How to Make Your Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Strategy Stick

It’s all well and good to have an ED&I strategy and is certainly a step in the right direction for organisations who want a more empowered and productive workforce. However, if your ED&I strategy is not comprehensive or is short-lived, then it is a futile activity altogether. In this blog, we’ll look at how to develop a lasting ED&I that is suitable and realistic for your organisation and its goals.  

Undertake an Audit 

To create a strategy of any kind, you need to recognise where you are and your current situation to then identify your prospects, aims, and goals. Undertaking an audit or “taking stock” of the organisation’s starting position in relation to EDI is an effective way to do this. This exercise begins with using the organisation’s existing ED&I data if available. For instance, your HR manager could look at the number of employees in each minority such as Black British, Irish, etc. This data should be collected after appointment offers are made, and when new starters are signing over personal information as standard onboarding procedure. If your organisation is not using the standard procedure, then data collection and monitoring systems may need to be reviewed and updated as a prior action. By evaluating inclusion and diversity data across all aspects of the organisation such as; recruitment, governance, professional progression/appraisals, disciplinary action, etc. areas for focus for improvement will be identified.  

Recognising Strategic Objectives 

Once the audit has been completed, and areas of focus have been identified, the next step is to set strategic objectives that will address the areas that need improvement. When setting these strategic objectives, it is important to consider numerous factors such as your organisational values and culture. Think about: 

What are your beliefs as an organisation?  

What is the culture set that drives the organisation?  

How do you want to be received by stakeholders and candidates? 

What differentiates you from other organisations within your industry and competitors?  

An organisation’s culture is the seed to its reputation and therefore, goes hand-in-hand with its success. Values seek to understand what is important to the organisation and its employees and culture are centred around how its viewed, what it’s known for, and beliefs and customs. Therefore, values and culture need to align with the ED&I strategy to ensure that the actions are the company are consistent.  It is also paramount to ensure these strategic objectives are SMART; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and, Timebound. Making objectives SMART grounds the company by making sure the objectives are pragmatic and ultimately, are effective. Setting objectives that are not critically written have a lesser chance of being achieved as they have no logical basis.  

Keeping in mind the organisation’s long-term vision is also useful because short-term and long-term objectives can be set to reach the vision. Creating time-focused objectives means that these milestones work as a gradual process that allows for checkpoints. It also makes the process of achieving such objectives less daunting because they are more digestible and so can be reached with a phased approach. 

Collaborative Strategy 

A key part of ED&I is including all who have a stake in it, which is undoubtedly all staff in the organisation. Making sure staff feel heard is not only a great way to practice inclusion, but it also is an effective means of formulating strategy as often employees have insightful perceptions and opinions that might otherwise be missed. By consulting with your employees on your ED&I strategy, not only are you demonstrating that you value them, but you are ensuring that your strategy reflects the needs and voices of all those within your organisation.  

But how can you do this?  

Consulting with staff can be a timely exercise, especially for larger companies with hundreds of employees. Ideally, one-to-one interviews would be a comprehensive task to ensure you have thoroughly collected their thoughts, however, this is not always practical. A great starting point would be to conduct surveys amongst staff from varying departments to ascertain a basic understanding of their thoughts towards ED&I. Collecting this initial data can be a helpful starting point which will later inform more in-depth data collection.  

Following this, it would be helpful to have conversations with employees regarding the current ED&I practices and collect their ideas for the future of the business. Conversations allow employees to talk freely and emotively about how they feel. HR leaders can also read facial expressions, body language and, hear the tone, which gives invaluable insight and perspective that written communication does not. Unspoken communication signalling often shows subtleties and feelings that employees may not be able to communicate verbally. 

By completing these actions, your ED&I strategy will be well informed and based on data from those who know your business the best and are core to the functioning and success of the organisation. However, such tasks can be difficult to initiate in knowing what questions to ask and having knowledge on which primary data collection tools to use and when.

We at Can?Did! are experts in implementing ED&I strategy and have a tried and tested methodical system to assist organisations. You can find out more on how we can help you with the practical steps in ED&I research here.