Creating inclusive multi-faith workplaces
This resource was developed to help Australian organisations move from accommodating the religious beliefs and expressions of their staff, to building inclusive workplaces which respect and respond to diversity in faith affiliation and experience.
Summary
The following is an extract from the Diversity Council Australia resource. Read the full document.
How?
1. Start with understanding the law: Inclusion is about more than just meeting your legal obligations, but it helps to understand Australia’s laws covering protection from religious discrimination at work.
2. Get counting: Use DCA’s principles for inclusive data collection to help you understand the faith diversity of your workforce and subsequent need for faith-based inclusion within your organisation.
3. Build inclusion into ALL of your policies:
- Update your D&I policy to include faith, and no faith, as part of a person’s identity.
- Consider how to make your dress codes inclusive; so that they provide flexibility to accommodate employees’ religious or cultural obligations, while meeting health and safety requirements.
- Check if your leave polices allow for employees to meet cultural and religious obligations.
- Include staff from a variety of backgrounds when planning events to ensure these are inclusive.
- Where feasible, Multi-faith Quiet Rooms are an excellent way to be inclusive of employee needs for prayer, meditation, and quiet reflection for employees of all faith and of no-faith.
4. Educate to avoid stereotypes and bias: Faith-based stereotyping is extremely common and in the workplace can lead to inaccurate ideas that people from particular faiths are not capable of taking on certain roles.
Balancing religion with other human rights at work
How do workplaces handle situations where someone’s religious beliefs, challenge another person’s belief or identity, especially if this has an impact on the needs of the business?
There are no easy answers, but the principle of inclusion – ensuring that all employees are respected, connected, and able to contribute and progress – can help navigate some of these situations. In practice, aspiring for inclusion means:
1. STARTING WITH MUTUAL RESPECT. Inclusive organisations are ones where a diversity of employees are respected. When you encounter a situation where it appears that two ideas may be in conflict with each other, a good point to start from is by ensuring that all employees are treated with respect. In most cases, starting with respect enables there to be a sensible compromise.
2. WELCOMING RELIGIOUS BELIEFS BUT RECOGNISING THAT WORK IS NOT THE PLACE FOR PROSELYTISING – UNLESS YOU ARE EMPLOYED TO DO THIS. Inclusive workplaces welcome and encourage religious beliefs and expression, but religious expression shouldn’t involve prosletysing at work (unless that is the actual job).
3. SEPARATING RELIGIOUS BELIEFS FROM RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION. Many people in Australia have deeply held religious beliefs, but expressing those beliefs in a way that is harmful to other people could breach anti-discrimination laws, and may also not be respectful in a workplace context.
4. RECOGNISING THAT COMMUNITY EXPECTATIONS ARE CONSTANTLY SHIFTING OVER TIME. At various times in history, religious beliefs were used to justify a range of practices including slavery, prohibitions on interracial marriage, and the criminalisation of homosexuality. But in 2019, thankfully, the views and expectations of the community have since shifted.