Why DE&I Initiatives Fail and 4 Tips to Address Them

Meera is exhausted. As the Head of People of a mid-sized tech company, she's spent the past couple of months running DE&I program after program to support her organization's diversity and inclusion goals. But despite her efforts, she's facing mounting problems:

• Attrition rates are escalating
• Training programs aren't changing the culture
• The representation of underrepresented groups in senior leadership remains stubbornly low

Meera is a composite drawn from the experience of People leaders we work with. They're working hard to support their teams and make the workplace more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, but they're not seeing the results they want. So what's going on?

In this article, we'll look at 4 reasons why DE&I programs often fail and tips to address them.

4 DE&I Failure Modes and Tips to Address Them

1. Lack of Leadership Buy In

If the leadership team wants to increase representation, equity, and belonging within their workplace, they must be proactive and fully invested in ensuring that DE&I programs are successful. It is not enough for them to simply delegate this task to middle management or frontline employees; top-tier executives should take the initiative - otherwise they are tacitly signaling to their teams that DE&I efforts are inconsequential.

How to Address?

"The CEO needs to take a public stance, embed DE&I in the organization's purpose, exemplify the culture, and take responsibility for progress toward goals. They need to be out front, even if a CDO is part of the team," according to an HBR article.

It’s critical to involve the leadership team in the planning and implementation of DE&I initiatives. Have your leadership team create a DE&I North Star together. Your North Star acts a compass which guides your organization and rallies them collectively towards a vision of change. Though it will require a greater time investment, when a leadership team creates the North Star together, they will be more committed and accountable to making it successful from a personal level.

When crafting a DE&I North Star, consider the following:

1. Assess the current state of DE&I. You can employ surveys, focus groups, interviews, and data analysis to understand where your organization stands.
2. Engage with key stakeholders, including employees, managers, and leaders, to understand their perspectives and gain buy-in for the DE&I North Star. This will help ensure that North Star is grounded in the needs and aspirations of your organization.

Here are a couple examples of DE&I North Stars from other organizations:

• We are family. We celebrate our differences. We all belong. (Ford)
• Igniting the doer in all of us to build a culture of understanding, acceptance and appreciation (Home Depot)
• Uniqueness is powerful. Be Yourself. We like it that way. (T-Mobile)

2. Unclear DE&I Goals

Organizations wouldn't run their business, finance, or marketing strategies without goals and definitive metrics. However, over 75% of companies have no diversity or inclusion goals.

Without clear, measurable diversity and inclusion goals, you are unlikely to make significant progress in creating a more inclusive workplace. If you can't measure progress, organizations can't identify whether their efforts are working.

How to Address?

One of the ways to start setting clear DE&I goals is to be specific about what kind of diversity your organization is committed to creating, according to Justin Michael Williams, a pioneering voice for diversity and inclusion.

Diversity can mean a lot of things. It can be gender, age, background, language, race, and sexual orientation. What kind of diversity do you want to create? What percentage benchmarks are you looking to hit? What kind of roles? And most importantly, by when?

Here are some specific examples of DE&I goals from Johnson & Johnson, which has publicly stated DE&I as a Strategic Imperative:

• By 2025, achieve $4.5 billion Global Impact Spend with small and diverse suppliers, representing a 20% increase from 2020
• By 2025, engage two million girls in STEM activities
• 2025, achieve 50% of women in management positions globally

3. Not Valuing DE&I Expertise Highly Enough During a Reduction in Force

Revelio Labs’ 2023 report on the state of DE&I and the impact of 2022 layoffs found that DE&I-focused roles had a nearly 40% churn rate at companies engaged in layoffs, as opposed to about 24% for non-DE&I roles.

Yet, these are the roles that will add a huge amount of value to the company.

Companies with DE&I teams tend to have a higher representation of Asian, Black and Hispanic hires than companies without DE&I teams.

How to Address?

Invest in DE&I expertise. If you don't have the budget to hire your own team, consider working with diversity and inclusion consultants. These professionals bring expertise and perspective.

In this challenging economic climate, many companies have had to respond with RIFs. It’s a really difficult decision to make and everyone will process the change at different paces. Bring empathy and patience and lean into the opportunity to reset the culture, making DE&I foundational to the company's future. Here are three things leaders can do following after layoffs:

• Refocus and align around a new purpose-driven strategy. It is essential to develop a clear, purpose-driven plan. Consolidating the data into one page that aligns everyone in the organization can renew enthusiasm and provide an impetus for progress.
• Evaluate your culture. Conduct a culture review to assess areas that need improvement. It's likely not feasible or necessary to do a comprehensive culture overhaul, but conducting a post-layoff assessment can target specific areas to be addressed and help lay a path to the inclusive culture you envisioned.
• Partner with employees. Having to "do more with less" comes with real challenges. Leaders can engage employees in addressing the challenges and opportunities to create a foundation for renewed enthusiasm and motivation. Don't just tell them what to do — invite them to participate.

4. Lack of Leadership Accountability

A McKinsey report conducted a study using "social listening", focusing on sentiment in employee reviews of their employers posted on US-based online platforms. They focused on three industries: financial services, technology, and healthcare.

One of their findings is that opinions about leadership and accountability in Inclusion and Diversity accounted for the highest number of mentions and were strongly negative. On average, 51% are related to leadership and 56% of those were negative.

This finding underscores the need to improve accountability with leadership teams and middle managers.

How to Address?

Here's a three-part framework for driving better accountability around DE&I (by Evelyn R. Carter, a PhD in social psychology):

1. Educate. Before telling people what to do, tell them why. Highlight how the proposed changes are personally relevant to the leaders and the company. Leaders are more likely to persist in the face of change when they are intrinsically motivated.
2. Listen. Invite feedback, really listen to it, and iterate. Leaders are more likely to adopt changes if they help create the solutions themselves. This step also helps identify where new processes aimed at improving DE&I will go off the rails.
3. Recognize. Celebrate your wins, but nudge those who need it. Give a lot of encouragement and recognition to people who use the process well, and provide nudges and accountability to those who need it. Establishing a regular debrief cadence where people can share insights with others and emphasizing a growth mindset are also important.

Creating a culture of diversity and inclusion is not easy, but the outcomes are worth it. As a People leader, you have the opportunity to create meaningful and lasting change that will benefit your people, organization, and the world outside.

Free 'How to Run Inclusive Meetings' Training

We understand there's a lot to learn and unlearn in creating an inclusive culture and we want to help. We are offering a free 'How To Run Inclusive Meetings' video training for your people managers, helping them to run meetings where people don't feel excluded based on their gender, race, experience level or personality to name a few.

Here’s the 1-min snippet from the video training.