Building Opportunities: Advancement Module

Maximizing the talent pool leads to new opportunities for your business to grow and prosper.

Include women on committees and in leadership roles, to give them a voice. Do not overburden a few women by asking them to serve on too many committees. Be prepared for and welcome change; different ideas will benefit your organization.

A study by Ernst & Young of 9,700 employees globally showed that over 50% said they would leave a job if not given access to mentors. Additionally, in the paper “Does Mentoring Matter?” published to the Journal of Vocational Behaviour, the authors conclude that workplace mentorship programs have benefits for worker attitude, health, and motivation. Mentorship programs are used by companies of all sizes to address some common Human Resource issues:

• Retention
• Productivity
• Continued learning
• High-potential development

Mentorships can prove critical to the advancement of women in the workplace. Having mentors available (not necessarily involved in the same occupation, but leaders in their field) to share advice leads to higher retention of women in the workplace. These can be collaborative programs, offered in conjunction with training institutions, government agencies, employers and other members of the private sector. A paper by Management Mentors highlights the role of mentorship in succession/promotion:

• Mentorship helps build skills, trains the workers you need and facilitates the transfer of knowledge—the preservation of a key asset.

• It helps to bolster diversity initiatives by passing behaviours directly from management/senior workers to newer hires/lower level employees.

• It provides a feeling of community, inclusion, and boosts morale.

• Establish an Advisory Group to design, manage, and evaluate the mentorship program (Appendix 3.A).

• Produce a mentor/mentee agreement form (Appendix 3.B).

• Provide training and orientation materials to support your mentors (Appendix 3.D).

Gender discrimination occurs when different genders are treated not only differently, but unequally. There is an inherently unequal system of promotion in many workplaces that favour men. When clear, standard criteria for promotions are established, workplaces experience the following benefits:

Planning and Training
When all workers know the criteria for attaining a promotion, everyone has an equal opportunity to gain the training and education necessary for that position. This encourages continuous workplace learning, and generates a better-trained team overall.

Retention of Workers
When workers know how they will be able to advance in their careers, they are able to plan for a long future with the company by researching all available opportunities.

Achievable Goals
Standard promotion criteria ensures that advancement considers only factors that are achievable by all workers. Not all measures of a ‘good worker’ are attainable for everyone. For example:

• Working overtime or long hours; not everyone has the ability to do this for many reasons, including being sole or primary childcare provider, or taking care of ailing family members.

• Showing leadership, or showing teamwork; this may not be possible for those working in particular roles (i.e. only working alone, or in a setting where it is unobservable by management).

Inclusion in Workplace Culture
As Rosemary Hunter writes in her book Indirect Discrimination, “Notification of promotion opportunities through informal networks, with employees being given no official information about how the ‘system’ works, will generally have the effect of limiting women’s and minority employees’ access to promotion.” When promotions rely solely on the recommendation of a supervisor, for example, often only those with the best social relationships with coworkers and management are considered.

Similar to other suggestions in this toolkit, (such as having standardized interview questions, interview evaluations, standardized onboarding and orientation), having clear promotion criteria ensures gender bias in the workplace is eliminated in the advancement of workers.

• Make the expectations, criteria, and opportunities for advancement clear, and available in written format (Appendix 3.C).

• Standardize the procedures for being considered for advancement, such as using committees and pre-established evaluation parameters.

The benefits of offering continuing education to employees are as follows:

• Heightened productivity,

• Employee engagement,

• A benefit offered to the employee that directly impacts the company positively,

• Higher company loyalty/retention rate.

• Allow work hours to be changed to fit with course scheduling.

• Standardize the procedures for being considered for advancement, such as using committees and pre-established evaluation parameters (Appendix 3.C ).

• Consider tuition reimbursement.

• Offsetting material costs (books, transit, etc.).

• Partnerships with local universities/colleges for discounted rates and courses that cater to your company’s particular needs (Appendix 1.I ).

• Job advancement upon successful completion of training/education program.