Diversity, Equality and Inclusion in 2024, Part 2: Navigating the way forward

In the first part of my blog on DEI yesterday, I described the current complex and at times contradictory contemporary situation facing HR and diversity professionals in the UK as they try to progress their DEI agendas.

In this second part today I highlight three specific areas for action DEI and HR leaders and functions can take now to navigate forward effectively and benefit from and reinforce these powerful trends and 'currents'. I support this with IES’s long-running strand of HR research, and particularly our most recent tracking of the shifting ‘HR roles and influence in a post-Covid landscape’,

Reset: The way forward on DEI - Three action areas

So what can HR and diversity leaders do, practically, over the next 12 months so as to navigate these difficult contemporary waters i described yesterday and really ride the five waves of progress that my IES colleague Meenakshi points to in her excellent blogs, hopefully thereby avoiding the counter-vailing surface currents and rip-tides pulling back on their initiatives and their impact?

Based on our IES research on people strategies and developments in the HR function and its activities, I would point to three immediate and urgent priorities:

1.????? Get a focused DEI strategy and more board time with it to develop, support and monitor its implementation.

Meenakshi’s first deep-current involves ‘Taking DEI beyond HR and embedding it into business strategy’. Research, for example by Mckinsey, points to a significant increase in the time corporate boards now spend on people and diversity issues, leading to a growing presence and strategic influence of HR professionals – reported by almost two-thirds (64%) of us in the CIPD’s recent survey of its members, for example. This has helped to drive significant investments in major diversity initiatives and programmes by some of our largest companies inside and outside of their organisations over the past decade and especially during and since the Covid crisis.

But as Diana Scott from the Conference Board puts it, ‘they didn’t always think things through very well: what does all this really mean, what’s the business case’; and in too many cases were really, as right-wing critics allege, just ‘virtue signalling’. Now that, as Meenakshi points out, the ‘corporate bandwagon’ that many employers jumped on has lost momentum and is in danger of reversing, HR and diversity leaders have to have both the strategic rationale and the evidence for the returns on these investments. How do they do that? By focusing on key areas of current and future impact and by measuring and demonstrating the positive impact on them of your DEI work.

2.????? Focus on key areas of impact in your DEI strategy – labour markets and culture.

The two key areas leveraging both the influence of HR leaders at board level and the impact of their people strategies on an organisation’s purpose and business strategy identified in IES’s HR research were labour markets and culture. Focusing on these priorities in many employers will be key now to maintaining and enhancing a sustained and successful commitment to DEI.

More than half (54%) of FTSE 350 companies listed labour shortages as material risks to their future in their annual report and accounts, according to PwC’s annual analysis. Even the most shareholder-value-obsessed board member can recognise that say, the UK’s shortage of over 150,000 skilled tradespeople, estimated to cost business and the economy ￡98 billion by 2030, might at least partly be addressed if the ‘diversity’ of the current workforce population? which 98% : 2% male : female was improved in favour of women. And similarly, the highly white-worker skew in the current population were to be rebalanced in favour of ethnic minority workers, who are also experiencing almost twice the unemployment rate of the UK’s white working age population.

Or that the difficulties in recruiting leadership and executive talent many of these companies such as Aon report could at least partly be addressed by increasing the pipeline of female talent up through the organisation; and by reducing the significant leakages from it that are evident in the male-dominated and toxic cultures that too many high-potential female managers report experiencing.

As Meenakshi describes, ‘Labour market analytics and skills-based approaches (for example on pay where I am currently doing a lot of my work) will enable companies to strategically integrate DEI goals with talent acquisition and workforce planning’. Or as another IES colleague Wendy Hirsh expressed it slightly less charitably, HR functions need to ‘stop dithering and start (workforce) planning’.

Culture and values and making them a reality, rather than a slogan, in the organisation, are also a key area where CEO’s are now looking to their HR and diversity leaders for help and impact, evident in both our own and McKinsey’s research. As Meenakshi says, ‘Mere lip service or box-ticking efforts cannot bring values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect to life’.

IES has also carried out specific research on this and how best to ‘land’ value-based ambitions, (including often, treating everybody equally and fairly), and embed them in the every-day realities of our time-pressured and cash-strapped employers today. While the current conflicts and legal challenges in various parts of the world have highlighted the difficulties of living your diversity values, and what Meenakshi terms ‘the churning oceans of DEI’, helping employers to understand and interpret these social movements and challenges is now a key role that CEO’s are asking HR and DEI leaders to play.

For the FT’s American editor Rana Foroohar, the ‘silver lining’ in the current ‘push-back’ against ‘wokeness’ is that it is forcing companies into ‘rethinking inclusion policy’ and ‘to think more deeply and honestly about identity and inclusion’, which she rightly believes can only improve the focus and impact of the programmes which the ‘opponents of woke’ rail against.

Amongst IES’s various people strategy case studies, G’s Fresh, one of the UK’s largest fresh food growers, perhaps best illustrates how an HR function can use this dual-focus to drive successful diversity and people management and thereby business success and sustainability.

