Your organization is doing Diversity & Inclusion backwards

These days, Diversity & Inclusion initiatives have become more common than ever at companies around the world. Data from Indeed shows that D&I positions have increased by 35% in just two years, and the diversity landscape is inundated with so many workshops, talks, lectures, courses, and trainings on D&I that the phrase “diversity fatigue” is in our lexicon. But things aren’t working as smoothly as we’d like. Controversy over D&I has shaken dozens of companies over the past few years. A recent McKinsey study found that companies have made no progress in the last 4 years on improving the state of women in the workplace. Endemic racial discrimination persists in workplaces across the country. The rising tide of D&I initiatives has yet to create the organizational outcomes we want. Why?

In this essay, I’ll argue that the way in which organizations do D&I work — focusing first on diversity, then on inclusion — sets many up to fail. I’ll use examples from my experience working with dozens of companies to show the consequences of this strategy on both the marginalized employees and the organization itself. Finally, I’ll share my thoughts on why we need to build organizations with a baseline of inclusion before, not after, we start tackling diversity.

The Holy Grail of Diversity

When companies are criticized by the media, it’s almost always due to their demographic representation: what proportion of companies is made up by women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other URMs. It makes sense, since other measures of D&I like disaggregated retention rate by race, feelings of belonging for women, and the wage gap are far less transparent to employees of these organizations, let alone journalists writing about them. But the relative accessibility of this metric elevates it above all others, and as a result, demographic representation becomes a stand-in for how well a company is doing on D&I.

Media does its part to reinforce this dynamic. Companies with low URM representation are lambasted, while companies with better URM representation are lauded for their achievements. The companies themselves adopt demographic representation as a goal in response to this media focus. That’s why companies with more equitable representation brag about their achievements, while companies lacking that representation are always “getting better.” Implied in all this is that the holy grail of D&I is a 50–50 gender split and proportional representation of people of color, LGBTQ+ employees, and other URMs.

In service of this holy grail, leaders almost always choose to prioritize the “D” over the “I” in D&I. They assume that the first and foremost priority should be increasing their company’s diversity through tactics that increase the number of URMs who make it through the door. Two of the most common ways they do so are through hiring campaigns to boost the number of URM candidates and unconscious bias trainings to improve the percentage of URMs that make it through the hiring process. A major chunk of the blossoming D&I industry is focused on this exact effort, working with organizations to challenge bias, increase access to the talent “pipeline,” and implement inclusive hiring practices.

But “diversity-first” initiatives are doomed to fail. Increasing diversity should be one of the last steps of a D&I strategy, not the first, and it should always come after inclusion, not before. I’ll explain.

Your Organization Leaks

Many D&I practitioners and corporate leaders conceptualize their organizations like bottles with narrow necks. By engaging in hiring campaigns and bias training, they hope to slowly widen the hiring bottleneck in their organization to increase the flow of URMs who make it in.

Their goal of course is an organization where people of all genders, races, abilities, religions, sexualities, etc. have an equal shot at making it into the organization, in order to capture the best talent regardless of identity or background.

While inclusion is acknowledged as an important issue, it’s always a secondary one. “If we can get URMs through the door, then we can work on improving their workplace experience slowly,” or so the logic goes. As a result, D&I strategy is frequently “first D, then I,” in that order.

The problem is that most practitioners and organizations get their priorities mixed up: the bottleneck impeding the flow of diverse URMs into the organization isn’t the most pressing issue. The most pressing D&I challenge facing organizations today is the abundance of “holes” within organizations that cause them to heavily bleed any URMs they get in the first place.

Examples?

• Organizations lack coherent organizational culture and rely on unspoken cultural norms created by majority groups within the organization. These norms cause many organizations to feel like old boys clubs, fraternity houses, and other predominantly white, masculine, heterosexual, elite spaces. URMs start off feeling little to no organizational belonging.
• Organizations lack mentorship programs and resources for URMs, and have little to no URM representation in leadership. URMs are denied opportunities to acculturate and see themselves over the long-term in the organization.
• Line managers lack training on how to deal with difference, conflict, or crisis. URMs are marginalized for their differences, face unchecked discrimination, and punished when they speak up.
• Organizations lack formal community-building initiatives, leading to “organic” communities with high degrees of homophily and similarity. URMs struggle with feeling isolated and finding a space where they fit.
• Organizations delegate all internal D&I work to URMs who are often under-resourced, underpaid, or unpaid for their labor. URMs are either blamed for not advocating more or are evaluated less favorably because their advocacy work is not considered in performance reviews.
• Organizations are uncomfortable with conflict and respond to internal discontent among URMs by suppressing and even firing “trouble employees.” This creates a chilling effect on URM belonging and engagement.

These inclusion crises contribute to dismal retention rates for URMs, and also lead to poorer performance, lower engagement rates, and higher turnover. If organizations are bottles, then they’re riddled with holes and leaking at a rate that is quite frankly unacceptable. In this context, it quickly becomes apparent that fixating on the bottleneck of hiring is a well-intentioned but ineffective D&I strategy.

“Diversity-first” strategies have negative long-term effects, as well. Companies with these strategies typically adopt a less urgent approach to inclusion, allocating meager funds to internal D&I work to formalize rules, establish norms, and otherwise build the inclusive culture that URMs need to survive. In many cases, a D&I role doesn’t exist and the entirety of this mission-critical culture-building work rests on the back of passionate URMs willing to do the hardest work for free. There’s a reason why your organization’s employee resource groups and D&I initiatives go through so many leaders so quickly: they’re being used up and burned out by organizations that dedicate far too many resources getting URMs in, and far too few resources keeping them in.

I can sum up many organizations’ inclusion strategies with this:

“Take advantage of the trust and passion from an ever-changing flow of URMs as free labor to fix the very problems they’re being pushed out by.”

At best, this strategy is ineffective. At worst, it’s outright exploitation. Inclusion isn’t a perk for URMs — it’s a need to have.

Inclusion & Diversity…& Inclusion Again

For any organization to succeed in the coming era of diversity & inclusion, it must begin with a baseline of inclusion built-in to its organizational design. And, thanks to decades of research on D&I in organizations, the foundational best practices are clear and widely agreed on. Create an environment that respects and welcomes diversity of thought, experience, and background. Create organizational culture that promotes psychological safety for all employees. Create formal procedures for hiring, promotion, and termination and ensure that all employees with authority understand how to use it effectively. Accommodate difference through policies and norms that allow anyone from a nursing mother, to a practicing Muslim, to a nonbinary trans person to get their basic needs met at work.

You wouldn’t wait for someone to go into anaphylactic shock to label your peanuts. Why would you waste millions in never-ending hiring campaigns and onboarding to get a clue on inclusion?

There’s hard work to do on D&I for every organization. The biggest questions are also the unsolved ones: how do you convey critical D&I knowledge in decentralized organizations? How can you engage employees with current events and political issues in a respectful manner? What is the best way to effectively interact with subordinates when differing social identities and power dynamics are involved? These are the questions that organizations can and should be constantly working on with the (hopefully compensated and recognized) help of their URM employees.

But organizations and D&I practitioners need to recognize that there are standards that need to be met before they can even think about getting URMs through the door. Don’t do D&I backwards. Inclusion — at least a baseline level of it — needs to come first.

This article was originally published in Medium.