Workplace diversity grows through everyday decisions, not slogans. Experts in the field share practical ways to include different perspectives, question old systems, and strengthen team decisions. From mentoring across backgrounds to inviting quieter voices, these initiatives offer clear steps for building a fairer workplace.
- Give Teams Permission to Rumble
- Rotate Speaking Order After Pilots
- Host Voluntary Conversations About Identity
- Apply Client Lenses to Market Needs
- Support Flexible Schedules and Fair Pay
- Normalize Constructive Dissent Before Decisions
- Let New Hires Challenge Old Systems
- Open Decisions to Written Input
- Amplify Filipino Voices Through Podcasts
- Teach Teams to Argue Effectively
- Ask Frontline Staff What They Notice
- Assign Rotating Skeptics to Major Decisions
- Write Views Before Group Discussions
- Track Friction After Every Launch
- Create Personal Operating Manuals
- Appoint Confidence Auditors at Planning Meetings
- End Reviews With Unasked Questions
- Use Perspective Partners for Key Plans
- Add Context to Every Proposal
- Share Local Stories on Discord
- Solicit Quiet Voices Before Leaders Speak
- Hear Newest Crew Leads First
- Ask New Hires to Flag Flaws
- Connect Mentors Across Diverse Backgrounds
- Invite Cross-Regional Architecture Reviews
Give Teams Permission to Rumble
I’ve always believed that celebrating differences is pretty meaningless if people don’t feel comfortable expressing them. You can have all the diversity statements and values posters you like, but if everyone agrees politely in meetings and saves their real opinions for the corridor, what have you actually achieved?
I worked with a senior leadership team that was bright, committed, and genuinely caring. But they were also incredibly polite. Nobody wanted to upset anyone, and they often avoided difficult conversations.
During one of our team development sessions, a senior colleague made a wonderfully honest observation: “What we don’t do, guys, is rumble!”
By rumble, she meant openly disagreeing, challenging each other’s thinking and having the conversations that really mattered.
That single observation opened up a remarkably honest discussion about why people held back. We explored the risks they perceived in challenging colleagues and agreed on how the team could encourage direct, respectful disagreement without damaging relationships.
It was a huge step forward, not because everyone suddenly agreed, but because they gave each other permission not to.
My experience has taught me that the real value of diversity isn’t simply having people who think differently. It’s creating an environment where those differences are genuinely welcomed, explored and allowed to influence decisions.
Otherwise, you’ve just assembled a wonderfully diverse group of people and taught them all to keep quiet!
Andrew Porteous, Leadership Consultant & Executive Coach, EthicEyes
Rotate Speaking Order After Pilots
As more people learn about the change they’ll all start to contribute their opinions. Because you have many people across different markets your going to notice different aspects about each home. There’s always something the maintainer will pick up on that someone who is replying to guest messages wont.
Our biggest success was rotating our roles that speak during our post pilot meeting. After each pilot we allow each role to speak about what they noticed. By changing the order of who speaks we hear everyone. Many times the maintainer and guest messages can line up with what is wrong. Allowing your team to hear both can show why we should appreciate others opinion.
Once your able to appreciate what others can bring to the table it becomes second nature. If someone new gives an idea that helps improve our next pilot it shows that by having different opinion will always benefit our pilots. Allow your leaders to help drive this by asking what hasn’t been said before we end our meetings. It will help your company continue to grow as we expand.
Steve Kifer, Manager, Ritzy Room
Host Voluntary Conversations About Identity
I think people feel comfortable discussing their differences when they believe those differences will be understood.
One idea I like is structuring team conversations to help staff share aspects of themselves as individuals including their beliefs, experiences, culture, and traditions. This structure promotes a deeper understanding of colleagues and gives individuals an opportunity to identify and question, in a respectful way, assumptions they have about their colleagues.
It’s important that participation be voluntary. Depending on how the structure is designed, it may be important to make time for all staff, including those who are naturally reserved, or less inclined to speak before a larger audience.
When people feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work, including their ideas and thoughts and differing opinions, work becomes more productive and enjoyable. Differences should be embraced rather than simply acknowledged.
