Your talent acquisition strategy rests upon how you are perceived by Indigenous audiences. 
We can provide assessments to aid your recruitment, retention and advancement processes.

8. Cultural Inclusion Inventory

What level of Indigenous cultural inclusion is already practiced in your organization?

Indigenous Works will conduct a ‘cultural inclusion inventory’ of what and how your company currently recognizes and honours Indigenous culture and heritage in your workplace. Some examples of cultural inventory are these. Your company may do smudging or invite other forms of Indigenous ceremony into its meetings or gatherings, at times. It may have pieces of Indigenous artwork in various locations. Staff or managers may attend pow-wows or other celebrations at times. You may provide donations or gifts in kind through your corporate social responsibility programs to Indigenous communities and you do things as a company which are socially responsible and responsive to Indigenous community needs. Your company may hold cultural awareness activities, or you may conduct outreach activities on June 21 which is National Indigenous Peoples Day.

These workplace practices will be captured in a new cultural inclusion inventory. Your company probably does not keep a record of the multiple ways that it is recognizing and honouring Indigenous culture and heritage and therefore, no way of knowing how to improve upon your set of cultural practices. We will interview your employees, compile your inventory, and make recommendations about the ways your company could add to the list or make the practices you currently do, more uniform. Your ability to further embed existing and new cultural practices is part of defining your Indigenous workplace inclusion design.

9. Workplace Inclusion Design and Measurement 

Facilitated workshop and report on your Indigenous Inclusion Standards & Criteria

Your company recognizes that the term ‘workplace inclusion’ means different things to different people. Looking at inclusion from an Indigenous lens implies that there are incremental attributes to a workplace which employees would agree is an Indigenous inclusive workplace. Your company may not have adopted a definition of what it means to have cultivated an Indigenous inclusive workplace. You may not yet have developed the standards and criteria by which your company or its employees can make that assessment.

You and your employees will want to bring some focus to this journey by better understanding what the end goal is for workplace inclusion design. Otherwise, how will you know how close you are to attaining that goal? This module creates the metrics by which you can assess your progress.

As part of this module, Indigenous Works will facilitate a thought-leadership workshop circle to discuss your company’s personal descriptors and metrics on Indigenous workplace inclusion. Through the circle Indigenous Works will also introduce new concepts, standards, and criteria so that your company can narrow or expand its definition and criteria as you see fit. Indigenous Works will produce a statement about what ‘Indigenous workplace inclusion’ looks like from your company’s and its Indigenous employees’ perspectives. The value of this initiative is to bring greater precision and cohesion to the terminology that your company is using to talk about and measure its state of Indigenous workplace inclusion. These definitions and standards will be highly instrumental in understanding Indigenous retention issues as well as further informing on your company’s Indigenous employment brand.

10. Employment Systems Review and Employment Equity Plan

Professional approach to creating an Indigenous Employment Systems Review

Does your company fall under Employment Equity Legislation? Do you need to prepare an Indigenous Employment Systems Review or a three-year Employment Equity Plan? Anyone who is tasked with this knows that there are challenges to completing this documentation. We will work with your Human Resources and/or DEI Unit to prepare your Indigenous Employment Systems Review and your Three-year Indigenous Employment Equity Plan.  

Our step-by-step approach begins with a formal work plan outlining the steps we will take to complete your Indigenous Systems Review and EE Plan. 

• Comprehensive Project Workplan and Charter
• Documents Review
• Analytics Review
• Interviews with your team and colleagues (recruiters, leadership, front-line and managers +others)
• Facilitated Workshop – Your Company’s Position on the Inclusion Continuum
• Dedicated Session – Assessing your Corporate Indigenous Index Score
• Policy review
• Strategy and Practices Review
• Indigenous Employment Systems Review identifies barriers to Indigenous employment using Indigenous Works 9-Point Framework
• Directional Framework and Goal setting
• Quantitative Analysis – Using WEIMS Data
• Developing Your EE Plan – 3-year comprehensive activities, policy recommendations, your Indigenous employment brand and much more
• Final EE Plan and Presentation