DiversityInc has compiled a collection of best practices from religiously inclusive workplaces and data from the DiversityInc Top 50 to help your company navigate the cultural competence and legalities of religion in the workplace.

Ask DiversityInc: How Does Your Company Handle Religious Holidays?
When allowing employees to celebrate the holidays with tasteful decorations and celebrations, how do organizations make sure that those who don’t celebrate are not offended?

Best Practices on Religiously Inclusive Workplaces
Employers must provide “reasonable accommodations” for employees’ religious practices, per Title VII. But what exactly does that mean?

Religious Discrimination in the Workplace
A leading discrimination attorney provides advice on EEOC/Civil Rights laws and how to best mitigate religious discrimination at work.

Laws on Religion, Dress & the Workplace
What’s permissible and what’s not? We spell out the legal precedents for you.

Ask the White Guy: My Managers Are 95% White, Christian–Do I Have a Chance?
What can a person do if they’re in a company where the in-crowd goes to a certain church?

Ask DiversityInc: How Can Diversity Management Measure Religious Inclusion?
Can religion be represented/highlighted as a primary diversity metric in an overall assessment?

Ask the White Guy: What About Religious Expression?
How much religious expression in the workplace is acceptable? CEO Luke Visconti discusses the difference between proselytizing and religious expression.

Ask the White Guy: Are Traditional Christian Values Part of Diversity?
Does diversity management mean ignoring those who hold traditional Christian values?

The post Holidays at Work: Culturally Competent or Offensive? What You SHOULD Know appeared first on DiversityInc.

Diversity-Management Question: I am the chairman of a religious group at my company. I am working with key business partners in our headquarters city to move forward with a strategy that involves transformation [to a religiously inclusive workplace]. Will you share your vision as to how religious diversity can be represented/highlighted as a primary metric in an overall diversity assessment of the companies you speak with?

A. We’ve assessed best practices for diversity management and religious inclusion for several years, including religious resource groups, which generally follow two models—all-inclusive of many religions or a focus on individual religions (American Express, No. 14 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50, is the leader in this with Christian, Jewish and Muslim resource groups).

The key to all those resource groups’ successes is that they are inclusive (anyone can join, including people not of that or any faith) and they are educational, with a primary goal of educating employees about the religion and its members. They cannot ever proselytize or promote anything that is exclusive of anyone else (this primarily surfaces with some religious groups arguing against the inclusion of LGBT people). Read Starting Religious Employee-Resource Groups for more.

Outside of the groups, DiversityInc also measures in the DiversityInc Top 50 survey whether companies make religious accommodations for employees (usually in the form of hours and dress but also including prayer rooms) and whether they allow employees time off for religious holidays. The Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding (www.tanenbaum.org) has a lot of information on this and on national trends around the issue.

The post Ask DiversityInc: How Can Diversity Management Measure Religious Inclusion? appeared first on DiversityInc.