Leadership Role in Implementing DEI

Necessary Planning

There is no question that the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent social justice movements have led organizations, leaders, and employees to delve deeper and reassess their relationships relative to DEI. DEI leaders must be proactive and innovative in their approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. To be effective, DEI leaders must invest in developing both team and individual competencies, skills, and behaviors.

There must be clearly articulated strategies and expected outcomes relative to the initiatives and connect those to the overall business strategic goals. The initiatives should be ongoing with clear communication of ongoing review of those initiatives so that they may be tweaked where necessary. Leaders must lead by example and courage. I found the attached article “Diversity & Inclusion Leadership” by Dr. Vanessa Weaver, et al, helpful.

To tackle DEI, leaders must look to the seen and unseen. It is critical for leaders to be aware of unconscious bias which can come in the forms of race, skin tone, ethnicity, national origin, incarcerated individual, religion, disability, body weight, sex, stereotypes, and gender identity amongst others. Leaders and their teams should be candid about hidden feelings and associations of bias that are sub-rosa. Acknowledging that these exist, thus avoiding gaslighting, is a necessary first step.

Representative Leadership

A workforce and its leadership architecture should mirror the population it serves. Hiring a diverse and well qualified workforce is one of the most effective ways to promote DEI. It means that if the current workforce is homogenous, hiring from outside of that workforce will make sense.

Technologies that exacerbate bias by screening out certain job applicants must be decommissioned or re-designed to eliminate bias. Where humans are making the decisions, it may be necessary to put practices in place to mitigate the risks of human bias (“What Works? Evidence-Based Ideas to Increase Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace,” 34-36). Avoiding the use of employee referrals and expanding the areas where the job postings are made should be considered to expand the potential prospective employee pool. It may be necessary to specifically target the population sought to be included and the organization should see if it can take advantage of any laws encouraging affirmative action. In this regard, the organization must be vigilant to avoid over-correcting and ending up with reverse discrimination.

Pay Equity

Another way to be more effective in implementing DEI measures is by promoting pay equity to ensure that the playing field is level by providing equal opportunity for each employee to grow and advance. People analytics should be employed to pinpoint the employees that have suffered from entrenched pay disparity as against similarly situated employees and take corrective measures.

Training

Leaders must institute training programs that are targeted to meet the organization’s DEI strategic goals. The training must be relevant to the functions and competencies sought to be enhanced and must be pertinent to both the individual and business goals as well as the industry involved. These training programs must be instituted with a competencies and behavioral outcomes in mind. The training should include cultural values, and styles in communication and how those affect self-identity, teamwork, and conflict resolution. These training programs must not be compulsory. You can’t force change, but you can incentivize it as long as the incentives are not discriminatory. There should be a clearly articulated vision of why the training is happening and what the expected outcomes will be, while connecting it all to the overall strategic goals of the organization.

Leadership Must Be Onboard

Getting senior leadership onboard from the planning stages and imbedding DEI in the organization’s standard business practices, value system, and culture, with corresponding robust funding, are prerequisites to success. Such an alignment helps open proper channels of dialogue and support while increasing the visibility, innovation, and awareness of such DEI initiatives.

Some of the support that can be offered by leadership include allowing employees time off for religious or significant cultural holidays that are not generally observed by the company, having cultural exchange activities, inclusive office facilities like non-gendered restrooms, yoga rooms, black-out nap rooms, prayer/medication space, making websites ADA-compliant above and beyond suggested requirements, reserved parking spaces, more access ramps than the bare minimum to meet compliance standards, and childcare amenities.

Diverse and inclusive mentorship programs can present a career boost to up-and-coming professionals. The mentorship program should be sufficiently flexibile to ensure that everyone who desires it has an opportunity to participate and advance. It may be necessary to partner with others, where necessary, to provide things that an organization’s programs lack. These mentorship programs should seek to support development opportunities in continuing education, coaching, leadership training, skills re-tooling. In this regard, the pool of mentors should be equally diverse, and the executive leadership ought to be closely involved in those mentorship programs. See “Promote Workplace Diversity Through Employee Engagement” by Cristian Grossmann, June 4, 2021.

Programs That Can Help

Another effective way the HR professional will aid the DEI efforts will be to set up channels that are safe and effective to communicate problems of DEI, discrimination, and retaliation. It may require an overhaul of the organization’s internal dispute resolution system to include using outside credible investigation to avoid relegating this to HR for the most part. Other ways include incorporating Employee Assistance Programs, Ombuds and/or alternative dispute resolution processes that offer neutrality, privacy, confidentiality. These programs will be useless if the organization is unable to effectively communicate their availability to employees.

Most discrimination and harassment investigations protocols in organizations are cynical liability-shield or verdict-mitigation mechanisms for organizations. How an organization handles complaints of inequity, harassment, discrimination, and retaliation will have a direct impact on the reporting and how open employees are likely to make such reports and what happens beyond the reporting and investigation stages to say, making claims or initiating lawsuits.

Thus, organizations should see such complaints as an opportunity to learn, change and grow and should therefore, encourage avenues that make it easy for those complaints to be made. The ostrich approach will entrench inequity. (“Diversity and Inclusion Efforts That Really Work” by David Pedulla, 3-4)

Measuring Success

Finally, there ought to be tangible organizational assessment data and metrics to make sure that DEI is on track to deliver. The data should show in hiring, promotions, leadership roles, retention, employee engagement, employee attitude and the number of claims made. Organizations must proactively keep a keen eye out for both disparate impact and disparate treatment in the workplace and all their attendant nuances.

A truly diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce is a tremendous value added to the organization and is founded on fairness. It is not just good for morale, PR, goodwill and for the advancement of all, it is good for the bottom line, and we must all strive towards it and the successful HR professional in charge should be able to not only deliver change but bring sustainable value to the organization.