In June, spurred by worldwide anti-racism protests, companies pledged to do better on racial equality. Two months later, after making internal and public declarations about their commitments, some leaders may be wondering how to handle the next steps.
It starts with gathering data, say experts in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
How many people of color does your organization employ, and how senior are they? Have you measured employee engagement levels by race or gender? Do you have performance reviews to indicate how fair and inclusive managers are?
Once you know where you stand, set clear, measurable targets. Look not only at outcome metrics (how many Black people are in the C-suite) but also at process metrics (performance review ratings). Those can help identify why outcomes are uneven. Communicate these goals to staff with a transparent, long-term vision about why meeting them is vital. Tie it back to the company’s mission and values so employees feel they have a stake in the outcome.
The next step is to hold employees at all levels accountable for meeting goals. Meeting diversity goals will take much more than training sessions on topics such as implicit bias. Relying too heavily on anti-bias training can give the inaccurate impression that racism is an individual, not a structural, problem.
Any serious initiative requires leaders to analyze their internal processes—formal ones, such as hiring and promotion, and informal ways decisions are made and work gets done.
With hiring, recruit from a broader applicant pool and work with executive search companies that specialize in diversity. Make sure your candidate pools have multiple female and non-White candidates. Research by Stefanie Johnson, author of Inclusify: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams and a professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has shown that when half a candidate pool is non-White or female, the hiring committee has a 50-50 chance of choosing one of those applicants. When only one person in the finalist pool is non-White or female, that person is never chosen. You might also anonymize the application process, removing names and other race- or gender-identifying details from résumés; this effectively boosts underrepresented candidates’ success, Johnson’s research has found.
Having standard questions and criteria can reduce disparities. One experiment using a structured review process led to Black men and White and Black women getting higher bonuses. In a different study, an insurance company that added objective criteria to the interview process offered jobs to 46% more minority candidates than it had under the old, subjective approach.
Middle managers have an outsize impact on company culture. They shape how engaged direct reports feel and how well they perform. To see how they’re doing on inclusion, middle managers can create dashboards. Make a spreadsheet to keep tabs on who gets what assignment, making sure you’re handing out the plum ones (and the scut work) fairly and spending one-on-one time with everyone on your team.
For diversity initiatives to succeed, the CDO should report directly to the chief executive. If you have a DEI initiative that is not led by someone with the authority to make structural change, it is going to be ineffective.
Another dead-end strategy is promoting diversity by promoting meritocracy, without explicitly talking about race or gender. Experiments show that when researchers emphasize choosing the most qualified candidate, study participants overwhelmingly choose the White male—even if his experience is identical to everyone else’s.
Above all, the most important strategy for a more equitable and inclusive environment is persistence.
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