Serious About Inclusion? These Are the 9 Levers You Should Already Be Pulling to Create Change

Industry Research

The pace of change in diversity and inclusion can sometimes seem nothing short of glacial. Thankfully, there are at least nine points of leverage available to organizations that recognize inclusion as a powerful engine for positive change at every level.

1) Take Back Control of Your D&I Language

Do you talk about diversity and inclusion as basically indistinguishable ideas? You’re not exactly alone, but that’s not an excuse! It’s important to be conscious of the separation of the two, because failing to do so has often meant focusing on diversity at the expense of inclusion—you can nominally be doing plenty of “D&I” work while doing very little to advance inclusion.
 

Pulling this lever requires knowing when your programs are working to improve the measurable “diversity” of the workforce, and when they’re instead focused on making an environment where everyone can excel to the best of their ability. Because while it helps to know that there are visible women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals in the organization, this is only part of the picture of the workplace culture that any worker experiences day-to-day.

2) Make the Right Business Case with Cold-Hearted Facts

From greater creativity and soaring innovation to a simple sense of what’s good and proper, the emotionally-resonant business cases for greater diversity and inclusion often aren’t the ones that get actual decision-makers to open their wallets. Treating the emotive issue of D&I as just another business proposal may seem counterintuitive, but it’s often just the system that you will have to work within.

How should you make the business case? By highlighting specific, bottom-line benefits that your leaders need to see to sign off on any project. For example, you could forecast how your D&I activity will increase your market share, decrease employee turnover, or even increase scores in your safety or compliance records.

3) Back Words with Actions—And Actions with Budgets

D&I ideas can sometimes seem like a lot of empathy-based common sense, essentially free from cost if you just ask people to be a little more mindful of saying the right things. In reality, it’s wishful thinking to assume that everyone holds values conducive to diverse and inclusive best practice. Or that even those with good intentions aren’t frequently undermined by their own unconscious biases or other priorities.

The actions that change these behaviors aren’t cost free: D&I leaders won’t be able to affect real change on a shoestring budget. They need to be able to hire and consult with external experts and work with engaging training formats as diverse as the organization they’re trying to create. The alternative is dangerous. D&I fatigue is a real threat in organizations that have underfunded, ineffective D&I programs that employees have essentially become desensitized to. 

4) Empower Your ERGs with the Right Rules

Your Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are potentially a great point of leverage, but only if they’re set up to succeed. This means ensuring they have a robust charter, a meaningful structure, and an executive sponsor through which they can reach your wider business. It also means that they should have goals too: be clear about the direct line between their activity and your business outcomes, monitor the impact of ERG activity, and make ERGs accountable to their own engagement and targets.

5) Meet with Your Procurement Director (the Powerful Friend You Never Knew You Had)

Procurement directors are already an important part of your organization’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts as a result of sustainability and anti-modern slavery considerations in your supply chain. The next logical step is working with procurement directors on ensuring D&I values are adhered to from the top to the bottom of your supply chain. 

Regardless of how included we feel in our immediate surroundings, the knowledge that our work is in some way perpetuating the exclusion of others elsewhere in the chain can only undermine how included we ultimately feel.

6) Start Measuring Inclusion (Yes, It Can Be Done!)

An argument could be made that one of the reasons that programs targeting diversity get more focus than those that target inclusion, is that inclusion is essentially unmeasurable. That may well be how businesses have rationalized their D&I mix, but the premise is false: the tools do exist to measure your inclusion programs, and are an essential part of proving just how effective your work is. Specifically, look to the following:

●  Employment engagement surveys
●  Hiring numbers
●  Talent velocity

Among the metrics above, particular attention should be paid to talent velocity, which can be described as the speed at which diverse talent permeates through your organization. Talent velocity is a key starting point for your diversity analytics, and considers more of what happens beyond initial hire. This is essential because retention, promotion, and other moves within the organization have implications in terms of your overall inclusivity.

7) Exorcise the Bias from Your Processes

Whether we like it or not, biases are inevitable in your talent processes. This doesn’t mean we have to tolerate them, however. How we structure hiring matters immensely, as does training our teams to recognize and counteract their own biases, and those of others. Moving towards an anonymized hiring process, or regularly reviewing basic qualifications in order to weed out unnecessarily discriminative criteria, are good first steps.

8) Work Smarter to Make Training Last Longer

If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance that D&I is part of your job and something you think about several times in your working day. Obviously, the average employee isn’t so tuned into the topic—though organizations could often do a better job at giving D&I more airtime.

If your D&I training approach stacks everything you want to teach about Diversity and Inclusion into single, infrequent sessions, you’re packaging your message in a way that is too disposable, too easily ignored. In order to make a session last a whole year, use a blended learning approach: offer material in different formats, nudge people on what they have learned at key decision points. In other words, teach little but often.

9) Embed D&I Accountability into Your Performance Management

Measurement of your D&I activity doesn’t matter if you don’t also hold leaders accountable to those measurements. This is where the rubber hits the road. Emphasize that things like ERG attendance, demonstrable allyship, and improvements in retention and employee engagement aren’t merely “nice to haves”. Set D&I-related goals and treat them as an integral part of the role, giving them as much weight as any other item on the job spec when it comes to compensation and performance discussions.

How Affirmity and PDT Global Can Help

These nine levers present nine key possibilities for driving real change with your D&I initiatives. Remember, however, that none of them are really optional: after all, you can’t be “a little bit pregnant”, and you can’t do “a little bit of inclusion”. Keeping a hand on all nine levers will be easier with an external partner: Affirmity and PDT Global can work in partnership to transform your organization through a full program of measurement, design, application, and impact assessment.

To find out more, visit Affirmity.com and PDTGlobal.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. Connect Angela Peacock Follow @AngiePeacockPDT