If you want to create an inclusive workplace, start with respect, urges this author

All I’m askin’ is for a little respect. Nearly six decades since Aretha Franklin sang those famous lyrics, they still resonate, especially with employees looking for a little more courtesy in the workplace.

In her 2022 book, Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel, Gena Cox urges HR and business leaders to prioritize respect. Cox, an organizational psychologist and founder and CEO of leadership consultancy Feels Human, says respect is foundational to effective DE&I initiatives.

She spoke with HR Brew about how people leaders can encourage respect in the workplace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s a key takeaway from your book?

I’ve watched HR leaders and business leaders, really with good intention, [try] to do a bunch of stuff, especially in the last four years since George Floyd was killed…But, they tended to, number one, put the cart before the horse, and secondly, emphasize the wrong things…[We] really want good organizations, healthy organizations where everybody can thrive. But, if you just go out and focus on getting more people of color, or hiring chief diversity officers, or doing implicit bias training, what you discover four years later is that the impact has been minimal, and maybe even in some cases negative. You need to start with focusing on the outcome of respect…because respect is a universally valued outcome, but it’s also the outcome that people from underrepresented groups say they want.

What are strategies for focusing on respect?

Respect is not the same thing as stability. So, a distinction I like to make is that it’s not just being nice, and making eye contact, and saying hello, although clearly, that’s an element. The other thing I know from the research is that Black people, in particular, and indigenous peoples, put a higher value on respect. For example, they’ll say, you don’t have to like me, but you will respect me…What this means is that organizational leaders, even when they think they’re behaving respectfully, are often not…so I encourage them to use my very, very simple and basic three-point model of thinking about respect…In order for someone to feel that an experience is respectful, they have to feel seen, they have to feel heard, and they have to feel valued. And so, organizations tend to do one, or some, but they don’t tend to focus on all three of those ideas simultaneously, but they must if I’m going to feel respected.

What advice do you have for HR leaders who want the C-suite to value respect?

Disrespect tends to be in the top three factors…why people voluntarily leave organizations. So, if you’re not focusing on respect, you’re probably missing one of the key drivers of turnover that you probably didn’t even realize was that important. It doesn’t sound like it might be important, but it is…When I talk to tech leaders, it really resonates with them, when I talk about the value of respect in terms of just making it possible for me to get through a difficult time—because we are all going through difficult times where we’re underresourced [and] we have too much to do…So, respect acts as a buffer to some of that…It supports resilience in the face of burnout.

An extremely powerful way to build an inclusive employee experience is to make sure we have a respectful culture…If the top-level leaders of the organization, if they aren’t doing that, then they’re missing the opportunity to create that culture that really only the top level has the full control or authority to do. Even though, clearly at a department level or a team level, any individual supervisor or manager can also work on this, but it’s much more powerful when this is an enterprise effort. So, in a way, one of the other talking points is that if we don’t do it, it won’t get done.