How Companies Can Push Past Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Lip Service to Enact Meaningful Change

Unmasking the reality of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the corporate world, we delve into the gap between rhetoric and action. We explore how businesses can transcend mere tokenism and truly embed these principles into their organizational fabric to drive substantial change.

Improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I)

Just 49 percent of employees say their companies have DE&I improvement strategies

The situation in the U.S. is only slightly better
Making workplaces truly diverse, fair, and inclusive has never been easy given inherent biases in everything from how companies source talent to how people interview and see themselves

Identify opportunities to create equity

Policies and processes perpetuate inequities and changing them will help bridge those gaps

For instance, we looked at our job descriptions and found that the use of words like “strong” spoke more to men than to women. By changing job descriptions, we boosted the opportunity for Black women to apply.

Lead with proactive acts of inclusion

Call out microaggressions

We all have biases, often because of how we were raised
Counteracting biases by watching and changing our behavior
Being more inclusive starts by recognizing and calling out biases that work against inclusion

Secure top-down and bottom-up commitment

You need champions at every level of the organization to push change forward

This starts with leadership voicing support for DE&I initiatives and creating a runway for employees to drive efforts forward on the front lines
At her workplace, they got this started by assembling a 21-member Global Diversity Advisory Council

Individualize learning

Meet people where they are

Give them multiple ways to access learning, including in micro-segments, which can be as short as three minutes
Allow for mistakes
DE&I is a long journey, not a sprint, but it has to be started eventually