Employment and Human Resources Equity Toolkit

We are excited to share a new toolkit designed to assist your organizations in equitable employment practices to ensure their workforce and leaders reflect the perspectives of immigrants and racialized populations. This toolkit was commissioned by OLIP, and developed with expertise from Seema Lamba, a human rights and employment equity expert with over 20 years’ experience in this area. Seema worked collaboratively with partner organizations of the Equity Ottawa Partnership to develop a practical guide to more representative and inclusive workplaces and service providers.

The Employment and Human Resources Toolkit includes 14 tools on taking stock, understanding the organizational change process, the cycle of human resource planning, as well as communication and stakeholder engagement tools. Below are links to – and short descriptions of – this toolkit.

1.Taking Stock of Your Workplace
This tool helps organizations identify where they are in their journey of integrating human rights into their organization. Through a human rights maturity model, this tool described the 4 stages of progression from Reactive, Active – Beginning, Active-Midway, Proactive. This tool help organization reflect on their journey to becoming an anti-oppressive, anti-racist, intersectional, diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization.

2. Stages of Organization Change Process
This tool describes 3 stages of an organization change process, including Unfreeze-Prepare, Change-Manage, and Freeze-Sustain. This model is helpful for a range of different organizations because the emphasis is on the structures, behaviours and actions of leaders, management, and staff.

3. Human Resource Planning Cycle
This cycle guide outlines several steps or processes needed to help an organization successful achieve the goal of becoming an organization that is anti-oppressive, anti-racist, diverse, equitable and inclusive. Organizations can have differing levels of time and resources to dedicate to each step depending on their size and mandate. In the end, this guideline can be adapted to meet the specific employment needs of an organization.

4. Commitment and Vision
This tool outlines how to develop commitment and a vision for a change initiative. The tool highlights that meaningful or lasting cultural change in an organization requires the commitment and vision is internally driven by leaders and senior management and that the change is internalized within the organization.

5. Gather Data on Representation
This tool outlines the need to examine an organization’s workplace environment by determining how representative it is of marginalized communities. The tool further describes the importance of and how to design and conduct a voluntary confidential self-identification workforce survey as well as how to address challenges such as low response rate.

6. Workforce Analysis
Building on the data gathered in the previous stage, this tool help organizations determine the level of representation of equity groups within their organization compared to the broader Canadian workforce. This tool outlines how to conduct this analysis using publicly available data and labour market availability data to examine an organization’s representation rate (including hiring, promotion, and termination) as well as identify gaps and barriers.

7. Systems Review
This guide outlines the purpose and how to conduct as systems review, a comprehensive examination of an organization’s informal and formal systems, policies, procedures, and practices to understand the reasons for the under-representation of equity groups in the workplace and to identify barriers faced by equity groups.

8. Analysis of Systems Review
This tool describes the systems review analysis stage, including how to conduct this analysis, who needs to be involved, who to identify barriers within policies, procedures, and practices as well as how to organize a summary report of this analysis.

9. Development of Plan
Once the system review and analysis is complete, this tool is essential to support in the development of an equity plan that outlines the representation gaps and barriers as well as the measures and actions to remove those barriers. This tool outlines the structure of a plan, questions for reflection and consideration, and sample equity plan tables to help your organization get started.

10. Implementation of Plan
Closely linked to the development plan is implementing the plan with specific timeframes, this tool helps organization in developing an implementation plan. This tool is also linked to the community strategy and the stakeholder engagement tools described below.

11. Monitor, Evaluate, Revise
This tool highlights the importance of monitoring, evaluating, and revising the development and implementation of the equity plan. In some cases, even with a well developed and implemented plan, adequate resources, and support by stakeholders and accountability measures, there can be little, or no progress made on the plan, this tool can help organization identify the sources of this lack of progress and plan a way forward.

12. Communication Strategy
This tool explains how to develop a good communication strategy to ensure all stakeholders understand and buy into the initiative or equity plan as all member of an organization play an important role in implementing and ensuring a representative and inclusive organization exists for everyone.

13. Stakeholder Engagement  
This guiding tool support organizations to identify and purposively engage a range of internal and external stakeholders engaged to ensure long-term commitment and support through the whole organization.

14. Resources
This tool provides a comprehensive list of 14 resources from a range of national and local organizations.

Together, these tools provide guidance to human resources staff and leaders in identifying gaps, planning the human resource cycle, communicating effectively, and engaging various stakeholders to ensure inclusive and equitable practices are entrenched and normalized in their organization to sustain this work despite changes in staff and leadership.

We thank the Government of Ontario for their generous funding that allowed us to advance OLIP’s vision and plans to help cultivate inclusive and equitable organizations, that are reflective and inclusive of immigrants and racialized populations.