The Critical Role Of Accountability In DEI

Organizations looking to make meaningful progress toward DEI goals must prioritize accountability

All too often, well-intentioned organizations find themselves in a conundrum when it comes to implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Despite dutifully rolling out well-thought-out DEI policies and procedures, employers are left to wonder why issues around representation and equity in their organizations persist.

In many cases, it comes down to accountability. Without it, even the most ambitious DEI policies will falter. 

The Role of Accountability in DEI

The most successful organizations hold the entire company accountable for achieving DEI goals. No single person or team within the organization is responsible for DEI, but rather it’s owned by every team. In the same way, the CFO of an organization is not solely responsible for ensuring financial success for an organization, DEI advancements happen as a result of many moving parts within. 
 

Accountability involves more than just training managers and leaders though. While it's true that ownership around DEI starts at the top, accountability should also be shared across all leadership members of the organization.

To understand the role of accountability in executing DEI initiatives, take for example a few major corporations that have come into the DEI spotlight in recent years. McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Genentech are three organizations coming out of past controversies stronger than ever by making accountability a key component of their DEI initiatives.

McDonald’s

Last year,  McDonald’s narrowed its global wage gap to 99.85% after solidifying its focus on accountability. In addition to conducting a global pay equity analysis on an annual basis, the fast-food giant agreed to tie 15% of its executives’ pay bonuses to meeting diversity and inclusion targets. This strategic decision incentivized company leaders to achieve DEI commitments and held them accountable for meeting them.

The company also reinforced the importance of data transparency by pledging to publicly release employee demographics by race, ethnicity, and gender. By doing this, it held itself accountable for delivering the sensitive data publicly. The result? It demonstrated to stakeholders that it was serious about DEI.

Denny’s

To create motivation and accountability at both an individual and organizational level, Denny’s established key performance indicators and created measurable goals like diversity benchmarking and supplier diversity targets. The restaurant chain emphasizes a critical point – the end goal of DEI is not a comfortable stopping point, but an ongoing journey. To ensure DEI success, it sets both individual and company-wide accountability goals.

Denny’s also holds itself accountable by partnering with civil rights leaders and organizations focused on racial justice. By engaging in ongoing dialogue with individuals that have real-world experience, the company learns from outside partners’ expertise and constantly re-assesses its approach. Instead of writing a DEI plan that gathers dust on the shelf, this strategy facilitates meaningful conversations that help put goals into action.

Genentech

To help resolve long-standing gender representation issues, biotech company, Genentech began incorporating accountability into individual employee performance review processes. To ensure DEI efforts were improving, leaders were asked to explain why their team was lacking female leadership during the review process.

Genentech attributes accountability as one of the primary reasons it was able to increase female representation and equity. It helped increase awareness around the gender representation gap, which led to actionable conversations for correcting the issue.

To Drive Accountability, Put a Measurement System in Place

If you want to succeed with DEI initiatives, it’s clear that you need to prioritize accountability, but before setting your DEI goals and holding individuals accountable for achieving them, you need to first know where you stand and that requires implementing a measurement system. 

Here’s Why

When you know what your organization is doing well and where there is room for improvement in regards to DEI, you can take action to work towards making meaningful progress. 

For example, from your baseline analysis, you could find that you have a representation issue within your tech department. There are few female employees and the ones you have are in lower-paid positions. By first understanding this, you can set goals for increasing female representation within your tech department and also ensure there are equal advancement opportunities for applicable female employees. 

To understand your organization’s DEI baseline, you will need to:
 

• Conduct a pay equity audit
• Perform a diversity analysis
• Execute a talent flow analysis
• Administer inclusion surveys

Simply conducting these analyses will not guarantee DEI success, however. You must measure your progress over time through the application of tools. These tools will help you regularly measure progress against your goals and as a function of that, help in facilitating accountability.

Employers looking to make meaningful progress on DEI initiatives should explore options that enable them to be successful. Sophisticated solutions, like Trusaic’s pay equity auditing, diversity, and inclusion software solution, PayParitySM, provide you with the tools to conduct a pay equity audit at the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity and include professional services to help your team tie accountability to your goals and initiatives. PayParity can also frame your representation, sense of employee belonging, and compensation equality in a new perspective.  

This holistic view provides the details you need to gain critical insights relating to your company’s demographic and compensation data. Ultimately, this can help you set goals around resolving any identified pay disparities or representation issues. And once your goals are set, you can bring in members from your different teams to ensure they are held accountable for meeting goals.

Where to Begin with DEI

Meaningful DEI goes far beyond checking the proverbial box. Rather than documenting plans and allowing them to gather dust on the shelf, employers must treat them as living, evolving guidelines and measure their efforts against said plans over time. Problems will inevitably arise if these steps aren’t taken, even with the most dedicated leaders at the helm.

Building an equitable business culture from the top down is not an easy feat, but it’s well worth the effort. There is a direct connection between DEI initiatives and strategic benefits. Aside from the obvious moral imperative – which is important to underscore – there is also a strong business case for promoting DEI in the workplace.

To learn more about how to ensure DEI accountability and the benefits of prioritizing the social good, download the research report we sponsored, Creating a Culture of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, conducted by Harvard Business Review.

Robert Sheen is the CEO and Founder of Trusaic. Combining a law degree with his extensive background in tax and finance, Robert has built Trusaic into an industry leader in helping organizations successfully manage requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), achieving a 100% compliance rate in filing ACA information with the IRS. Connect Robert Sheen