Our commitment to fostering inclusion strives to create community through our talent strategies, designing for inclusion, nurturing wellbeing and cultivating learning.
Creating Communities at Steelcase
We foster inclusion to create a work experience where everyone can do their best work and feel a greater sense of wellbeing. We do this by building strong teams through inclusive talent attraction strategies and a robust talent pipeline. Our people, business and communities thrive when employees grow and develop in their careers which is why we’re dedicated to ensuring access to opportunity for everyone.
And we create a culture of inclusion by empowering employees to make spaces for all, where everyone feels welcome. Our workplaces are living labs. We prototype new ways to approach the work experience on ourselves so we can learn, adapt and share with our customers.
Building Strong Teams
Our skills-based hiring practices are designed to attract the best talent while also promoting fairness and transparency. We actively build talent networks across the globe to attract and engage talent across cultures, skills, abilities, experiences and more. We build strong teams through continuous learning and leadership enablement.
Ensuring Access to Opportunity
Our employees, business, and communities thrive when everyone has the opportunity to grow their skills and develop their careers. We foster a culture of curiosity and continuous learning, and encourage every employee to actively partner with their leaders to build individualized development plans. We offer a wide range of learning resources to support career development.
Advancing a Culture of Inclusion
Valuing Our Differences
Collaborative teams with a diversity of skills and experiences deliver better outcomes. We promote a shared language of problem-solving by using the Critical Thinking Model, which builds learning and constructive debate into decision-making and execution processes. Our long history of human-centered design lays a foundation for how we create better work environments for our people and our customers.
Listening and Learning
We have a robust employee listening system for gathering quantitative and qualitative feedback from all employees. Feedback loops support the prioritization of investments and reporting back on actions and results. Our ‘open door policy’ encourages employees to bring feedback directly to senior leaders and we offer a confidential integrity hotline. Our leaders regularly host employee roundtables to gather feedback from employees around the world. These are just a few of our tools for listening and identifying areas of opportunity.
Championing Inclusion
Our Business Inclusion Groups (BIGs) are employee-led communities based on shared interests that are open to all employees. The BIGs foster belonging for our employees and also promote positive business impacts through their work, such as building customer or community relationships. We support BIGs with executive sponsorship, consultation and resources to help our employees realize the shared goals that they establish.
Designing For Inclusion
We design with, not just for, our employees and our customers through our growing Inclusive Design practice.
When our Global Talent team moved into a new centrally-located space on our Grand Rapids, Mich. campus, the goal was to find strength in diversity by bringing people to the center of our culture to become trusted partners to our employees. The design team created an Inclusive Design Advisory Group to ensure the space and experiences addressed the needs of all employees and future employees.
We also work and learn alongside our customers and community partners such as Special Olympics of Michigan (seen left), Disability Advocates of Kent County, and the Kirk Gibson Foundation Center for people impacted by Parkinson’s. Inclusive design is a journey and we are learning with the help of our global partners so we can help our customers create spaces for all.
Nurturing Wellbeing
We are recognized as a leader in providing broad support for wellbeing and mental health services. Our pioneering research on wellbeing at work has informed our own wellbeing strategy and design of employee services and benefits around the world. We actively support physical, mental, emotional and financial health for all employees, and offer a broad range of services including fitness, on-site massage, mental health support, safety resources and profit-sharing programs in addition to standard medical and dental benefits.
For our customers, we create products and environments that enhance wellbeing by providing people with choice and control over how they work — whether that’s providing a cocoon-like private space for focused work or a vibrant work café for socialization and collaboration.
Cultivating Learning
Acquiring new skills is essential for staying ahead, and knowing where to find learning opportunities and who to ask for help ensures long-term success in both career and personal growth.
We cultivate an environment where everyone expects, values and celebrates growth and learning. To do this, we’ve introduced new habits and practices globally to improve learning behaviors. We meet learners where they are by connecting people with easy-to-use resources to empower everyone in their learning journey.
We believe learning happens everywhere. Our global research helps us create insight-led learning spaces for ourselves and our customers. The environments and products we design serve all levels of learning whether in the classroom or an organization, informally or formally.