Lina Haj Hussien, Founder and CHO, Employee Engagement & Experience Manager, Inspire
Apply Client Lenses to Market Needs
1. People only bring their differences to a table when they feel safe being the only ‘odd’ one in a room. At CheapForexVPS, I have a very distributed team across several countries/time zones and also have a very diverse client base of all different traders from around the world. So for me, different perspectives are market intelligence, something that I want to encourage rather than something that is nice to have. In meetings, I try to ensure that the quietest person in the room goes first, before the senior individuals in the room can ‘anchor’ the discussion. I also make sure that I thank people in front of their peers when they have challenged my view and I have subsequently found that they were correct.
2. In order to solve problems of our clients from different cultures, we have a monthly meeting – “Client Lens”. Someone from support, finance, or sales departments tells us a problem of a customer from his perspective and background. Sometimes it even reveals how a trader from our home market understands the concept of risk, or why customers reacted negatively to a phrase used in one of our marketing campaigns. A very good example of this was a rewrite of our onboarding emails for customers from one of the regions where they were perceived as too pushy. The effect was almost immediate – within a month or so, we saw a big decrease in the number of early cancellations. But most importantly, people had the opportunity to bring to work their background and to use it to solve problems of our customers instead of leaving it in a park. The best “Client Lens” of a quarter is then even treated to a lunch of the presenter’s choice, and it becomes a fun tour of foods that different people like to eat.
Corina Tham, Sales, Marketing and Business Development Director, CheapForexVPS
Support Flexible Schedules and Fair Pay
At hagel IT, the Hamburg IT company I founded in 2004, we make room for different lives first, and different views follow. Anyone with a doctor’s appointment, a child to collect from nursery or a better afternoon rhythm sets their own hours. We also publish a salary band for every role, so pay never depends on who negotiates hardest. I find people speak up more readily when their pay and schedule do not depend on fitting one type.
Jens Hagel, Founder & Owner, kjello
Normalize Constructive Dissent Before Decisions
I encourage different perspectives by making disagreement part of the normal workflow, so nobody has to find the courage to speak up.
The initiative that works best is a short “other side” round before any real decision. Before we pick a campaign angle, a tool or a price, I ask each person to give one reason we could be wrong. People answer in writing first, then we discuss. Writing first matters, because quieter people, newer people and people who think in a second language get the same voice as the loudest person in the room.
I also credit ideas by name. When a suggestion from a junior teammate changes our plan, I say so in front of the team. People share more when they see their difference turn into a result, and they keep quiet when ideas vanish into the group.
Finally, I ask people to explain how they would solve a problem in their own way, instead of forcing one process. Different backgrounds produce different solutions, and the best ones often come from the person who works differently from me.
Celebrating differences works when the team can see them improve decisions.
Ihor Lavrenenko, Founder, Smarfle (smarfle.com)
Ihor Lavrenenko, Founder, Smarfle
Let New Hires Challenge Old Systems
An initiative I have implemented successfully is reverse onboarding for established employees. Instead of teaching only the new hire how the organization works, the new hire documents what seems unclear, inconsistent, or unnecessarily difficult during the first sixty days. A small group then discusses the observations before familiarity teaches everyone to overlook them.
This supports perspective-sharing because fresh eyes are legitimate expertise. The practice tests whether existing systems make sense without insider knowledge. Leaders should visibly respond to one workable observation. That response tells employees that difference is not merely tolerated at orientation, it can improve how work gets done.
Xavier Berkness, President & CTO, PERC Engage
Open Decisions to Written Input
The most useful thing I’ve learned is that people don’t hold back their perspectives because they lack them. They hold back because the way decisions get made doesn’t leave room for them.
Our team spans several countries and time zones, and early on we made a common mistake. We worked hard to hire people with different backgrounds, then kept making decisions the old way: in quick conversations between people who had worked together for years. Nobody was excluded on purpose, but new voices weren’t pulled in either. The team looked diverse. The decision-making circle hadn’t changed.
The fix was simple: we moved decisions into shared written documents. When a meaningful choice comes up, we put the context, options, and reasoning in a doc the whole team can read and comment on before anything is final. We name ownership, and the reasoning stays visible afterward.
That changed who participated. People who would never interrupt a fast-moving meeting, especially those working in a second language or from a culture where challenging a senior person in public is uncomfortable, started contributing in writing. Their input started showing up in the decisions, and the decisions got better because we heard perspectives we’d been missing.
We paired that with something smaller. When hiring and onboarding across countries, we started asking people how decisions and feedback usually work in their local professional culture. It sounds minor, but it prevented many early misunderstandings, where we read differences in directness or responsiveness as performance issues when they were really cultural norms.
Celebrating differences isn’t mainly about events or messaging. It’s about whether different perspectives can actually change what the company does. Make the decision process visible and open to written input, and people share far more of what they genuinely think.
Andrei Blaj, Co-founder, Medicai
Amplify Filipino Voices Through Podcasts
How do you encourage people to celebrate their differences and share their unique perspectives?
The first thing is not asking people to look or work the same. Trust isn’t a perk you hand out after someone proves themselves. It’s the operating cost of not managing adults like children. When people aren’t tracked or second-guessed, they tell you what they actually think. A lot of the women who work with us are mothers who want to stay close to family at home instead of losing dozens of hours a month commuting. Flexible, remote work lets them keep both a career and a family.
The second thing is that we value judgment over polish. We don’t screen on resumes alone. We use practical tasks and ask candidates to show where an AI’s output falls short. The skill that matters is knowing when the AI is wrong, which means speaking up when something looks off. Same standard applies to my own team. A culture that rewards that habit gets different perspectives by design.
One initiative: our weekly podcast in Spotify called From Kayod to Keyboard. It’s hosted by Filipino members of our team, in Taglish, the way Filipino VAs or virtual assistants actually talk. It shares real VA stories and what our recruiters see across thousands of applications. It’s built around the community’s own voice and language instead of a polished corporate one.
Alon Pearl, Founder & CEO, VA Masters
Teach Teams to Argue Effectively
We had a lot of growing pains when we grew our workforce to include international hires and remote workers. Part of it was simply learning a bunch of new names and faces in the muddle of a hybrid environment, but there were also some serious personality and cultural mismatches, especially around conflict, disagreement, and decision-making. We did several professional development trainings around this exact issue. One of the most unique and effective was actually bringing in couples counselors to talk to our teams about how to argue effectively. We covered things like the power of “I” statements, avoiding blame, and being direct with your needs. It felt a little silly to me, especially with a tech background, but it genuinely improved our company culture.
Ranjith Raghunath, CEO, CX Data Labs
Ask Frontline Staff What They Notice
One thing I’ve learned is that telling people, “Please speak up if you have an idea,” isn’t really enough. Especially when you’re the founder, people naturally pay attention to what you think, and if I give my opinion too early, it can very easily become the answer everyone works around.
So one practice I’ve tried to build into the way we work is to ask the person closest to the situation what they noticed before jumping in with my own solution. If we’re reviewing part of a treatment or the client experience, I might ask, “What didn’t feel right to you?” or “If you could change one thing, what would you do differently?”
That is important at Zeva because people on our team notice very different things. Someone with a strong trichology background may focus on what is happening with the scalp. Someone else may notice that a client seems uncomfortable, confused, or overwhelmed. Another person may spot something in the service flow that I haven’t even thought about.
I don’t necessarily agree with every suggestion, and I don’t think encouraging different perspectives means every idea has to be used. What I try to encourage is for people to explain how they arrived at a point of view, rather than trying to guess what I want to hear.
What I’ve found is that once people realize their observations can actually influence how we work, they become much more comfortable raising things earlier instead of waiting for me to notice them.
For me, that is what celebrating differences looks like in a team. It is less about telling people that everyone is different, and more about making sure those differences are actually useful in the room.
