WFH: The Secret Weapon in Achieving DEI?

 Welcome to the Black Heritage Month issue of Recruiting Roundtable, where we’ll explore the possibilities — some well-worn and others fresh and still surfacing — that remote work will be a boon for diversity and inclusion. Enjoy! 

Why the rise of remote work may help companies become more diverse — and more inclusive

Getting remote work and diversity and inclusion right are two of the biggest challenges currently facing talent acquisition. No surprise there. Both issues represent seismic changes.

The good news? Solving one of these issues could help your organization move forward on the other.

In a post for the Talent Blog, writer Samantha McLaren notes that remote work could make it easier to hire underrepresented talent. Her point was echoed at LinkedIn’s recent virtual event, Driving Change: How to Create a More Equitable and Inclusive Workplace (click here to watch the hour-long discussion). Panelist Danny Guillory, the head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Dropbox, shared how his company has adopted a distributed hiring strategy. 

“We’re partnering with our talent acquisition team and thinking about how strategically we can really start to source and fill the top of the funnel with candidates from areas that are more diverse,” Danny says. “We actually did a lot of research in advance and picked out four or five major markets throughout the country where we really want to focus our efforts because they have a much larger percentage of Black and LatinX candidates.”

Remote work may also allow LGBTQ+ employees to have their work ‘speak for itself’

There has been less attention paid to how remote work, almost paradoxically, can boost inclusivity. As Sam notes in her post: “For LGBTQ+ employees who have faced discrimination as a result of their gender expression, this may result in less scrutiny over the way they look — allowing their work to speak for itself.”

Home can also be a safer, less exhausting workplace for employees with disabilities. Companies that were reluctant to allow remote work before the pandemic for fear of productivity losses should now reexamine any lingering hesitancy they may harbor about hiring people with disabilities.

WFH may be nudging inclusivity along in some other ways too. When I spoke with Damien Hooper-Campbell, the chief diversity officer at Zoom, he noted — in a deft bit of product placement — that when you’re on gallery view on a videoconference call, every box is the same size. “There isn’t a group of folks who are in the U.S.,” Damien said, “laughing and chattering in a conference room, while the folks from Bengaluru and Seoul and Amsterdam are on a screen and people have their backs to them.”

Finally, Damien pointed out that there is one other group, which is often silenced, that may have more of an opportunity to “speak” with remote work. “If there’s someone who is a bit more introverted,” Damien said, “they can chat in the box and still get their viewpoint in. Whereas before, if you had somebody like me who tends to be verbose, the introverts may not have been able to get a word in edgewise.” (Which is exactly why so many introverts, including myself, become writers — to not only get a word in, but get the last word.)

Remote work is not a cure-all. For some employees, it will increase their sense of isolation and undermine their well-being. But it is an option that, if implemented wisely, can help nudge companies closer to becoming places that truly welcome every employee, whether they’re working from a corner office on the 15th floor or a converted mudroom just off the kitchen.