"DEIB Is About Creating a Culture that Values and Encourages These Values"

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: How can companies build a sustainable diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) strategy?

Bailey: DE&I initiatives are essential to ensuring organizations are broadening diversity and leveling the playing field with equitable talent management decisions. Inclusion efforts allow your team to bring their whole, authentic selves to work regardless of, or including, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or race. As organizations work to cultivate more diverse, equitable workplaces through tactics, including skills-based hiring, those that invest in creating safe, inclusive environments will thrive.

A sustainable DEI strategy starts with hiring. For hiring teams, orienting their criteria around candidates’ skills and how they meet the requirements of the position, even if those skills were learned through less traditional pathways, will start to create more equitable access to the top of the funnel. From there, companies can see a better representation of the population in the interview process and translate it into the workforce as a whole.

While hiring a diverse pool of new hires is great, it's not enough. These new hires need to feel inclusion and belonging from the moment they are brought into the company, and that sense of inclusion and belonging must persist for their entire tenure at your organization. Everyone is responsible for this – management and leadership, of course, but so too are the rest of their teammates.

For example, when being evaluated for mentorship, new projects, access to ERG groups,  promotions and raises, all individuals, regardless of background, should be and feel fairly evaluated within the company as their peers.

By ensuring DEI strategies from hiring to onboarding and as a core element of daily expectations within the company, efforts will be sustainable and scalable with the workforce's needs.

Q: What are the changes a company needs to bring in in order to support, engage and build a diverse workforce?

Bailey: Invest in employees. DEI within the workforce is not a one-and-done checklist item. Instead, a company must be dedicated to the ongoing development of their employees and supporting them throughout their individual career journeys. Employees want the flexibility to choose their career path, and businesses need to provide them with opportunities to do so.

By offering development opportunities like reskilling and upskilling, employers are putting the power of talent mobility and flexibility in the hands of their employees and allowing them to craft their own narratives on how they will succeed at work.

Q: What are some of the biggest challenges in prolonging sustainable DEI? How can organizations overcome these?

Bailey: We are currently facing a period of increased turnover and retention challenges. In these times, organizations must offer their employees opportunities to expand their knowledge. L&D opportunities are critical to increasing employee engagement and retaining talent. Robust, outcomes-based employee learning and development programs are the path successful organizations take to demonstrate their commitment to employee fulfillment and long-term growth.

Q: How important and challenging is it to look at DEI not just as a hiring strategy and as a mere data point?

Bailey: DEI should be a continuous goal for organizations. It’s not merely about hiring and data; it’s about creating a workplace culture that values and encourages DEI. It’s simple to develop strategies and leave it at that, but it’s more important to create a company culture that promotes learning and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace.

Q: How do you foresee inclusion becoming a reality?

Bailey: Diversity and inclusion initiatives have become an expectation for employees, and employers will lose talent if they do not set and communicate their DEI goals. Employees want their employers to take action and deliver on their promises. This expectation will drive organizations to focus on their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.

Q: How can organizations pave the way for equitable workplace culture?

Bailey: Leaders can pave the way for equitable workplace culture by making their organization’s values clear to employees and cultivating safe spaces for employees to be heard. Employers must communicate and be transparent about their organization’s goals and how they plan to reach them. Additionally, training and development programs can help employees and managers learn and develop the skills necessary for an inclusive culture.

Q: What would be the role of new technologies in aiding DEI?

Bailey: Technology plays a crucial role in aiding DEI efforts. Take digital credentials, for example. Digital credentials are a key component to improving DEI in the workplace. Organizations that rely on them for a skills-based approach to their talent management efforts have a better chance of picking the best person for the job outside their years of experience or educational background, which often come with underlying biases.

Q: What has been your experience with building DEI culture? What have been the challenges? What are the learnings?

Bailey: Building a DEI culture is everyone’s responsibility, no matter your role in an organization. I believe that building an inclusive, diverse culture needs to start with leadership but ultimately every employee needs to embrace and further that approach.

Some of the core challenges that I’ve seen lie in the major gaps in tools that help employers understand how to recruit, upskill, and promote based on their teams’ skills. Historically, the HR tools that have been used have not provided the level of transparency needed to understand the skill profile of talent and where to go from there. This hamstrings employers’ ability to help their talent grow - which in turn impacts DEI.

The key learning is to build your tech stack with intentionality, and thoughtfully consider whether your HRTech tools are helping, hurting, or are neutral. AI and machine learning are only as unbiased as we teach them to be, so taking an intentional approach upfront helps set an organization up for longer-term success.

Q: What changes do you plan to bring into your strategy to build a sustainable DEI culture?

Bailey: As a hiring manager, I’m committed to skills-based hiring practices in order to build a team that reflects my organization’s needs. I’m also leading with my company values, which include tenets such as, “Foster Empowerment and Ownership,” “Learn, Adapt, and Grow,” and “Earn Trust Every Day.” The conversations I have and the decisions I make are informed by those values, and when new programs or initiatives are rolled out, or when I see a need for new skills to be developed, this presents an opportunity to put the values into action.