Social Innovation, v. 2: JEDI

It was great to get such positive feedback on my first Social Innovation newsletter, which focused on financial innovation for the underserved. Thank you! 

This issue is focused on the many innovations in justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) that I have seen from companies during my research for Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism, and more recent articles on Forbes and Medium.

The social entrepreneurs I have met during this research are creating some of the most innovative and creative businesses I have encountered in my 20-year career as a business school researcher and in these newsletters, my goal is to connect the dots between the different innovations and innovative practices I have been seeing. Future issues of the newsletter will focus on topics such as new human capital strategies, employee ownership, innovations in social impact investing and supply chain environmental management. Please let me know if there are other topics you know of that I should investigate! 

Please share/forward this newsletter with others who might be interested!

Overcoming Systemic Racism & Implicit Bias

Advancing economic justice is rapidly becoming a business imperative—the work of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) is coming to the forefront of many companies’ values and business models.Businesses and corporations are finally embracing the fact that not only will a more just economy support diverse communities — including those that have been traditionally exploited in the global economy — but it will also make the economy as a whole more robust, innovative, resilient and creative. These are qualities badly needed in the market to help tackle global issues, like poverty and climate change. Achieving this level of structural change to allow for a just economic system will require infusing principles of diversity, equity and inclusion across various facets of our economy and a wide range of stakeholders. 

One company I have learned a lot from is Greyston Bakery (the above picture is from their bakery). The companies’ employees, in Yonkers, New York, were deemed essential during the pandemic—its employees, at the time, were 95% people of color, 30% women. “If you look at some of the issues surrounding both the pandemic and George Floyd, what are we talking about? It’s opportunity; it’s access,” President and CEO Joe Kenner told me “You’re talking about poverty; you’re talking about discrimination — that’s what we've been doing for 38 years, addressing those issues. We’ve been bringing folks into the mainstream for decades by investing in their potential, with no judgment.” Greyston, for close to 40 years, has had an innovative and influential ‘Open Hiring’ model: this is a process by which a company hires anyone who applies without requiring a resume, an interview, or a background check. This hiring process is aimed at breaking cycles of poverty and at offering any individual be they from lower socio-economic communities, refugees, previously-incarcerated, etc, who is willing to work, the opportunity to do so. 

Overcoming systemic racism, implicit biases, and deep-rooted injustices begins, for many, at the individual level. It begins with the need to recognize and accept that every single person has implicit biases on many issues and that we each have to work to undo these individual implicit biases. Dr. Tiffany Jana’s first book, Overcoming Bias, addresses this issue directly. Jana explained to me that, “We make shortcuts. We make assumptions. And it’s totally fine when we’re dealing with inanimate objects and places. But when we’re talking about people and we’re overlaying our experiences, our assumptions, and the messages that we’ve been told or taught, suddenly that becomes a challenge.” Unconscious bias, Jana explains, doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s a fact of life, it’s part of the way that the human brain works. No matter what, unconscious bias will never be totally eradicated because “no sooner do you address a set of them then a new one pops up behind it.” At TMI Consulting, Jana and their team work together with companies to help them through this process, especially the initial steps. 

Many of the companies I have studied recently have started embodying these principles, and you can read more in the linked articles:

SecondMuse, a business accelerator recent began working seriously on JEDI issues. Carrie Freeman, CEO explained to me “For about the last year and a half we have engaged with someone who specifically trained in multiculturalism. It's not just about organizational effectiveness or coaching, it's truly someone who is an expert in creating an engaging multicultural environment.That has been super helpful for us understanding how we're just different as humans as well as how the elements of race and culture fit into race culture, gender, etc.”

At Butler/Till, a marketing agency focused on healthcare, financial services, insurance, and energy, the company reflected on and updated its EDI practices following the summer of 2020. CEO Kimberly Jones told me they took a couple of months for the discovery phase, and “invited Dr. Aaron X. Smith, a professor from Temple University in Africology Studies, to come help us understand the history of racism. We made that available to all of our employee-owners. We offered a curated list of LinkedIn Learning courses, including a mandatory class on confronting bias in the workplace. Then we held a lot of focus groups, because we needed to take a pulse on where our employee-owners were when it came to this topic of racial equity. As an employee-owned company, without knowing where everybody was on their own personal journeys, we were not sure where to start. That approach has been really effective.”

Importance of Goal-Setting

Jana emphasizes that the first step the road to equity and inclusion is goal-setting for both individuals and the company itself. “To achieve success, you’re never going to move the needle if you haven’t decided where the needle is going,” they explained.

Butler/Till took the same approach that Jana recommends: everything was specific and action-oriented. The company began by actively writing down a goal, CEO Kimberly Jones told me in order to “attract, develop, engage and retain a high-performing workforce that reflects the communities that we serve.” (above is a company photo from 2019).

