Organizational assessment : an overlooked approach to managing diversity and addressing racism in the workplace

Strategies to manage diversity and address racism within organizations are fast becoming routine practice. This is especially important given the demographic compositions of workforces are changing and evidence that racism is commonplace within workplaces and associated with a range of detrimental economic, social and health outcomes. In this paper, we consider organizational assessment as a largely overlooked approach to managing diversity and addressing racism in the workplace. Approaches to organizational assessment in the fields of diversity management and cultural competency are explored and critiqued before turning to a review of organizational assessment tools focused on managing diversity and/or addressing racism. A critical review of the eight tools that met the inclusion criteria led to the formulation of six key principles to guide the selection of organizational assessment tools.. Current organizational assessment tools lack an explicit focus on addressing systemic racism and require further refinement and testing in order to effectively manage diversity and address racism in the workplace.