3 Levers to Focus On To Build a DEI Program That Actually Works

The year 2020 was monumental for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The great awakening to injustice, inequality and systemic racism drove organizations to re-examine and reinvigorate their DEI initiatives.Â

The speed with which organizations responded yielded some great results and some attempts that didn’t work or won’t sustain meaningful change.

Three things many organizations got right in their attempts to create more equitable workplaces were:

Expanding their historic D&I initiatives to DEI â€” improving diversity and inclusion by adding equity in pay, promotions, policies, and so onÂ
Asking HR and compliance to take an integrated role with any DEI partners to drive change and operationalize it with the rest of the organization’s values and policies
Presenting the business case of DEI and engaged leaders in the dialogue, no matter how uncomfortable or disparate it may be compared with past practicesÂ

Three mistakes organizations commonly made in their attempts were:

Focusing on the demographic composition of various leadership ranks as a telling sign of diversity and inclusion in the organization
Inviting a consultant or set of speakers to share their experiences as a â€œlive trainingâ€ equivalentÂ
Focusing on the definitions and types of bias rather than educating employees on how to effectively interrupt bias and reframe the experience for those subjected to bias

To build a DEI program that actually works and positively shifts the organization’s culture in addition to identifying problems early, focus on three key levers: baselining the company’s DEI readiness quotient, effective training, and continued communication.

1. Start With Identifying Your DEI Readiness Quotient

A thriving DEI program must be rooted in the culture of a company’s employees, its business processes, and how it recruits, hires, and rewards employees. The collective actions and outcomes from these roots set the tone for sustained change.Â

Many HR operations already employ tools, platforms, and policies to support DEI initiatives that monitor promotions, hiring, pay equity, and other trends to determine commitment to DEI. This often misses the human component â€” the executives, the managers, and the rank-and-file employees. If they aren’t committed to DEI or clearly understand how it fits into the organization’s mission, vision, and values, they won’t be catalysts for change.

A key part of measuring the readiness and behavior of your employees is to leverage simulations and behavioral insights to assess the human dimension of your culture. This can be done as a separate baselining exercise before training or embedded within if using an intelligent, measurable, technology-driven digital experience.

Undertaking this not only will help you understand the leader and employee buy-in but also will highlight areas of deficiency, misconceptions, or apathy that can drive a counterculture within the organization. Because all humans are susceptible to bias, assuming demographic diversity leads to DEI is a fallacy that is easy to fall for. Even diverse members of your leadership team might not recognize the biases they carry or see those that exist within their environment because of the preconceptions they bring with them. This can be avoided with a more objective, quantitative measurement of the human factor and combined with the operational processes commitment to identify your DEI readiness quotient.Â Â

See More: 3 Ways To Leverage Hiring Tech for DE&I Success

2. Deploy Measurable and Targeted Training

Training must be a core priority of any DEI program. Small, live workshops are inherently effective in the moment. But the logistics of organizing and executing such sessions and sustaining the change, especially as the pandemic continues and some companies that went remote decide to stay remote are often an obstacle. Online learning fills this gap and delivers an extra, powerful benefit if an organization uses a simulative-based, adaptive approach with measurable results.

Good simulation data from training, something more than tracking whether someone started or completed a course, provides a deeper understanding of which behaviors employees excel at or struggle with. From this intelligence, HR can plan where and how targeted reinforcement needs to happen to further DEI goals specific to the organization, including the live workshops that can now act as â€œsmart classroomsâ€ that already have a baseline on the learner’s strengths and weaknesses for each session.Â

The best training emphasizes visualization exercises and situational simulations, challenging employees to consider how they might react to everyday encounters and, most importantly, how to interrupt bias constructively at work. Learning by doing is crucial because, in real life, that will be the action that is required to drive a cultural shift positively. Don’t deploy training on DEI concepts year after year: Instead, focus on simulations, self-reflection to spot our own biases in a safe space, and practicing behaviors that lead to better outcomes. The insights you gain from this kind of training, supplemented by HR, audit, investigations, and sentiment data, should shape your future training as well as DEI strategy.

Leadership plays a key role and must be trained specifically on these topics. Compared with rank-and-file employees, leaders need to display more empathy and a greater understanding of their power and their responsibilities to shape culture. They may have earned their roles by being great at their jobs, but that doesn’t automatically mean they will excel at soft skills. This targeted guidance should include:

Recognizing implicit bias with themselves and others
How to speak appropriately to their teams
How to have one-on-one conversations about sensitive subjects with direct reports
How to handle setbacks
When to escalate a concern or allegation to HR

Holding live sessions to help leaders see the behavioral insights of their teams and realize the tone they set and its alignment with the company’s mission is critical to sustaining change. Some classic social psychology experimentsOpens a new window , such as the Asch social conformity experiment and the Milgram shock experiment, offer great discussion examples on how employees trust authority and how leaders can use (or misuse) that trust to effect change.

3. Communicate, Communicate â€¦ Then Communicate Some More

Too many DEI initiatives fizzle out because the organization is content with putting out a few statements and holding a round of training, then stepping away, thinking it has done enough. Managers and employees may start out enthusiastic, but without continual encouragement and activity, they can forget the progress made and the principles they learned.

A key pillar of DEI training is that it should never be one and done. Measurable training represents a starting point for continuing education that helps employees realize the implicit biases they may have that shape, knowingly or unknowingly, workplace decisions. It should set the foundation for an ongoing, two-way dialogue in which employees can feel confident in raising their hands without fear of retaliation when they witness perceived or actual inequities on the job.

Coupling this with a strong communication strategy is critical to the ongoing care and feeding of your DEI program. Today’s organizations have many channels available, from social media to email to Slack. Take advantage of as many tools as possible to integrate bias and equity topics through messaging, events, live and video Q&A with leadership, and anything else that gets the word out and encourages discussion. Highlight the progress, admit the missteps, and share what the organization has learned from them and how it’s changing. Employees expect progress, not perfection. Authenticity will help them realize we must each make a conscious decision every day to create a better organization and a fairer world.Â

Ensure that your message resonates with employees by constructing it with empathy and human touch; you don’t want communication to sound too corporate or impersonal. More importantly, reinforce a speak-up culture. DEI becomes a struggle if people are too afraid to communicate, so prioritize that one of the best ways to drive equity and inclusion is not to be silent and instead be an active ally or involve others who can do so more effectively.

See More: Improving Inclusion Within Tech: 3 Ways To Create a More Diverse Pipeline

Change Takes Time

Company cultures don’t transform overnight. People are set in their ways, and getting them to change takes immense self-reflection, plenty of practice, self-correction, and inherent repetition and time. There may be many difficult DEI conversations, especially upward with senior leadership, and you might not immediately sway everyone. As much as organizations want to embrace DEI principles fully, baby steps are often a more realistic goal. The evolution of business and HR processes, buy-in from leadership, outstanding training, and constant communication can move the needle, which, ultimately, is progress.

Approaching DEI as change management rather than just a nice initiative helps ensure that tools and processes are in place to better drive that progress. Each employee is on a journey in a DEI program, and HR, Compliance and ethics teams must carefully measure the progress and tailor the journey and the time needed accordingly so that the destination, as lofty as it may sometimes seem, is worth the effort.

Which of these three levers have you missed focusing on? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .