Inclusion and diversity measures good for business, survey finds

The Diversity Council of Australia has released the second volume of its Inclusion@Work survey, which tracks the experiences of people with a disability, members of the LGBTI community and Indigenous Australians at work.

It found that while men were the least likely to be supportive of their workplace introducing diversity and inclusion measures, with just 38 per cent strongly supportive, but that is a 7 per cent increase on the result two years earlier.

The Council's chief executive Lisa Annese said she was somewhat surprised by how broad the support for inclusion measures was, considering how much media attention is generated against such measures.

"Only 3 per cent of people across the labour market either oppose or strongly oppose it, which means everyone else is in some state of support and 43 per cent of people strongly support it. So that's almost half," Ms Annese said.

Ms Annese said she was concerned by responses that said there are still groups that don't feel included in the workplace, like the 29 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers who said they felt like they had to hide or change who they are to fit in at work.

"I think we can all understand what it's like to feel excluded, it doesn't make us feel good to feel like you're on the outside, everyone's had that experience."

The survey also showed that people in workplaces that made efforts to make people feel more included performed better in business as well.

Workers who said they were part of an inclusive organisational culture were three times more likely to report their team was highly effective, and five times likely to say their team was innovative.

Workers in financial and insurance industries were most likely to report being in an inclusive workplace, while those in manufacturing were less likely.