DEI during an economic downturn?

I’m so glad many of you were able to join my Ask Me Anything session with Pyn last month! I had fun answering the thoughtful questions folks brought to the forum.

Unsurprisingly, several of the questions were about how to make progress around DEI during a period of economic uncertainty and downturn, like many industries are currently experiencing. Since I’ve been hearing similar questions from clients lately, today I’m sharing one of those questions and a summary of my answer.

Are you trying to make DEI progress with a small budget? Stay tuned: mailing list subscribers will be the first to learn about a new, low-cost offering we’ll be launching next month to help you live your DEI values through your hiring practices!

Until then, the AMA excerpt recap is below. Please reach out if you have other DEI questions you’d like help with!

Attendee Question:

“I work in tech, where diversity is difficult at the best of times. Most of the areas that are most vulnerable during a Reduction in Force (like Marketing, Admin, and Sales) tend to also be where you will find a large number of underrepresented folks.

What are some strategies to help bring more diversity into less vulnerable sectors of the business during a downturn?”

My Answer:

Let’s first note that this question makes an important (and correct) assumption about DEI work:

Focusing on proactive and sustainable strategies to recruit and retain a demographically diverse staff – especially in functional areas that are deemed most essential to the business – is key to successful DEI work that can survive economic turmoil.

That’s precisely because it's essentially impossible to improve demographic diversity when you're not hiring. And if you haven’t been investing in recruiting and retaining folks from historically excluded groups into areas of the company that are less vulnerable during a downturn (which is not where you see the highest number of applicants from those groups in the first place), it’s even harder. Therefore, strategies to bring more demographic diversity into the less vulnerable functional areas of the business are exactly what I would focus on.

So, what kinds of strategies work for this that are feasible in a tough economy? Here are some of my favorite strategies for recruitment and retention.

1. For recruitment: Proactively diversify your network.

Referrals account for the vast majority of hires in most organizations. This is how we end up building homogenous organizations: we tend to know people and be in networks with people who look like us.

This is a normal, adaptive human behavior. But that doesn’t mean it’s still serving us well, and that we can’t change it. For those of us who are part of one or more overrepresented demographic groups, I’d argue that it’s in fact crucial that we change it! So how can we do that? Here are two ideas:

• Build reciprocal relationships* with organizations where folks from historically excluded groups in your industry tend to gather. For example, if you work in tech, you might reach out to organizations like Afro Tech, Lesbians in Tech, Women Who Code, etc, to see what they’re looking for partnership on that you can help with.

• Regularly attend events where you’re more likely to meet folks who are part of marginalized groups you don’t belong to. This way, they'll be top of mind when you have a job opening. Plus, then your work can be informed by more diverse perspectives! Our work suffers when we are only exposed to the perspectives of people like us. Building relationships with people who have demographic differences from us helps us build stronger products so that our work can be stronger.

Feeling stuck as you wonder why your network looks mostly like you? Check out our free allyship workbook to start working through this.

2. For retention: Make your policies more equitable.

Much of the work needed to retain staff across demographic groups involves ensuring that your internal policies are designed to treat staff fairly. Take a look at your hiring practices, your bereavement and parental leave policies, your performance review templates, your meeting norms, your salary bands, etc. Then take a look at your attrition trends, your hiring pipeline trends, your employee engagement survey data, and your promotion trends across demographic groups. Chances are, there’s a long list of changes you can make to those policies that will positively impact that data.

This is the kind of substantive work is critical for at least two reasons:

First, it tells staff you’re serious about your commitment to DEI. This is the real work of making your organization more equitable.

Second, it’s what allows you to retain staff across demographic groups. You can put all the money and time you want into hiring more diverse teams. But if folks don’t feel included and treated equitably once they get to work, they’ll leave within a few years. This policy work is how you keep folks!

It doesn’t matter how many times you celebrate a history month or have a float in a parade – if you’re not paying staff equitably, giving them clear career paths, and making it feasible for them to care for themselves and their families, your DEI work will come across as – and be – performative.

The best thing about these strategies? They don’t require a huge investment – in fact, both of them can be totally free.

If you’d like support implementing either of these, or other sustainable DEI strategies, please reach out. As always, I’d be honored to help.