Industry Research: Bringing Your Whole Self to Work: Diversity’s Greatest Myth

Imagine you’ve been in an organization for a couple of months and you receive an invite for a family fun day with a cartoon character fancy dress theme. The theme couldn’t be more perfect!. Your family loves cartoons, loves dressing up, and launches into preparing for the event with boundless enthusiasm.

The day arrives, you all pile into the station wagon as an assortment of comic book heroes, Disney villains, and banana-obsessed Minions. And as you walk through the gates you see that your entire organization, from the CEO and her executives down, are dressed in shorts and sneakers. Everyone is staring at you—at your family. Whether they’re saying it or not, the question on everybody’s lips is ‘What on earth could have possessed you?’.
 

You feel absolutely devastated. Not good enough. Not welcome. Later, you realize you missed the small print: “optional”. Of course. You missed the unwritten rule of the organization: we all stay the same, we keep it quiet, and we don’t rock the boat. Geez, even their families knew to play the game and keep stuff hidden.

Something similar to this plays out in workplaces around the world every single day. It happens every time a person from a historically marginalized group takes a role in an organization that claims “we allow you to bring your whole self to work”. This promise of a place of psychological safety is rarely realized. Employees are still taken to one side and asked to “not be quite so loud”, to not dress in certain ways, to not display their partner’s photograph on their desk, to be less challenging in meetings. You can bring your whole self to work—just not, you know, that bit.

“Bring your whole self to work” is a phrase that will continue to ring hollow if organizations fail to establish true strategic plans, and lack accountability and purposeful measurement. So how do you start to back these great declarations with real cultural change?

It Takes Rooting Out Moments of Exclusion

The widespread use of a phrase like “bring your whole self to work” is part of a wider pattern of organizations taking admirable but emotionally easy actions that ultimately fail to address the difficult work they actually need to be doing. Think back to summer 2020 when organizations were posting black squares on social media and maybe reaching out to their ERGs for guidance. Gestures that don’t address the underlying problem.

If your organization realizes it has really low representation for women at senior levels, statements aren’t enough. The root problem is getting a handle on unconscious bias, sexism, and gender bias in the individuals choosing your talent, your systems, and your processes. Similarly, it may be a fun idea to stick your CEO on a float at your local pride event, but are you actually tackling homophobia and transphobia in a way that addresses your own systemic issues?

An illuminating exercise we’ve previously run with clients is to scrape their statements on diversity topics from internal and external-facing places, and ask training attendees to identify which ones their organizations actually make happen. The success rate is low.

It’s important to root out performative behaviors—the things your organization is saying, but not doing, through comms and your DE&I strategy.

How HR Must Drive the Solution

To create the kind of organization that can really allow everyone to “bring their whole self”, you need three key things:

1. Measurement with a purpose 
2. Accountability eventually through performance 
3. A strategic plan

Many organizations have convinced themselves they have a strategic plan. They may have a strategy. They may have far-reaching goals. But more often than not they lack a month-by-month, detailed plan of just how they’re going to get to the goal.

If you’re going to tackle the systemic bias in your recruitment process, when are you starting to look at it, how are you going to design it, and how will you launch it, measure its effectiveness, and hold people accountable to it? Systemic biases need to be addressed with a plan that is published and actioned over a period of time. And in our experience, HR professionals are best responsible for designing and executing that underlying, month-by-month plan.

Here’s what that entails: HR publishes an 18-month to two-year plan that shows in detail when they’re going to improve processes, pilot, and measure the results. Every single executive leader (regional, business unit, etc.) develops their own month-by-month plan reflecting how their area will support these changes and then be held accountable for embedding them into regular practice. To make leaders accountable, that plan must be tucked into performance management.

Final Thoughts

As “bringing your whole self to work” drifts into cliche, it’s time for organizations to move on to actually creating and talking about the plans that will deliver on these sentiments. If you’d like to discuss our ideas for realizing this, please contact us at info@affirmity.com today.

Angela Peacock is the Global Director D&I at PDT Global (a part of Affirmity). Through the work of hundreds of clients across 20 years of global DE&I experience, Angela has seen the good, the bad, and the downright idiotic: she pulls no punches and has learned that by having frank, strategic, and not just well-meaning conversations, organizations can drive better results and excel in terms of diversity, inclusion, and business performance. Visit www.pdtglobal.com  Connect Angela Peacock