Why I think DEI Programs Fail

To create impactful DEI efforts, organizations must identify and address challenges head-on and create a culture that values diversity, promotes equity, and fosters inclusion at all levels.

It will require a genuine commitment from leadership, ongoing education and training, inclusive policies, and transparency in communication. DEI should be an integral part of an organization's strategy and woven into the fabric of its operations.

Most businesses know all this, but most businesses continue to struggle with establishing diverse, equitable and inclusive (DEI) work environments because they start to build the DEI house without first laying a solid foundation. Before you can begin to make impactful changes, you must have a clear understanding of your organization’s existing culture and the gaps that may exist.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk decided to lay off 10% of Tesla’s 100,000 strong workforce. Among the first to go were the president of the LGBTQ+ community who was involved in diversity and inclusion.

Without visible and consistent support from top leadership, DEI initiatives can struggle to gain traction. When leaders don't prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values, it sends a message that these efforts are not essential. Facing burnout and a lack of executive support, many DEI leaders have made the decision to quit on their own.

"Organizations often hold very high expectations of what the head of DEI needs to do but in some cases sometimes fail to clearly define the scope and priorities for the role,” said Randall Tucker, chief inclusion officer at Mastercard. “After two or three years of dealing with constant crisis management and the pressure to show up as a master at everything, some DEI Leaders may feel ill-equipped so they leave. The role has evolved into one that requires both a breadth and depth of leadership skills.”

Furthermore, COVID-19 resulted in staggering unemployment trends across the U.S. In August 2021, the unemployment rate was 8.8% among Black workers and 6.4% for Latinx workers, compared to 4.5% for white workers.

The recovery rates are not isolated to ethnicity; women lost their jobs at a much higher rate than men during the past year.

These numbers far and wide point to the need for massive changes in terms of providing more sustainable and inclusive working environments for underrepresented groups.

Successful DEI not only enables culturally diverse workforces — it’s imperative to business success. DEI efforts require long-term commitment and consistency. Organizations that focus on short-term fixes or one-off initiatives are less likely to see sustainable change.

I believe that before you can create a truly diverse workforce, you must build a solid foundation first and start with top-down commitment to equitable and inclusive initiatives that support ALL people employed at your company. Put simply, no matter how diverse your team is, your DEI efforts will fail if you don’t provide equitable programs and inclusive environments.

While the business case remains strong, progress is slow going. In May 2020, McKinsey confirmed most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability — proving DEI has a profound effect on corporate outcomes.

Put equitable and inclusive structures in place to support a diverse work culture

Companies need to rethink and reprioritize. Equity must come first, then inclusion and then diversity will follow.

EID

For example, as a gay white man who spent most of his career focused on the team member experience — recruiting candidates, building teams and leading diversity efforts. Time and again, companies have brought me into their organization to increase diversity, without having basic policies and programs in place to support a diverse workforce.

No matter how much work I did to find opportunities for people, it was never enough without giving them the resources and environment they needed to succeed. Discrimination complaints were dismissed, requests for support ignored. New team members who joined a company enthusiastic and excited about their future would quickly become disenchanted with their work environment. The missing common denominator wasn’t the lack of diversity but the lack of a focus on equity. So we needed to pivot, and we did.

I truly believe that if businesses want to reshape how they approach DEI, they must first ask: How do we create an equitable and inclusive foundation that will lead to building and retaining diverse talent?

Equality vs. Equity

While equality means giving everyone the same resources, equity means giving individual team members the resources and opportunities specific to their needs so that they can reach the same level of success as their colleagues. To build equity into your DEI initiatives, you must realize that each person comes to their role with a different set of needs.

Compensation

The first step to embracing equity and making sure the same job opportunities and pay are accessible to all team members is to conduct a pay analysis.

In 2019, a survey conducted by PayScale found that Black men earned 87 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, and Latino men earned 91 cents. The gender pay gap is even wider, with women earning 84% of what men earned in the same year of work. According to Pew Research, the gender pay gap in U.S. hasn’t changed much in two decades.