Brenda Leung, Founder, Zeva HAIR SPA
Assign Rotating Skeptics to Major Decisions
A lot of companies “celebrate differences” with a heritage month post or a virtual potluck. Those are nice, but they keep differences on the social side of work. They rarely show up where it counts, which is in decisions.
The real problem is that different perspectives often go unsaid. Someone has a different take because of their country, their background, or how their brain works, but they’re the only one who sees it that way. Speaking up feels like going against the room. So they nod.
The initiative that helped most was surprisingly simple: for any big decision, we assign someone to be the skeptic. Their job is to argue against the plan. We rotate the role, and we often give it to someone who’s newer or quieter.
What changed is that disagreeing stopped being personal. You’re not the difficult one, you’re just doing your assigned job. And once people get used to pushing back in that role, they start doing it on their own.
Some of our best product decisions came from this. A teammate who’s a non-native English speaker challenged how our narration handled certain academic phrasing, which most of us had never noticed. Someone with ADHD pushed back on a feature that seemed obviously helpful to everyone else but would’ve been distracting for people like her, and a lot of our users are like her.
Differences don’t do much if everyone keeps them to themselves. The goal isn’t to celebrate them once a year. It’s to make them useful every week.
Derek Wild, CEO & Founder, Listening.com
Write Views Before Group Discussions
Most “celebrate our differences” initiatives celebrate the safe ones: food, holidays, a themed lunch. Those are nice, but the differences that matter at work are differences in how people think. Those get erased quietly, usually by whoever speaks first and most confidently. At a startup that’s often the founder, which in my case means me.
So the practice I’d point to is simple: write first, talk second. Before we discuss any real decision, everyone privately writes down their own view in a few sentences. We read them all before anyone argues. It takes ten minutes.
What it changes is surprising. The quiet person who came from a different industry, or grew up in a different market, or just thinks in a different order gets heard at full strength instead of after adjusting to the room. People stop agreeing with me by default because they committed to a view before they knew mine. And we regularly find that two or three people shared a concern nobody would have said out loud.
It also makes disagreement normal rather than brave. Nobody has to be the one who contradicts the boss. They wrote what they thought, and it’s on the page next to everyone else’s.
Building a card game that people play with a dozen sets of regional house rules has made me respect this even more. Nobody thinks their table’s rules are the weird ones. Teams work the same way, and the job is getting everyone’s rules on the table before the loudest player decides for everyone.
Eric Lafleche, Founder, Pitch
Track Friction After Every Launch
Difference is easiest to celebrate when employees are not asked to translate their entire identity into a presentation. Better results come from designing moments where experience naturally informs the work. For a leadership team, that means asking whose context is absent from a decision, and treating the answer as a delivery, trust, and risk-management question.
I used a friction archive after launches and internal changes. Employees recorded where a process assumed too much, whether about time zones, terminology, caregiving, language, or technical familiarity. A monthly review selected one pattern for correction. The archive shifted conversation from personal defensiveness toward system design, and made progress visible through the recurring frictions removed.
Sherif Koussa, CEO, Software Secured
Create Personal Operating Manuals
The initiative that worked was not a diversity program. It was a practical tool: we asked every team member to create a short operating manual for themselves.
One page. How you prefer to communicate. When you do your best work. What kind of feedback helps you versus what shuts you down. Whether you process information by reading, talking, or doing. Everyone wrote one and shared it with their team.
The result surprised me. People started referencing each other’s manuals in real situations. Someone would say, “I know you prefer written feedback, so I put my thoughts in a doc instead of bringing them up in the meeting.” A quiet teammate who rarely spoke up in group settings started getting Slack threads directed at her because the team learned she contributed more thoughtfully in writing.
What made it different from a typical initiative is that it was not about celebrating difference in the abstract. It was about making difference useful. When you understand that your teammate thinks differently from you and you know specifically how, you can actually work together better. The celebration happens through improved collaboration, not through a workshop.
The biggest surprise was how much people appreciated being asked how they work. Most employees go years without anyone asking that question. The simple act of asking it changed how the team related to each other.
