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Policies to Advance Women in the Workplace
Human resource policies are fundamental for establishing an organization’s workplace culture and fostering each employee’s work experience and career progression. They are important building blocks that create an enabling environment for women to thrive and progress in their careers, facilitate setting and tracking progress toward goals, and support developing a business case for advancing women in the workplace.
When effective policies set the tone of an organization, they reflect leadership commitment and enable organizations to achieve real change in practice. While creating a policy is an important step toward ensuring balanced representation of men and women, all HR policies must be reviewed with careful attention to ensure women receive support across the organization—throughout policy implementation.
Successful HR policies that fully support women’s economic empowerment help promote women’s participation and leadership throughout all stages of the employee life cycle. By ensuring each policy prioritizes balanced representation of men and women with clear measures and targets, levels of accountability, and action plans to implement the policy and monitor progress, companies can ensure all people prosper in the workplace. Adopting policies for equal treatment of men and women throughout the employee life cycle also positions companies for enhanced business performance.
Tips for Policy Implementation
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Secure Early Buy-In at All Levels and Ensure Men’s and Women’s Voices are Involved in Drafting the Policy
To build a more inclusive workforce, both men’s and women’s voices must be involved in drafting policies. HR policies should be created with input from people in multiple departments at various levels, ensuring that female and male employees and decision-makers are included. The policy should have buy-in at all levels, especially senior leadership, to ensure commitment to policy implementation and board-level adoption.
Ensure Strong and Ongoing Dissemination
Once the policy is in place, the company needs a strong and ongoing dissemination plan to explain why the policy is needed and how it will benefit all staff as well as the organization as a whole. Staff, particularly managers and senior leaders who are responsible for modeling and enforcing policies, will require training on the policy and the topics it covers. Communications and HR departments play an important role in sharing success stories to help staff understand and support the policies, introducing policies in the onboarding process, and ensuring all staff can easily access and review the policies. An organization can survey employees to assess understanding of the policies and whether they are being followed or used appropriately.
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Create Accountability
Lasting improvements require an enabling environment for accountability and follow-through. There must be an action plan with clear, measurable, and time-bound targets to support policy implementation. A specific department should be responsible for implementing the policy, monitoring progress toward actionable targets with sex-disaggregated data, and reviewing the policy on a periodic basis to assess if changes are needed. To ensure senior leadership is accountable, the company should also establish and track key performance indicators for managers’ successful implementation of the policy.
Best Practices for Using Policies to Advance Women in the Workplace
Use our Best Practices Framework tool to learn how to create and revise effective workplace policies.
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