Enhancing an Organization’s
Culture:
Implementing a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and
Belonging Initiative (DEIB)
About the Capture Approach
Increasingly organizations are expanding their efforts to create an inclusive and inviting culture: Incorporating DEIB can positively impact recruiting, employee engagement, retention, the customer experience, the organizational culture, and as research has shown, organizations’ bottom line. CapturePPG has extensive experience in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), along with organizational change, leadership development and coaching, and training design and delivery.
Capture will create a tailored roadmap to design and implement an organization specific strategy for DEIB based on YOUR specific company needs, expectations, and culture, building upon Capture’s core competency of data collection and analysis. In addition the roadmap addresses key elements of the core business case for DEIB, noted in the appendix below. These elements include:
- Improved financial Performance
- Greater innovation
- Migration of legal and Reputational risks
- Increased employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention
Adapted from Krys Burnette, “Belonging: A Conversation about Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” January 21, 2019
The high-level components of this roadmap are based on the following key pilars:
Change Management
A sound change management and data collection process are essential for successful DEIB implementation, including a business case outlining the value of this initiative, tailored to specific organizations. The plan should include short-term successes and account for organizational and customer diversity, with medium and long-term goals, with metrics for success and continuous improvement. for integration and continuous improvement.
Building
Capacity
Success in implementation entails providing skill training and coaching to support success, such as discussing difficult issues, addressing discrimination and unconscious bias, appreciating differences between cultures, and building cultural competence, among others. While it is helpful, but not sufficient, initiatives should address equity, inclusion, and belonging issues in addition to diversity, or the initiative may be seen as incomplete, or worse, contribute to reinforcing a vicious cycle.
Action
Orientation
Often the best learning comes “in action,” providing coaching in the moment or through scheduled meetings to review and problem-solve critical issues. This can include strategic input and coaching to senior leaders and a DEIB Council on strategies and tactics to implement survey data and accomplish the long-term goal to make DEIB part of the organization’s day to day DNA. In addition, coaching is helpful to mid-level and first-level managers and teams who may be struggling with DEIB issues.
Alignment
To ensure sustained commitment and success, DEIB initiatives must be integrated into an organization’s strategic plan, with appropriate accountability measures to track progress and demonstrate improvement. Without this integration, there is a risk of it being perceived as a checkbox exercise, rather than a genuine commitment to DEIB. In this way DEIB becomes part of the organization’s DNA, with senior leaders and other stakeholders providing strategic input to achieve this goal.
Possible Action Steps:
Designing and Implementing a DEIB Initiative
Below are outlined possible elements of an implementation plan to install DEIB within an organization’s culture. This plan can be tweaked based on organizational priorities, timelines, budget, and internal resources to support the effort. It can be summarized as a comprehensive GANTT chart to measure progress and accountabilities. This work can include, among others:
Establish a DEIB Council
Organizing a cross-sectional representative Council is important to help set a DEIB agenda, develop programs, communicate about DEIB across the organization, and monitor success. Council members can serve as DEIB Ambassadors across the organization. In addition, this work entails creating a council charter and ensuring seeing leadership support.
Survey the organization and develop measurable action plans:
Organizations can make uninformed decisions and allocate resources to ineffective tactics and strategies without good data. Creating engagement and urgency in the data collection process is crucial from the start of any initiative. This involves developing and analyzing an organization-wide survey, sharing results with key stakeholders, and helping the organization build action plans to enhance its culture based on the data collection process.
Programming
Programming on critical, timely, and important issues of DEIB can provide early successes. These programs can be on timely issues in the news, as well as themes that arise during a yearly cycle, such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and Pride Month.
Skill Development
A key to success is to fully embed and sustain DEIB throughout the organization. This includes understanding and appreciating a wide array of different cultures and backgrounds, identifying personal blind spots and biases, and handling difficult conversations about all aspects of diversity and inclusion with grace and respect. This can be done through training, ongoing dialogues, facilitated meetings, discussions about readings, coaching in live meetings, and identification and dissemination of resources providing guidance. In addition, we can design train-the-trainer sessions to accelerate skill development at your company.
Communication
This should happen regularly and through a variety of mechanisms. As the organization rolls out a DEIB initiative, stakeholders, including company leadership and the Council, should assure that communication is effective and should regularly connect with employees throught a variety of mechanisms, including company-wide emails, publications, social media, podcasts, among others.
The strategy will be tailored to capitalize on your current processes, including sharing information at regular team meetings.
Other
There are variety of other strategies that can be utilized to strengthen and expand engagement DEIB. Some of these include review of documentation (policies, training materials) and creating employee resource or affinity groups, perhaps on a pilot basis. These ERGs are focused on the unique identities and needs of specific employee groups, including race, gender, LGBTQ+, and others.
Capture Configurations and Offerings
CapturePPG in codesigns and configures an implementation plan to best meet client short- and long-term needs and to maximize success and sustainability. Some of the approaches we use include:
- Assure client engagement throughout the implementation, including jointly creating the project plan.
- Design and analysis of survey needs assessment to determine priorities, organizationally, by division, or other organizational slices;
- Design and delivery of training and train-the-trainer programs;
- Offering coaching at strategic points or throughout the project; and,
- Assist in designing and moderating programs or drop-in meetings.
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