This is the 11th edition of the list, honouring employers that go above and beyond in their approach to diversity. And arguably, every year of that "diversity decade" has brought further landmarks. Statistics, including those gathered by Mediacorp from Canada's Top Employers, show that participation in management and leadership by women and visible minorities has shot up. So has hiring of Indigenous people and individuals with disabilities. Almost every large organization has established employee resource groups to help people of various identities network and support one another. Most dramatically in recent years, people from the LGBTQ+ community have come into their own, and the phrase "bring your whole self to work" -- rarely heard a decade ago -- is now a hallowed cliché of the human resources industry.

But Canada's Best Diversity Employers continue to evolve and expand their policies and approaches. For one thing, notes Kristina Leung, the Senior Editor at Mediacorp who has overseen the list for the past seven years, many employers have moved well beyond just the idea of diversity -- ensuring representation of many different kinds of people -- and embraced inclusion, where everybody's voice is heard. "It's almost a two-step process," she says. "You need to have the diverse representation in place, and then you have to ensure that these individuals are not being ignored, or prevented from advancing, say. I think inclusion is the hardest challenge. It's a culture change."

Employers are also drilling down into the nuts and bolts of diversity. Many corporate recruiters are now going into high schools to encourage under-represented groups to enter various industries. Girls, particularly, are being urged to take more science and math courses in order to consider, say, engineering or finance as a future career. Organizations are reaching out to Indigenous youth to increase awareness of opportunities they may not have considered. "The employers are looking to ensure that future talent pools are more diverse," says Leung.

She also sees more intense attention being paid to people with disabilities. "Even within that definition, there has been such an expansion," she says. "Are we talking about mental health, are we talking about intellectual disabilities, about physical disabilities, about accessibility? It has been a wide-ranging conversation among this year's winners, and very interesting to follow."

CIBC, for example, has partnered with support groups and committed to hiring more people with disabilities, including people on the autism spectrum. At the food and facilities management company Sodexo Canada, Katherine Power, Vice President Corporate Affairs, sees people with disabilities as a "huge opportunity" and her company's top priority for diverse recruitment. "It's a highly untapped population that is very educated and under-hired," she says. "We've done some business cases around it. People with disabilities have better safety records, better attendance, fewer sick leaves and they stay in the job longer. It impacts the overall engagement of our teams and increases customer satisfaction. Just all around, it's really, really positive for us."

Given that most major organizations now have at least one manager -- and often a senior executive backed by a team -- with a title focused solely on overseeing diversity, expect more groups to receive attention and support. Leung notes that military veterans -- a valuable recruitment pool given their training -- are coming into the spotlight. "Some of their their needs as they transition out of the service align with a lot of organizations' mental health supports," she notes. Many HR professionals also talk about inter-generational diversity, actively bringing together Millennials and older generations, and policies to support introverts, who may need help expressing themselves with colleagues.

As a matter of history, it's worth noting that many of Canada's Best Diversity Employers were well ahead of the pack. TD Bank counts itself the first bank in North America to introduce spousal benefits for same-sex couples in 1994, well before the Supreme Court required it, and RBC, which today is among the first organizations to produce a comprehensive set of guidelines supporting employees who are transitioning their gender in the workplace, followed in 1995. Air Canada had similar timing, as did a number of other progressive organizations.

You can count on all the employers on Mediacorp's list to continue to improve their diversity and inclusion policies as the second "diversity decade" dawns. Says Leung: "The conversation just keeps going and going, and expanding."

– Berton Woodward

Reproduced from the official magazine announcing Canada's Best Diversity Employers (2018), published March 2, 2018 in The Globe and Mail