Equity in pay is often a major stumbling block for most DEI initiatives. Until recently, many companies didn’t even conduct pay analysis, let alone provide transparency for salary ranges and pay scales across the organization.

A comprehensive analysis should be conducted annually to track your organization’s progress, as well as locate your weaknesses. When implemented correctly, a pay analysis will reveal your organization’s pay equity across race, gender and age.

The goal: Design and implement a truly equitable system that provides fair pay wages regardless of ethnicity or gender. Seek to close the pay gap so that Black team members and people of color earn the same as their white counterparts, and women the same as men.

A lack of imagination and foresight

Here is something I hear about often: Businesses are striving to be more diverse but can’t find diverse talent. All too often, the claim is that this is a difficult market, or there is a talent shortage out there, especially in the technology industry, where roles are defined by technical capabilities.

I firmly believe that the talent shortage is a false premise.

Instead of focusing hiring efforts on the wrong criteria, and putting too much emphasis on years of experience or specific skill sets, hiring professionals need to consider "hiring for attitude and training for skill."

In other words, get creative on the hiring side and invest in robust training up front to get the new team member up-to-speed quicker.

This archaic approach - focusing on years of experience or specific skill set - works against recruiting diverse talent as many underrepresented groups are denied opportunities that would lead to longevity in a role or adequate training to acquire specific skills.

Consider this: if a candidate has the right traits — like resilience, creativity, grit and ambition — they’ll likely be quick to learn whatever technical capabilities are needed to do the job in a short period of time.

I coach companies to understand that a person’s unique experiences and innate strengths make them a worthwhile candidate. It is a winning approach to be intentional about their hiring practices so that they’re looking beyond years of experience.

Now, don't get me wrong, this may not work for all open roles, but if there is any bandwidth for training and learning opportunities, teams can make serious progress on their diversity goals by expanding their ideas of the “perfect” candidate.

Why ERGs win!

While pay analysis is an important step you can take, another key effort is building support systems for your people through employee resource groups (ERGs).

ERGs can take many shapes — groups for women, Black team members, Latinx team members and LGBTQ+ workers, to name a few. Successful ERGs have the potential to offer a vast amount of support across the organization and will serve as the backbone of inclusion initiatives, creating camaraderie and offering team members safe, welcoming spaces where they can share their experiences.

Not only do ERGs help better serve your organization’s underrepresented groups, they help leadership increase their awareness of other cultures and life experiences.

ERGs are essential if your goal is to create allyship and provide a platform for robust dialogue around personal and sensitive topics. They not only encourage inclusion, but can dramatically increase retention rates. Through effective ERGs, organizations become more clear on their team's needs and can act on initiatives that help boost team morale, productivity and job satisfaction.

Want to know how your teams feel about their work? Ask them.

Regardless of the size of the company, finding gaps in DEI efforts is a challenge. As the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. Without collecting and analyzing data, it becomes challenging to measure progress and identify areas for improvement.

Sending out monthly, quarterly or even annual team surveys opens the door to deep insights on team satisfaction. Collecting this kind of information reveals gaps that may be unseen at certain levels of the organization, making it possible to address problematic issues and create new processes that better serve your DEI efforts.

Internal surveys are an invaluable tool, offering insightful data that can motivate team members. Tracking results, measuring progress and evaluating baselines is an integral component of any massive project but especially important when you’re aiming to shift work cultures and build lasting DEI structures.

Leading the way

To build truly equitable, inclusive and diverse organizations buy-in from leadership is essential. Without it, it will feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain by yourself.

Before you can implement comprehensive solutions, the C-suite must be on board and ALL business leaders must be able to articulate what these initiatives mean. In other words, everyone needs to be on the same page.

Once you have leadership support, it will then be time to begin to activate sustainable DEI programs, starting with equitable pay and job opportunities. After these efforts are firmly in place, you can then begin to develop a hiring strategy that not only attracts diverse teams but maintains high retention rates.

Diverse, equitable, inclusive work environments give teams the ability to bring their unique life experiences and diverse backgrounds to the table each day. This will help to expand the company’s outlook and ability to connect with wider audiences and have a wider reach in the market.🌈