How compliance and diversity can work together to build a more inclusive organization

Doing the bare minimum to be legally compliant is likely not enough to support a strong and diverse corporate culture and this will lead to organizational cynicism about both the compliance and diversity initiatives.

Organizations today have a compelling interest to take both compliance and diversity beyond paper initiatives. Both are essential to ensuring a fair and safe workforce, and both need to be enforced from the top down to be successfully administered. However, businesses still struggle to find the common ground between the two, and more specifically, how compliance can (and should) improve diversity efforts – and vice versa.

In August 2021, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved a new listing rule from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange (NSE) that mandates all companies trading on Nasdaq to have at least two diverse directors on the board. This, as one of the first official listing rules that cracks down on diversity efforts, is now one of the driving forces for both public and private sector companies to rethink how they are shaping their corporate culture, both from a compliance and diversity standpoint.