What do we do when “DEI” work is banned?
How to maintain progress amidst anti-DEI legislation
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Today’s DEI Climate
The right-wing in the US is clearly terrified of the power or DEI work – they’re trying their best to make it illegal. Republican state legislators are proposing, and in many cases passing laws to ban certain types of DEI work in many states. And as mainstream media outlets pay less and less attention to the racial justice movements that gained more airtime after George Floyd’s 2020 murder, organizational leaders feel less public pressure to invest in DEI work. As a result, they’ve deprioritized it, slashing their DEI budgets and eliminating positions for DEI subject matter experts.
What’s happening to our organizations as a result? Fewer resources for DEI means less opportunity to achieve our DEI goals and gather enough data to measure our impact. And that’s bad news for organizational culture — which, studies show time and time again, means higher turnover, less innovation, and lower productivity.* In their annual report on the state of DEI within the companies who use their software, Culture Amp shared that, while the percentage of companies who had a dedicated DEI role remained the same (39%), the percentage of companies who hired external DEI consultants shrank from 66% in 2021 to 47% in 2023. Meanwhile, “the percentage of companies with a dedicated DEI leader dropped from 56% to 41% from 2021-2023.” Relatedly, they also found that, “34% of HR teams in 2023 said they didn’t have an explicit organizational perspective on DEI, down 23% from 2021.”
However demoralizing this reality, Culture Amp’s takeaway echoes the theory of change that has motivated my consulting practice since I established it in 2018:
For DEI to make a substantial impact, it must be integrated into an organization’s daily operations and functional areas, supported by subject matter experts.
We won’t be successful if we approach it primarily as a separate event series, committee project, or other add-on.
This means that we can (and should, if you ask me!) keep working to make our organizations more diverse, equitable, and inclusive in any way we can.
Equitable Operations: A More Sustainable Approach
So when my clients ask how they should handle today’s sticky DEI climate, I answer, “By continuing what we’ve been doing since we started working together!” That’s because, rather than focusing on doing “DEI work” solely through siloed history month observances, workshops or lunch-and-learns, or affinity groups, I help clients make their day-to-day operating practices more equitable so that they can build diverse and inclusive organizations in a sustainable and substantial way.
Equitable operations, when done well, help organizations achieve their goals more efficiently and effectively. The trick is to approach the bread-and-butter parts of your daily systems with an equity lens.
That means embedding DEI into how you run meetings, how you give and receive formal and informal feedback, how you hire and promote staff, how you determine salary, etc. Clients I’ve worked with from their own early days have built their operations with this lens, so they have a much easier time handling challenges that come their way. Embedding equity into organizational operations when you’re further down the road works, too – you just need to make sure you’re actually working with a DEI expert instead of asking staff with other areas of expertise to take this on.
Substance Over Labels
My colleague, Erin-Kate Escobar, just wrote this great piece on how we can continue to do DEI work amidst legislative bans on it. One of their takeaways is the answer I often give when folks ask what the “best” name is for DEI work: the substance of the work we’re doing matters a lot more than what we call it. And people call it a lot of different things.**
I regularly have clients say things to me like, “This doesn’t really feel like what I thought DEI work would be. This just feels like _____.” That blank space is usually filled with something like, “strong management best practices” or “common sense operations.”
And that’s the thing: when we’re doing DEI work by focusing on equitable operations, we’re often implementing more effective and efficient frameworks for day-to-day management and operating processes that were neglected before.
And, of course, we integrate our knowledge of how systemic oppression impacts our work into the design of those systems, so we don’t perpetuate it.
What should we do?
Each organization needs to make its own calculations about what DEI work is right for them – something I guide my clients through all the time. (And for many organizations, the right answer is to lean into DEI work even more right now to attract the talent and customers they want at a key moment in history!)
No matter how we approach it, what’s important is that we intentionally work to strengthen our organizations by making their infrastructure more equitable so that we don’t perpetuate systemic oppression.
At the end of the day, I’m happy for my clients to call our work whatever they want – as long as we’re having a positive impact on their staff’s experiences in the workplace and their ability to pursue their missions more effectively.
Curious to learn more about my “equitable operations” approach, and how it could work for you? Reach out for a free consultation! I’d love to chat.
*Culture Amp’s DEI In the Workplace 2023 Report found that employees who strongly believe their company values diversity are 84% engaged while those who strongly disagree are 20% engaged; Employees who strongly believe their organization doesn’t value diversity are 3.3x more likely to leave in a 12-month period; And companies that value diversity have a 6.8% higher stock price.
**We’ve got DEI, EDI, IDEA (A is for Access), JEDI (J is for Justice), REDI (R is for Racial), and more. My hope is that the acronym or words you’re using actually accurately describe what your focus is.