not only ensures compliance, but also strengthens your organisation’s culture, employee satisfaction and ability to attract and retain diverse talent.

By showing a commitment to regularly reviewing and improving your ED&I practices it enables you to better meet all employees’ expectations whilst also protecting your organisation’s reputation, creating a workplaces where everyone can thrive.

Empower managers to champion inclusivity

Managers play a pivotal role in shaping the employee experience and bringing ED&I strategies to life. Yet many managers feel underprepared to have sensitive conversations, spot issues early or confidently address concerns. Without the right support, even well-intentioned managers can inadvertently create barriers to inclusion.

Empowering managers with the right training, tools and confidence is key to embedding inclusive behaviours throughout your organisation. It ensures that ED&I isn’t seen as an HR initiative, but as a fundamental part of good people management.

By empowering managers to manage with confidence, organisations create more inclusive day-to-day experiences for employees, reducing risk, improving retention and building a workplace where all individuals feel supported and valued.

Small steps towards improving inclusion

Taking any action towards improving inclusion and understanding the experiences of your individual employees is better than standing still, so don’t wait to get everything in line before making changes. Small steps can make a huge difference.

At AdviserPlus, inclusion is at the heart of everything we do and we have an InclusivityPlus team who meet monthly to share ideas and plan activities to ensure we keep inclusion front and centre of our culture. We are also proud to be a Disability Confident Leader Organisation and so are committed to providing equal opportunities to people with disabilities.

Our passion for inclusion doesn’t end with what we do for our own people. We are working towards improving inclusion in all areas. Here is just one example of how we are taking small steps, thinking differently about inclusion by making our webinars more accessible for those in the deaf community.

Did you know that according to the British Deaf Association, over 87,000 people in the UK have BSL as their preferred language? BSL is not a direct translation of English, so for those in the deaf community whose native language is BSL, written English in subtitles does not go far enough in making webinars accessible to them.

We want to ensure this community can engage with the content we share, so we are working diligently to add BSL to all of our on-demand webinars and videos – with the first updates to our latest ‘People priorities 2025’ series soon.

Ready to turn ED&I ambition into action?

Building a truly inclusive workplace takes more than policies; it requires empowering your managers, embedding inclusive behaviours and using data-driven insights to guide continuous improvement.

Find out how we can help you integrate ED&I into the heart of your people management practices with our policy assessment services, learning and development solutions and innovative ER technology by getting in touch here.