Understanding what diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mean to your organization can be difficult. What can be even more difficult is creating goals that make sense for your organization. DEI goals tend to be generic, so how do you tailor your goals to fit the specifics of your organization? Here are some of our tips on how to set your goals in line with your company's objectives.
WHY
While prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion in your organization are extremely important - you need to know the “why” behind these efforts -- why does DEI matter to your organization? Why does it matter to your employees? More and more companies are doubling down on diversity metrics like business cases, scorecards, and targets. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Selena Rezvani and Stacey Gordon explained how these programs track things like workforce demographics, diversity hiring, retention, promotion rates, and utilization of DEI resources. While those measures have their place, they’re insufficient to create inclusion on their own. In fact, an overly mathematical approach actually deemphasizes the very thing you should be hoping to build in inclusive workplaces: Awareness, connection, empathy, and mutual respect.
So -- your goals will be unclear if you don’t understand the “why” behind your DEI initiatives. Is it the worry around talent retention? To combat the increase in discrimination lawsuits? To grow your business. The point is to find your “why” behind prioritizing DEI in order to enable you to better understand how to set meaningful goals later on.
WHERE
Let’s be honest. You are not going to be able to focus all of your efforts on all of the areas that you may want to, at least not efficiently. Think about where you can make the most meaningful change given the resources available. It is also essential to keep in mind who your employees are. What do they care about? What matters most to them?
COLLABORATE
Get everyone involved in setting goals. Most of the time, the leadership team that is setting the goals is actually the least diverse. A study by Namely found that, on average, 60% of managers were men, and 70% were white. You wouldn’t launch a new product or service without collaboration from different departments and people from different levels in your organization. Setting your goals should be no different.
BRING IN THE EXPERTS
Even after reading countless articles, watching hours of videos, and more, it can still be confusing on how to get started. Luckily there are experts that can help guide you towards making your organization a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive company.
There is a reason why companies still struggle with creating meaningful change in their organizations. Setting goals is hard, but making progress towards those goals is even harder. Reach out to us, FIG Strategy & Consulting, to determine how to create meaningful change in your organization.
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