Giving Compass' Take:

• B Lab discusses its assessment from the Inclusive Economy Challenge to see how they've progressed in their goals for greater workplace inclusiveness — and areas in which they can improve.

• Included here are useful tips for others to consider in each category, such as making sure you have the answers ready once you open up questions about your company's culture.

• Here's why inclusive leadership means sharing the power and building powerful voices.

The Inclusive Economy Challenge (IEC) is a call to action for Certified B Corps to make concrete improvements to their business practices in pursuit of a more inclusive economy. B Lab pulled the 25 questions from the B Impact Assessment that captured how businesses can be more inclusive and equitable in their workplace practices, governance, supply chain, and even environmental practices.

The challenge: choose three of those questions, set an improvement goal for each one, and work alongside your fellow B Corps to try to reach those goals in a year by August 31, 2018. Going beyond the three goals required by the Inclusive Economy Challenge, B Lab chose six questions to improve on, setting a goal for each one.

If you’ve found that working to create a more inclusive business is harder than you thought, you’re not alone. We’re sharing the goals we set and how we have (or haven’t) reached them, because we think there’s value in sharing the complicated truth. We also want to create some accountability for ourselves to keep working to do better.

Goal 1: Diversity and Inclusion Trainings. Take the time to ask what people want to learn about.

Goal 2: Management of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Collecting data is crucial, but be ready for it to raise as many questions as it answers.

Goal 3: Management diversity. “Diversity” isn’t a monolith, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

Goal 4: Increased Board of Directors Diversity. Diverse perspectives in governance are important, and meaningful change takes more than a year.

Goal 5: Significant Suppliers. Changing your purchasing practices in a meaningful way takes longer than a year.

Goal 6: Carbon Offsets. There’s low-hanging fruit, but we need more time and people to make a real dent.

Read the full article about inclusive workplaces by Madison Milano and Alicia Agnew at B the Change.