How these SCOTUS rulings will impact workplace DEI

Note: I drafted this newsletter on June 29, typing it to work through my rage. When news broke on June 30 about the Supreme Court’s decision in 303 Creative LLC et al. v. Elenis et al. (paving the way to legalize discrimination against LBGTQ+ people - a group to which I belong - and likely many other protected classes) I was finalizing the edits for this newsletter in my mailing list software, and decided I needed to keep going.

So while you won’t read about today's ruling below, please know that it only underscores what I hope your takeaway will be from today’s newsletter: 

These rulings will be devastating for our workplaces unless we proactively invest in sustainable infrastructure to make them more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. 

Please also know that if you’re feeling numb, devastated, exhausted, enraged, overwhelmed, etc about this predictable but devastating barrage of SCOTUS decisions, I’m right there with you. Remember to take good care of yourself and honor all the feelings that are coming up. We'll take productive action together while we take care of each other.

This post was supposed to be about my organizational values. 

Given the economic climate, organizations are cutting their budgets for DEI work, so I was going to start a series of newsletters about how you can do your standard HR work with a DEI lens. And maybe I will start that series at some point.

But just as I sat down to write that series yesterday, I learned about the Supreme Court’s decision that will dismantle affirmative action.* 

While this decision isn’t surprising given the current Court, I am enraged nonetheless. And now I can’t find the capacity to think or write about anything else. 

So that’s what I’m going to write about instead.

This decision is going to have devastating effects across all areas of our lives – and our workplaces are not exempt. 

Are you a white or Asian leader having trouble recruiting and keeping Black and Brown staff today? This decision is going to make it harder. 

And the trend over the last few years of organizations sidelining and defunding the DEI efforts they committed to in 2020 isn’t unrelated.

Let’s not pretend that it’s okay that white-led organizations – that created the budget to invest in DEI work amidst the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 despite a very scary early pandemic economy – are no longer willing to create that budget now.

It’s not acceptable. It’s racist.

And it's furthering the right-wing agenda to erase history and pretend that systemic oppression isn't real. 

But to quote from Justice Jackson’s (glorious!) dissent from yesterday, “Ignoring race just makes it matter more.” (Here’s the whole dissent. It starts on page 209.)

The reality is that the longer you wait to build solid DEI infrastructure into the DNA of your organization, the harder and more expensive it’s going to be later. 

And it’s highly likely that your staff will be treated inequitably in the meantime.

What do I mean by, “build solid DEI infrastructure into the DNA of your organization?”

I do not mean, “Find the budget for one DEI training per year.” We have the studies to show that will make your organization less diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

I also don’t mean, “Let your staff volunteer to run Employee Resource Groups.” Without proper resources and funding, ERGs usually pull staff from already marginalized groups away from their paid work, worsening pay gaps and underrepresentation.

Instead, you'll see success by investing in sustainable DEI strategies. Here are a few examples:

1. Pay staff equitably and more transparently. 

This means establishing clear salary bands to help your staff understand why they’re paid what they’re paid, and what skills they need to develop or additional work they need to contribute if they want to earn more. It also means conducting an annual pay equity analysis to learn about patterns that show you may be paying some demographic groups more than others, and address them.

2. Make your employee lifecycle processes more equitable. 

This means not only writing equitable policies for each of these moments (think recruiting, hiring, performance evaluation, promotion decisions, etc), but training staff to use them and then holding everyone accountable to them.

3. Integrate DEI best practices into your employee policies. 

I regularly review employee handbooks and find legal jargon that directly contradicts the company’s stated commitment to DEI. There are great ways to keep policies legally compliant AND operationalize your DEI commitment through them. This is part of what shows staff that you’re not just talking the talk, but walking the walk.

If you’d like help with any of this, please reach out. This work is more urgent every day and I’m honored to be able to support it.