The corporate and business world is ever-changing. In fact, there are more women CEOs leading big corporations than male. Although shocking, it is all because of a powerful DEI strategy that offers equal opportunities to employees of all backgrounds and characters.
Today, this guide will walk you through building a successful DEI strategy and the best practices you, as a leader, should adopt. However, first, you should understand what DEI or DEIB means.
What is DEI or DEIB?
DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (and Belonging, in the case of DEIB) and is a technique to create a welcoming environment for people from every background, identity, and faith. Moreover, it is a strategy to offer equal opportunity to every deserving individual and promote a safe, supportive, and healthy work culture. It means people from every race, age, culture, level, gender, and sexual preference can apply for a job and bring their true selves to work without fearing discrimination or disrespect.
What is a DEI Strategy?
A DEI strategy is an action plan that helps create an inclusive and diverse workplace culture. An effective and efficient strategy reduces systemic issues and provides equal opportunities to every employee. Here is a brief description of how you should approach each part of DEI or DEIB.
- Diversity: It means acknowledging representation across the organization, including applying candidates and how well you tackle them.
- Equity: It means ensuring every employee passes through a fair review and opportunity to develop and grow in your organization.
- Inclusion: It means checking if your company’s policies support employees’ sentiments, ideas, and opinions.
- Belonging: It means providing equal opportunity for every employee to connect with each other without fearing bullying or disrespect.
8 Best DEI Practices Every Leader Should Adopt
Implementing a solid and comprehensive DEI strategy takes time. However, if done right, it can create a robust environment where everyone can grow with the company.
Here are ten best practices for building a robust DEI Strategy.
1. Customize DEI Strategy
Every organization is different, with varying ethics, rules, and employees. So, a DEI strategy should also be unique for every organization. Customize an action plan to cater to your company’s unique goals.
First, take a quick scan of the company’s current DEI status. Analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and things to grow. After that, you should survey your company to gather essential information on the kind of people you have in your company, focusing on socioeconomic background. Finally, create a form that every candidate must fill out to apply. It will give you an idea of the representation of your talent.
2. Create Your DEI Aim
The second and one of the most essential steps is creating goals that align with your company. It is important to tailor these according to data analysis, employees’ reviews and feedback, and business values.
3. Check the Resources You Need
Establishing an effective and reliable DEI strategy can take time, money, and effort. So it is better to budget accordingly. Some essential resources you will need are data analysts or consultation firms, a diversity officer (with or without a team), and an in-house team for diversity initiatives.
If you are running a small company and don’t have a set DEI strategy budget, you can implement some rules in place of the things in the above paragraph. These include leaders becoming mentors, free software to gather information, and watching and sharing diversity training videos.
4. Consider Inclusive Sourcing
If your company is also working on a referral hiring program, then you need to make some changes. Attracting and hiring a diverse range of employees begins with inclusive sourcing. First, you must create an inclusive job requirement and description and post it on several platforms to attract a wide range of candidates.
5. Implement Structured Hiring
Sometimes, even inclusive sourcing is not enough, and the selected pool of candidates never makes it to the interview because of unequal treatment during the hiring process. It can happen due to recruitment teams looking for people who are more like them. However, you can eliminate this bias using the DEI strategy and implement a more structured hiring process to give everyone a fair chance.
6. Ditch Referrals from Employees
Another widely common hiring strategy is employee referrals. It means asking your current employee to refer a friend or family member to join the organization. It can limit the diversity in your organization and harm the company. So, ditch those referrals and invest in a proper hiring procedure.
7. Choose How to Track DEI Strategy
Monitoring and measuring your DEI strategy is the only way to know if your company is progressing toward its goals. You can track it by taking an analysis when you started and assessing after a year or 06 months by sending out survey forms for employees and setting quarterly employee meetings to discuss experiences.
8. Get Leadership Approval
If you want to implement a change, it is essential to have all leaders on board. Leadership must be willing to receive training to understand and accept your DEI strategy, welcome diversity, and promote an inclusive culture. Also, they must be ready to give reviews and feedback annually to help DEI initiatives progress toward growth.
Conclusion
A company with a diverse and inclusive culture is bound to succeed. DEI strategy helps offer equal opportunities to people of every age, race, gender, and other uniqueness, as it should be. Moreover, it gives a sense of acceptance to employees and attracts more and better employees to your organization.
To create an inclusive environment in the workplace, you must develop a comprehensive DEI strategy that works through the whole lifecycle of an employee. It will drive meaningful growth, progress, and change.