At JobSage, we know that candidates are looking for different things from a workplace culture. Across demographics, however, we found that most people want to know more about five factors of a company’s employee experience: flexibility, inclusion, sense of purpose, growth opportunities, and feedback. Moreover, they want to know about these things before accepting a job offer. We also know that most employers want to provide those things, they just need help figuring out how!

With that in mind, we spent hours evaluating dozens of tools designed to help employers. Today, we’re focusing on tools that allow employers to build an inclusive workplace where all employees feel empowered to participate and grow.

Why an inclusive culture matters for employers

An inclusive workplace is one where everyone feels valued, regardless of their role or background. The documented benefits of an inclusive workplace are almost too numerous to list: improved retention, increased creativity, higher productivity, and so much more.

But like every piece in the employee experience, an inclusive culture doesn’t just happen. Companies that want to reap the benefits of inclusion must invest time and resources into tools, policies, and practices that make everyone feel welcome and heard. 

It’s not just employees who thrive in an inclusive culture. Increasingly, candidates also care about inclusion and are making decisions based on that value.

Monster.com found that 62% of people, regardless of their background, would turn down a job offer if the company didn’t support an inclusive culture. Candidates also see through stock images and bland proclamations of embracing diversity. They want to know what your company’s culture is really like and they’re using every resource at their disposal to find out. 

In order to help you build or reinforce the inclusive culture 86% of candidates say is important to them, we evaluated several tools that claim to achieve this, across a variety of verticals.

Best tools for building an inclusive culture

Of those we reviewed, we recommend employers look into the following culture-building tools.

1. Chezie

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can play a critical role in your company culture. When done well, ERGs can help improve feelings of inclusion, increase retention, and maximize employee well-being. Unfortunately, they aren’t always done well.

That’s where Chezie comes in.

Chezie is an end-to-end solution to help companies track membership, engagement, and budget for their Employer Resource Groups. 

While ERGs are often key to corporate DEI initiatives, they can also consume too much manual administrative effort from employees who are often not compensated for their work running the ERG. Creating a software tool to track all aspects of an ERG for its users, Chezie’s founders empowered users to instead focus time on building a more inclusive workplace.

Chezie quickly improves the ROI of ERGs and helps overcome the pitfalls companies might otherwise face in managing diverse groups. With data often being sparse in the employee experience space, Chezie also impresses its users with accessible, actionable data that they can share with everyone from the company’s board to individual ERG members.

Find this helpful? You might also like Employee Feedback Tools Every Company Needs!

2. Balloon

One of the most frequent barriers to employees feeling a sense of inclusion occurs in meetings. Whether because of their gender, role, age, or other factor, many employees are afraid to speak up in meetings. Perhaps they’ve been ignored or shut down in the past or feel uncomfortably “on the spot” when asked to participate. With some workers spending nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, this is a particularly important place to intervene and incorporate inclusion.

Balloon is here to help.

Balloon’s founders recognized how loud voices and groupthink can plague meetings and exclude certain voices. To combat this, they created a tool that lets leaders ask questions, source anonymous ideas, empower the entire team to vote, and act on merit-based decisions rather than seniority or other biases. Teams that use Balloon are not only more inclusive, but they also reduce meeting time by up to 70%, according to the company.

3. Textio

An inclusive culture doesn’t start on day one of a new hire’s tenure with your company.

It actually starts long before that— the first moment they learn about the job opening, review the job description, and determine whether or not they should apply. Textio is a writing tool on a mission to ensure all candidates feel included and encouraged to apply.

Textio users input draft job descriptions. In return, Textio highlights potential biased wording, business jargon, and other phrases that can discourage certain candidates. But it doesn’t stop there. Textio also suggests new words and phrases to use instead, choices that will appeal to a broader, more diverse pool of candidates.