At Unreasonable Group, a company that operates a platform and accelerator for entrepreneurs, Whitney Heaps explained that setting goals has helped take them from a company with an implied ethos about JEDI, to a company that takes actionable steps to enact change. Heaps goes on to say, “Diversity, equity and inclusion are baked into every business unit and every team and function across the organization. Everyone is thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion as core to the overall success of the business.”

Recruitment and Hiring Process

A key step in addressing JEDI issues is to examine and re-imagine recruitment and hiring processes. However, in a similar way to how goal setting should be explicit and specific, the same values must carry through in this step as well.

Addressing Implicit Biases: Unreasonable Group’s Whitney Heaps explains how they’ve shifted their hiring practices in an intentional way to match their JEDI goal-setting. For example, the company has partnered with Applied to help them remove unconscious bias in the application phase, and partnered with Elivade to broaden their recruitment pool, and they have shifted to conducting blind application screening.

Intentional Networking: It necessary to be intentional about tapping diverse networks in hiring processes. As SecondMuse’s CEO Carrie Freeman explains, networking has become a large part of their mission toward JEDI values: “If you are a primarily white organization with white networks then the likelihood of getting diverse candidates for your jobs is lower. So we've consciously looked at how do we broaden our networks to increase that diverse applicant pool.

• At Butler/Till, they have also invested resources into inclusive hiring and restructuring their recruitment practices. They recently participated in a program sponsored by Google that takes diverse job candidates and pairs them directors of human resources and talent acquisition. Further, Butler/Till is focusing on ensuring that their candidate pools reflect a diverse population, for every position, and being intentional about it.
• A new initiative called Take Your Seat aims to mobilize, accelerate, and facilitate the movement to diversify boards of directors. Founded by One Better Ventures, Baldwin& and B Lab in October 2020 the initiative has built a robust platform and database of over 1,000 candidates, has successfully placed 7 Black executives on boards and has 7 active searches at this time, with the aspiration is to place 500 Black executives onto boards.

Ensuring Pay Equity

As I report in Better Business: “The Redwoods Group, a North Carolina–based commercial insurance company, realized it wasn’t paying everyone equally. “Decisions that are made five or ten years ago get forgotten and then you don’t realize that there’s a gap,” explained in-house counsel John Feasle. To fix the problem, the company increased the salaries of several individuals and minimized the gap.”

B the Change Media reports that UK based COOK foods published a gender pay gap report, which showed that the average salary of women was 11% lower than that of men. Although there are no gendered differences in the roles themselves, the company reports it is dedicated to correcting the pay gap that it found (the above picture is from their holiday video which celebrated the diversity of their workforce). And although pay equity is key to ensuring JEDI goals are met, COOK Foods has surpassed their commitment to fair pay by ensuring that their minimum hourly wages are significantly higher than the national minimums. For example, the company pays ￡8.75 per hour in the UK and ￡10.20 per hour in London to employees aged 18 and over The national minimum wage is 5.90 pounds for adults aged 18 to 20, and 7.50 pounds for adults over 25. 

It is encouraging that companies are starting to systematically examine issues of pay inequity that have in some cases festered for decades, admit there are issues in their organizations, and accordingly address the inequities. But also, one thing I have learned from my studies of social mission businesses is that much more work needs to be done on this topic across many more companies.

Speaking out/Advocacy

A final important step is public-facing advocacy. Tiffany Jana recalls that, “For many years, businesses shied from taking a stance on societal issues. But as more people look to align their careers and purchases with their values, companies are stepping up to address pressing issues. That’s especially apparent now, as calls for a more equitable society have become rally cries for racial justice in the wake of shootings and other violent attacks on People of Color — Jacob Blake, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor.” Contemporary society not only requires, but demands that individuals and businesses take a very clear, and very actionable stance on commitments to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

For me one of the most inspiring companies to speak out on this issue has been Ben & Jerry’s, vocally opposing White supremacy and articulating that it and other social justice issues are essential to its business. In its “Silence is not an option” message, Ben & Jerry’s issues four policy-oriented calls to action, reflecting its decades of advocacy work, which they followed-up with 12 Ways You Can Help Eradicate White Supremacy.

Rob Michalak, Ben & Jerry’s Director of Social Mission Special Projects says. “We respect that some people will have a set of values that are meaningful and important to them, and we may lose some customers. But what we've also learned is that those who share those values are more deeply loyal. We did some internal research that suggested that those people are actually two and a half times more loyal than just regular customers—that’s of great value. They understand that we stand for something and we’re authentic about it.

Please Stay in Touch!

If you are interested in keeping up to date on such innovations, please check out my regular articles on Forbes and Medium and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading and don’t hesitate to be in touch with any comments, suggestions or questions!