Kenneth Shen, CEO, Founder, Pigment
Appoint Confidence Auditors at Planning Meetings
I prefer structured disagreement over invitations to “speak up,” because the latter often rewards confidence more than insight. One initiative designated an employee at each planning meeting as the “confidence auditor.” That person listened for claims presented as facts and asked what evidence, lived experience, or frontline condition might produce a conclusion.
The role rotated across levels and functions, so nobody became the dissenter. Leaders had to document whether the challenge changed the decision or why it did not. This created a quiet form of respect. Perspective earned influence through inquiry, and accountability prevented curiosity from becoming theater.
Brian Lebeau, CEO, Attic Projects Company
End Reviews With Unasked Questions
I encourage employees to share unique perspectives by treating questions as contributions, not signs of inexperience. A well-timed question can expose an assumption, clarify a decision, or reveal that others share the same uncertainty. Leaders should model this by asking questions publicly, especially when the answer seems obvious.
One successful initiative was ending project reviews with a “question nobody asked” round. Every participant could raise one overlooked question, either aloud or anonymously. The format gave emerging employees a low-pressure way to contribute and invited experienced colleagues to challenge familiar routines. Several improvements began as questions rather than recommendations, including clearer ownership and more realistic expectations. The initiative reinforced an important lesson, curiosity is often the most practical expression of diversity.
Brian Hansen, President, Rocket Pilots
Use Perspective Partners for Key Plans
We introduced perspective partners to support high-impact decisions. Before finalizing a plan, we asked colleagues from outside the project to review it. Their role was to spot blind spots, question language that might exclude others, and suggest alternative approaches based on their own experiences. This brought fresh perspectives into decisions before they were finalized.
We kept the process simple, with brief reviews and clear feedback on which suggestions changed the plan. This feedback loop helped prevent the exercise from feeling like a formality. It also gave employees opportunities to contribute beyond their job titles. The strongest outcome was that speaking up became easier because the process made challenging ideas an expected part of work.
Kyle Barnholt, CEO & Co-founder, Trewup
Add Context to Every Proposal
We introduced origin notes for major decisions, asking contributors to explain what shaped their views before a proposal is discussed. These notes may mention a past role, a customer conversation, a cultural reference, or an operational lesson others may not share. This gives everyone useful context before judging whether they agree with an opinion. It also helps others understand the reasons behind different perspectives.
The practice improved discussions because people stopped viewing different opinions as unexplained resistance. Instead, we could understand the experiences behind each recommendation. It also gives quieter employees a clear way to contribute without competing for attention. The strongest ideas often emerge from valuable context that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
Chirag Kulkarni, Founder & CEO, Taco
Share Local Stories on Discord
Honestly, celebrating differences sounds like a poster to me. What people actually share is smaller and funnier than that.
Our team is split between the Dubai HQ and people working from home in different corners of India. In any given week somebody is in the middle of a festival half the company has never heard of. On the last Friday of the month one person gets 15 minutes on a Discord call to explain something from where they grew up. It has been a word in their language with no English version, or a recipe their whole street argues about. You find out who is funny. A pair of colleagues who had worked together for 2 years learned they shared a second language. Maybe that is all the initiative needs to be.
Sahil Agrawal, Founder, Head of Marketing, Qubit Capital
Solicit Quiet Voices Before Leaders Speak
On any decision that matters, I ask the people who haven’t spoken yet, by name, before I say a word of my own. Rooms tend to calibrate to the fastest talker, and everyone who processes more slowly quietly adjusts to match, which flattens the differences a team is supposed to bring. Nobody intends it. The room simply moves faster than some of the people in it.
My view goes last, every time. The moment the founder weighs in, everyone starts agreeing with me, and I’ve watched that happen too often to pretend otherwise. The first month of working this way feels uncomfortable. After that it becomes how the team runs.
Credit is the other half. When someone’s perspective changes a decision, we say so out loud, that came from you! People stop sharing a perspective after it gets absorbed once without attribution, so naming the source keeps the next one coming.
I picked this up as a journalist, where the most useful answer usually came from the person who was about to say nothing. My job was to notice them and ask.