With over 7000 employees at peak harvest periods, the Group HR function has used its expertise in successfully planning and delivering a labour supply, overcoming challenges such as Brexit and Covid. It also leads in the delivery of? the group’s ‘PPV’ (Promise, Philosophy and Values) which underpins their business and HR success. The HR team have grabbed the opportunities to challenge and change the Group culture and to improve the image of the Group and the wider sector as an employer and community partner, becoming a national leader in their ethics and anti-slavery activity’.

They not only have a plan, but as Meenakshi advocates strongly, have embedded it powerfully right across the organisation and its leadership.

3.????? Get the right measurement data on impact and progress of your DEI strategy and programmes.

‘Using data to drive DEI efforts’, this is perhaps the most powerful and influential current that runs through Meenakshi’s blogs and which every HR and DEI leader needs to swim and operate within.

Most employers I go into today have far more information available about their employees and their diversity. But as evidence-based HR expert Professor Rob Briner points out, simply having more data without analysis and purpose achieves nothing. Compulsory gender pay gap reporting in the UK has only had an impact in those organisations which analyse their data to understand what is driving gaps in their specific situation and thereby, which measures are likely to improve those gaps and which, however popular they are amongst other employers, are unlikely to have any impact.

The wry irony of the DEI critics’ attacks on and in some cases banning of UBT courses is that as the EHRC’s research meta-analysis clearly shows, UBT on its own appears to have little if any impact on key metrics of progress such as gender representation and equal pay gaps. It needs to be tailored they conclude to each employer and represent part of a much wider programme of initiatives to achieve sustained progress. The good and bad news for us is that ‘there’s no such thing as a quick-fix’ on diversity and inclusion.

In terms of an example of the powerful use of focused arguments and data in support of your DEI strategy and spending, I was interested to see a press release last week from the consultants’ professional association, the ‘BMA defends diversity officers in NHS from Government "culture war" tactics’. ?Responding to?reports?that the Health Secretary has asked NHS trusts to stop hiring diversity officers, Dr Latifa Patel, BMA workforce lead, said:

‘Racism, sexism, ableism and homophobia remain a real problem within the NHS and across society. We know that experiencing this discrimination has?lasting impacts on NHS workforce retention and staff morale: nearly one third of ethnic minority doctors we surveyed last year?had considered leaving the NHS?or had already left within the past two years due to race discrimination… The cost to the NHS of replacing doctors driven out by these experiences far outstrips the cost of employing diversity officers, who hold organisations to account in addressing poor workplace practices. Instead of a target for political attacks, the Health Secretary should see diversity officers in the NHS as a key tool in helping to stem the staffing shortfall, projected to top half a million in the next decade.’

For Rob Briner, the route to more HR and DEI impact through data is not to gather yet more of it, but rather to ‘adopt a structured and explicit process of gathering and using evidence’. This should ‘incorporate multiple sources and types of evidence and information’ including four main types: ‘stakeholders’ views, perspectives and judgements; professional expertise of practitioners; data and evidence from the context or setting; and scientific findings (so as) to build a more comprehensive picture of the best available and most relevant evidence to answer our questions’ and address the growing questioning of DEI policies and investments.

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Thereby, as Meenakshi describes, ‘the reward is not in merely collecting data, but in turning it into high-quality evidence that generates value for all stakeholders.’

Recommit

‘In every challenge lie the seeds for change and new growth. The call to action for organisations is to think strategically and long-term about investing in DEI efforts.’ IES

Culture. Values. Diversity. Inclusion. These are important, complex, ambiguous, controversial, complex subjects for us all, as individuals, employees and employers, that can never be reduced to black-and-white statements nor subject to simplistic, supposedly ‘boiler-plated’ solutions, especially in this country that created such a huge global empire. Sathnam Sanghera’s brilliant new imperial history, Empireworld, concludes that the way forward for us nationally is to ‘embrace the contradictions and paradoxes of empire… telling the truth…and creating dialogue between everyone’.

Re-iterating many of Meenakshi’s points, the FT’s Rana Foroohar concludes optimistically that despite the current ‘polarised and politicised’ context, these major challenges to the ‘seriously flawed’ approach of many employers to DEI should ultimately lead to much more effective progress:

‘in many workplaces - an uncritical attitude towards inclusion without clear, fact-based communication about the metrics that really matter: engagement, retention, leadership pipelines and, crucially, clarity on how this all relates to the core business objectives of the company. Another email from HR about happy hour to celebrate a particular identity day is not enough.’

For her, the ‘reset’ and ‘refashioning’ Meenakshi calls for, and which my three action areas are designed to support you with, should

‘focus on the core truth, which is that smart companies make themselves attractive to the broadest number of talented people?not by virtue signalling, but by creating real opportunity for the many. Doing so is good not just for inclusion, but for business’.

We at IES couldn’t have expressed it better, and we have many more pieces of research and support tools, as well as the ones linked to this article, to help you on your DEI journey.

?copyright Dr Duncan Brown