Industry Research: 4 Cultural and Analytical Changes to Improve Your DE&I Programs

While many organizations are committed in principle to diversity, equity and inclusion, the route to results is often unclear. Good intentions have to be backed with the right strategy. If like many business leaders you’re failing to “crack the code” despite budgeting significant time and money for DE&I, it’s time to pause, reassess and try the following key strategies.

1) Lead Inclusively

It all starts at the top: did you know that only around 6% of CEOs leading US Fortune 500 companies are women? When groups are underrepresented, a tone is set across an organization, and the responsibility for creating that change lies with today’s leaders, regardless of their backgrounds.
 

Thankfully, research suggests that those organizations who commit and action change at their highest levels will benefit. McKinsey & Company has observed that having a more ethnically diverse executive team increases the likelihood that an organization will perform well financially by around 36% versus the national industry median. Gender diversity has a similar effect (a 25% increase). 

Beyond leadership composition and the precedent that sets, executive teams have to take meaningful actions. Some key ideas include:
 

• Making DE&I a part of every leader’s work: DE&I shouldn’t be left just to the Chief Diversity Officer—all leaders must be involved and accountable for developing and implementing DE&I strategies.
• Investing in experts: Only one-third of employers have a well-resourced team specifically dedicated to DE&I, despite it being a mission-critical area for performance.
• Continuing to iterate: Leadership needs to commit to the idea that DE&I strategies aren’t static. Policies need to be reviewed frequently to ensure that progress remains unhindered.

2) Incorporate Equity

Equity is inseparable from diversity and inclusion, and being able to prove that you are an equitable employer is increasingly important when building and maintaining an attractive brand. According to one report, 75% of Millennials would consider quitting their job if they found out that their employer was paying men and women unequally. And thanks to changing attitudes around pay transparency, employees increasingly expect to be able to have access to this information.

And, it’s not just pay equity! Awareness of other measures, such as equal access to sponsorship opportunities, resources, support, and benefits continues to rise. Companies that fail to demonstrate equity in these areas risk being left behind.

3) Cultivate a Culturally Aware Climate

Retaining and attracting diverse talent requires a culture nurtured through three critical processes: delivering DE&I training, understanding and accounting for intersectionality, and promoting allyship.

i) Delivering the right messages via training
How you deliver your DE&I training matters almost as much as the actual content. Use a variety of training methods—self-guided online learning, on-the-job coaching, and virtual training to reach and engage a wider range of employees. Covering topics such as unconscious bias, microaggressions, as well as basic DE&I principles is important. But without real-world examples, employees can gain the impression that the principles are simply academic or theoretical.

Training entry-level employees can be just as important as training those higher up the chain. After all, they take cultural knowledge as they move up the corporate ladder. Remember that exclusion has a high cost—talent attracted away by fairer offers is expensive to replace.

ii) Embracing intersectionality and drilling down
When an individual is subject to multiple forms of oppression, those oppressions intersect rather than straightforwardly combine. This can be observed in the fact that while a Black man makes $0.74 and a White woman makes $0.78 to a White man’s dollar, a Black woman makes only $0.64. In this way, treating “women” and “Black people” collectively in your DE&I program may end up missing issues that are only experienced by those who are women and Black.

The challenge this creates for DE&I strategies is that drilling down and taking account of intersectionality forces us to rely on small numbers—something that the idea of statistical significance has conditioned us to be wary of. However, as the Harvard Business Review has suggested, this is less of an issue as long as we work with data for our organization’s full populations, rather than just a sample.

Robust data capture and reporting tools are required in order to account for intersectionality, not just along gender and race lines, but sexuality, religion, socio-economic class, veteran status, and others. 

iii) Encouraging allyship
As managers are involved in recruiting, retaining, and promoting employees, they are a natural starting point for any efforts to build allyship in your organization. Train these managers and other willing employees to gain appropriate knowledge and skills that will make them better allies to their diverse colleagues.

Make sure that your allies understand that good allyship involves:
 

• Relieving the burden of education: Good allies self-educate and don’t expect members of a group to educate them.
• Participate: Good allies work in partnership with a group, but they don’t speak or act on their behalf.
• Being open to feedback: Good allies don’t use allyship as a shield—they learn when corrected and don’t get defensive.

4) Know Your Diversity Numbers

In order to keep steering your project in the right direction, you need to measure the effectiveness of your strategy—and determine where it underperforms. 

Establishing Regularity and Benchmarking

Regular monitoring allows you to stay on top of your numbers as they evolve. Benchmarking ensures that those numbers are meaningfully paired with context, but DE&I teams have to be tactical about the external benchmarks they choose. This will depend on how you recruit and fill positions. Potential sources could include:
 

• U.S. Census data
• Geographic data
• Industry data via the American Community Survey
• IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System)

Your Numbers and the Talent Cycle

It is imperative that you know where your organization currently is and where it needs to go. Only by knowing the areas in which you fall short will you know where to “cast your line” and find the skilled individuals who will address your shortfall. For example, you may be prompted to recruit from women’s college campuses or professional organizations if you lack women at certain levels of the business. You should also be identifying opportunities to mentor these groups within your organization’s own Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).

Your commitment to monitoring hires, promotions and terminations needs to be ongoing—it can be most easily monitored through workforce analytics software. For example, Affirmity’s Talent Lifecycle chart is fed by HRIS and applicant tracking system data and provides per-demographic graphs for:
 

• Applicants (vs external pool)
• Hires (vs external pool)
• Promotions in (vs internal pool)
• Promotions out (vs representation from the beginning of the recorded period)
• Separations (vs representation from the beginning of the recorded period)

How Affirmity Can Help

The key strategies described above can be managed internally, but all aspects benefit from an outside perspective and expertise, and the data burden can be significantly reduced with software and outsourced services. Affirmity’s suite of plans, reports, scorecards, and dashboards can provide reporting consistency, efficiency, and visibility at all levels of your organization.

For more, visit Affirmity.com today.

Author Bio

Pamela Pujo has nearly a decade of experience developing and leading successful diversity strategies and innovative D&I programs — managing from within and as a consultant. At Affirmity, she helps clients optimize their D&I programs through deployment of benchmarking and reporting tools. Her expertise spans diversity and inclusion, equity, and accessibility, with an emphasis on data, metrics, and benchmarking. Before Affirmity, she was a senior leader of diversity strategies at American Airlines, with a focus on employee resource groups (ERGs). Connect Pamela Pujo