DIVERSITY INCLUSION GENDER FLEXIBILITY
Singapore - HR professionals in APAC are being urged to leverage their diversity strategies as gender, flexi-hours and family-friendly and cultural inclusion policies grow in importance around the region.
According to a new Mercer research, three quarters of 355 respondents to the Asia Pacific Diversity and Inclusion Survey are targeted around gender, with 52% offering flexible working options and 43% offering mentoring and family-friendly policies.
Other drivers of diversity and inclusion included having multiple generations within the workforce (43%), an increased expectation for flexible work arrangements (37%), aging population (35%) and multiple national cultures in the workforce (34%).
As Asian organisations increasingly become global, leaders are seeing the critical need to integrate international talent into their workforce. HR leaders are also developing human capital strategies to tailor to the diverse talent pool, with research suggesting hiring and recruiting practices (61%), career pathing (54%), all HR (41%) and compensation and benefits policies (35%) are expected to evolve along with demographic trends.
"A majority of organisations in Asia Pacific also see their diversity strategies as enabling them to better meet the needs of diverse customers. In this sense, human resources professionals should leverage their diversity and inclusion strategy to be stronger partners to the business and create an employee base that can help better serve the changing consumer segments," Bianca Stringuini, human capital consultant at Mercer, said.
Mercer also highlighted the three drivers behind organisations' diversity and inclusion strategies - the recruitment of talent (48.8%), employer branding (43.1%) and access to untapped talent pools (38.6%).
"We believe that the diversity and inclusion efforts will continue to go past all challenges and grow if organisations across the region continue to share best practices, create strong linkages between the diversity and inclusion strategy and the business, and measure the impact of the strategy on productivity, retention and profitability," Fermin Diez, Mercer's Asia Pacific business leader for human capital consulting said.
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