Organizations need to think much more expansively than their historical focus on physical identity ... [+]
There’s probably not a single U.S. company of any significant size that doesn’t wish to have a broadly diverse workforce that, to use a popular phrase, “looks just like America.”
Most larger companies—and many smaller ones— have formal programs to promote such outcomes. Some may have a chief diversity officer, and the company’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) may occupy a prominent position on the company’s Web site and be one of the perennially top topics for senior management when they meet.
For all of the energy and effort expended on DEI, however, the results are often disappointing. Truth be told, most diversity programs fall short of their goals.
While some companies’ workforces may look a lot more like America than they used to, many continue to have mostly white males occupying the C-suites; women performing most clerical chores or working in human resources and marketing; and lower-income whites, immigrants and people of color doing much of the heavy lifting.
I’m speaking in generalities, of course. There are lots of exceptions: Hispanic, Black, and Asian-American CEOs, senior- and middle-managers and entrepreneurial business-owners. But they largely remain exceptions, statistical anomalies.
Given the serious commitment most companies have made, both publicly and internally, to diversity and inclusion, why don’t more company payrolls, up and down the pecking order, look more like America?
I have a theory: It’s because most DEI efforts are anchored in labeling and focusing on people with simple demographic identities, and then building solutions around them. But because of that approach, these solutions may overlook important aspects of who employees are as individuals, which can shape their experiences at work. Additionally, a lot of employees who could benefit from DEI efforts aren’t included. A better approach, if increased diversity is the goal, would be to recognize the diversity of everyone, and to think more expansively about how DEI efforts could support more people.
I discussed this the other day with a colleague who, in my sincere opinion, is one of the leading thinkers on this topic in the country. She speaks with honesty, integrity and sensitivity. And unlike so many others who sound off on the DEI topic, she doesn’t have an ax to grind or a chip on her shoulder.
Gabrielle Novacek—Gabi to those who know her—earned her B.A. from Harvard and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. None of her degrees has anything to do with employment policy, people strategy, talent, recruitment, retention, or diversity, equity and inclusion—unless a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, with special emphasis on the archaeology of the Middle East in the fourth millennium B.C., somehow can help us understand the Great Resignation (or the Big Quit, as some call it) that has left many organization’s seriously short-staffed.
Novacek’s primary concern with current DEI thinking is that placing people into easy demographic categories is far too simple an approach. This person is a white male. This person is a Black female. This person is Hispanic (even though she’s a fourth generation native Texan). And on and on and on. Thinking like this enables the bean-counters to check their boxes, but it doesn’t really advance the cause of diversity and inclusion.
Why? Because people are more complex than that. As Novacek told me, “A Black employee may also identify as LGBTQ and be a caregiver for an elderly parent. A white male employee might have a physical disability and work-visa issues.” In other words, diversity is more than skin deep—and often there are aspects to people’s identities that have a profound impact on what they need and experience at work every day that go well beyond the simple categories that DEI programs focus on and measure.
That’s why organizations need to think much more expansively than their historical focus on physical identity as DEI’s defining characteristic. “For decades we have defined diversity against a single archetype, usually the straight, white, middle-aged male,” Novacek says.
“That’s what’s led us astray,” she says, because it ends up boiling all of us down to a simple set of definitions that can miss the bigger picture of who we are, what motivates us, and what we are looking for when we come to work. It also means that we end up being exclusionary in our inclusion efforts. When we expand our thinking from “parent” to “caregiver,” for example, we suddenly find ourselves recognizing and able to support a much more expansive community of employees who share a common set of important workplace needs, and also allow more employees to see DEI efforts as relevant and impactful to their own lives.
A quick example: Years ago, a colleague (former Forbes contributor Grant Freeland) and I collaborated with a team from Harvard Business School to see what could be done to reduce burnout and attrition among BCG’s early-career consultants: a big problem in those days.
We came up with a program that stressed predictable time off. If everyone could be guaranteed that they wouldn’t be bothered by needy colleagues or clients on certain nights and weekends—enabling them to make personal and family plans, or just kick-back and relax—we figured (correctly I will note!) that stress levels, burnout and attrition would all decline.
The program, which remains in place today, was so successful that the leaders of BCG’s women’s initiative asked to sponsor and fund it. We politely refused, knowing full well that if it was seen as a “women’s” program it would be ignored by our (mostly male) leadership and soon disappear.
Novacek stresses that DEI programs—in fact virtually all institutional programs—should be inclusive by design, benefitting as many people as possible as they seek to solve the real needs that are shaping workplace experiences.
“To ensure that DEI includes all employees, we must redefine what diversity means,” she says. “Diversity comes in many forms. A wide range of identities and issues, many of which are invisible and don’t naturally fit inside the core diversity categories employers focus on, can affect how people perform at work and their ability to advance in their careers. As a result, very little is done to address these issues.
“To date, most DEI work has tended to emphasize a specific set of diversity categories, such as women, people of color, those who identify as LGBTQ, and so forth. This work has and continues to be absolutely critical as we continuously push to mitigate workplace bias and inequity, but we also need to recognize that other factors may be just as important, or even more so, in defining an individual’s experience at work.”
What other factors? Novacek points to:
· demographic factors, such as age, socioeconomic background, language skills, and immigration status,
· family and life factors, such as parenthood, caregiver obligations, or being part of a dual-career household, and
· physical and mental factors, such as physical disability, chronic illness, mental health challenges, and personality differences.
In other words, diversity can have a great many characteristics. But that’s not how typical DEI programs conceive it.
The best approach to DEI is striving to make work better for everyone. DEI for everyone requires a better understanding of what all coworkers find challenging, what they find welcoming and what they find comforting. And that task is too big for any single DEI leader or even department. For DEI to be about everyone it needs to be the responsibility of everyone.