Kelly Ann Collins, Founder, SheCrypto
Hear Newest Crew Leads First
The initiative that got different perspectives on the table was a rule that before we chose a plan for a hard job, every crew lead had to explain how they would approach it, starting with the least senior person. In my NBN telecom contracting company I had about 30 people from very different backgrounds: former soldiers, my younger brother, a British mentor who had run a 500 person engineering firm, and young technicians on their first real job. The experienced voices naturally dominated, and the newer people stayed quiet even when they had spotted a better way.
Asking the newest person first changed that. Some of our best fixes for difficult areas came from younger technicians who saw the street differently, and when their idea worked, I said so in front of the whole team and it became part of our SOPs with their name attached. People started to see that their background was an asset, not something to hide. My own time in the Australian Army taught me that leaders are human, make mistakes and do not always know what to do, so I was open about not having every answer. If you want people to share unique views, make speaking up safe, ask the quiet people first, and visibly adopt the good ideas.
Ronald Osborne, Founder, Ronald Osborne Business Coach
Ask New Hires to Flag Flaws
I started asking every new engineer and support person the same thing in their first week. Which part of our tool they would refuse to use themselves, and why. Not a values survey, not a culture deck. One question, written down, kept in a shared doc everyone on my team can read.
The answers came back wildly different depending on who was answering. Someone who had worked in enterprise support flagged a setup flow that assumed people had admin access. Someone who had only ever worked at small startups flagged the opposite, that we were adding configuration nobody asked for. Both were right about their own world, and neither would have volunteered it in a general meeting, because in a meeting the loudest workflow wins.
We built the fix list from that doc. The tools we ship have to drop into workflows we don’t control, and the only way I know whether a flow holds up for a busy professional juggling five systems is to hire people who have lived in different versions of that chaos and then make it cheap for them to say so. When someone’s perspective shows up in what we build, they stop waiting for permission to offer the next one.
Val Narodetsky, CEO, Odesa
Connect Mentors Across Diverse Backgrounds
To encourage employees to celebrate differences and share perspectives, I implemented a virtual mentorship platform at Underdog that centers on connection and learning across backgrounds. The platform offers flexible online forums where employees can engage with senior leaders from a variety of industries and receive career growth advice. We matched mentors and mentees using criteria tied to professional goals, areas of expertise, and affiliation with affinity groups to ensure relevant, respectful pairings. That approach helped employees who lacked traditional networks find mentors who cared about their development regardless of background.
Travis Lindemoen, CEO, Underdog
Invite Cross-Regional Architecture Reviews
In a distributed engineering environment, inclusivity is not solely a social responsibility, it is also a great remedy against groupthink, which tends to be among the most costly hidden aspects of software development. The problem with homogeneous teams is that they frequently have the same blind spots, which means that they perceive certain issues similarly, for instance, regarding users’ behavior, data protection requirements, and operational risks. Creating an inclusive environment allows gleaning the maximum of benefit from the heterogeneity in the technical design stage, as the ideas brought into play will serve as a quality assurance tool helping to reveal potential pitfalls that could be missed by a single-culture team.
Our initiative of introducing the Cross-Regional Architecture Peer Review allows overcoming the boundaries of seven international delivery centers. Instead of reviewing the code or architecture by the project team, we engage leads and architects from other regions to provide a different and more objective point of view, for example, an architect from the Indore delivery center can peer-review a fintech application designed for the UK market together with his colleague from London. We require the reviewers not only to identify syntax mistakes but also to provide comments on the logic, for example, how users in their countries use financial systems or what compliance requirements should be taken into account at their location.
The success of this initiative is determined by the fact that personal opinions become professional contributions. Each engineer understands that their own cultural and geographical backgrounds are professional advantages rather than only personal interests. We have seen on many occasions that this opportunity allows detecting usability problems or gaps in logic that could have made the fixing of mistakes much harder after the deployment of solutions. By creating prerequisites for such events to happen, we develop a culture in which all team members feel that their opinions matter for the success of the project. We also put diversity into practice rather than keeping it on paper.
Abhishek Pareek, Founder & Director, Coders.dev