Before you start planning your recruitment, consider how you can make the process and your workplace culturally safe.
Ensuring a workplace is inclusive and culturally safe is everybody’s responsibility.
Cultural safety is ‘an environment which is safe for people; where there is no assault, challenge, or denial of their identity, of who they are and what they need. It is about shared respect, shared meaning, shared knowledge, and experience, of learning together with dignity, and truly listening’.1
To improve cultural safety, work with people from diverse communities and with lived experience of family violence or sexual assault in paid advisory roles.
Make it clear that workers from diverse communities are equal to others in the organisation. They are not ‘tokenistic’ hires. They are qualified workers delivering valuable services to clients.
Complexities can arise when a worker from a diverse community already has relationships in the community they are working in. This is more common in small, rural or remote communities. As part of ensuring cultural safety, make sure you acknowledge, understand and support these workers.
Refer to the section on Recruiting First Nations people(opens in a new window) for more tips on cultural safety.
References
1. R Williams, ‘Cultural safety — what does it mean for our work practice?’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 2008, 23(2): 213–214.
Updated