Diversity & Inclusion Practices - D&I Strategy

Q: What’s the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Put simply, diversity is the presence of difference. In our organizations, diversity typically refers to the representation of different identities across traits such as Read More

The world we live in is complex and dynamic. Workplaces, technologies, and industries are changing rapidly. Companies need talent that can match this new, evolving reality. You need unique viewpoints, varied opinions, and contrasting perspectives. In order to thrive, organizations must harness the power of all talent, not just some.

Our Approach to Diversity Intelligence

Our unique approach to enhancing your diversity recruitment efforts combines an internal analysis of your DE&I recruitment and retention efforts as well as external market research to learn about your competitor’s diversity programmes.

We then triangulate the data from our desk research, internal analysis, and external market intelligence to provide you with an evidence-based roadmap of the specific actions needed to address your diversity recruitment and retention challenges.

We understand that sourcing and maintaining a diverse workforce does not have a one-size-fits-all solution. Our methods emphasize your unique organizational context and industry, resulting in a custom-tailored path forward to achieve your specific diversity goals.

How We Build and Enhance Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Programs

Internal Analysis

Our in-depth internal process analysis is designed to develop a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and opportunities of your existing recruiting efforts and functions.

This approach ensures that best practices and tools are consistently utilized to achieve future talent strategies and diversity goals. Based on your organization’s needs, TI consultants will analyze and advise on diversity topics including:

Sourcing channels and candidate pool management
Hiring manager & recruiter processes
Candidate conversion & hiring procedures
Candidate socialization & communication of employer brand
Diverse interview process and composition
Diversity awareness & training programs
Diverse employee engagement & support structures
Performance review processes & bias
Bias in job descriptions & postings
Systems of accountability

We partner with your relevant organizational functions (e.g. Employee Resource Groups, Talent Acquisition, Human Resources, and business area leaders) to make comprehensive recommendations tailored to your unique organizational processes, challenges, and culture.

We also conduct focus groups to identify your specific challenges in attracting, hiring, and retaining diverse candidates to address any pre-existing concerns before constructing and implementing a new DE&I plan.

External Analysis

Our external market analysis provides you with a detailed and pragmatic view of your competitors’ diversity recruitment successes and challenges. We develop an understanding of their diversity journey – how their initiatives have evolved, what challenges they faced, and how they overcame those challenges. Typical topics include:

New untapped DE&I channels & resources
Efficacy of DE&I programs
Industry best practices (e.g. use of Employee Resource Groups, Systems of Accountability, etc.)
Candidate experience
Attraction and retention
Emerging talent trends for diverse hiring
DE&I initiatives and key focuses

Additional DE&I Strategy Features

Current practice analysis: We identify your barriers and gaps across sourcing channels, job descriptions, employer brand communication, hiring manager/TA practices, candidate pool management, interview panels & procedures and new employee onboarding.
Employee Resource Group involvement: We value the expertise of your subject matter experts in your recruitment and retention initiatives. Learning about the experience of employees at all levels of your organization helps us build a stronger DE&I program for you.

Constructing Your DE&I Plan

Utilizing the combination of the internal analysis and external research, we provide a comprehensive view of both the internal diversity processes, highlighting strengths and gaps, and the external market specific to your organization. Building on this foundation, we will develop a long-term strategy for creating lasting change within your organization.

We also understand that meaningful changes in diversity recruitment and retention don’t happen overnight. We’ll provide a list of both critical recommendations and additional peripheral recommendations for next steps to allow for immediate impact. This allows you to see incremental changes while we work toward your larger, lasting diversity goals.

Examples of our common DE&I recommendations:

Facilitate courageous DE&I conversations. These are complex topics and having the required honest and open dialogue needed to make real change isn’t easy. We’ll work with you to create an open, inviting environment where these crucial conversations can occur.
Prioritize diversity at all levels of hiring, including succession planning for executives. It is incredibly important for retention purposes that your staff sees diverse individuals at all levels of your organization, including in management and leadership roles.
Establish accountability and incentives for hiring managers. DE&I programs only work if they are implemented across the board. We can help you create transparency within your hiring process, and build incentive programs for those who move our DE&I efforts forward.
Remove opportunities for any conscious or unconscious bias to negatively affect hiring outcomes. This could include using more diverse interview panels, promoting blind screening of resumes, reevaluating your job descriptions and required skills, and more.

Implementing Your Custom DE&I Plan

Long-term objectives must be enterprise-wide, and the strategy must be disciplined and consistent over a long period of time. Concurrently, short-term strategies such as creating talent pools, unbiased job descriptions, diverse talent and hiring slates, etc. must set in motion for a D&I program to be truly successful.

Our industrial-organizational psychologist will roadmap equitable & inclusive internal talent processes and provide implementation workshops. This ensures that your program is implemented unilaterally across all business areas.

Together with your stakeholders, business leaders and hiring managers, human resources, and employee resource groups, we’ll put the pieces in place for you to attract the key demographics and diverse talent your organization needs.

Measuring DE&I Results: Beyond Hiring

While evaluating the effectiveness of your DE&I program needs to consider how many diverse candidates you interviewed and hired, it cannot stop there. Following up your diversity hiring efforts with an inclusive and equitable retention strategy encourages diverse employees to stay and grow with your organization.

This means embracing DE&I at every level of your organization, from talent sourcing to management and C-suite succession planning. It’s crucial that your DE&I program shows career and professional growth opportunities for all of your employees.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion FAQs

What’s the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Put simply, diversity is the presence of difference. In our organizations, diversity typically refers to the representation of different identities across traits such as race, gender identity, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and (dis)ability. Equity begins with an understanding that systemic barriers exist in our society that continue to oppress traditionally marginalized groups and results in not everyone getting access to the same resources.

First, let’s be clear that equity is not the same as equality. Despite the terms often being used interchangeably, equality distributes the same benefits to all and assumes everyone should be treated the same regardless of needs, experiences, and opportunities. Equity, on the other hand, puts people on an equal footing by recognizing the systemic barriers that continue to oppress traditionally marginalized groups and implementing a fairer distribution of resources.

In short, equity recognizes that barriers and privileges mean not everyone comes to the table with the same resources. Equitable projects aim to correct for those imbalances by improving procedures and processes.

Inclusion is about all people feeling that they are welcome and valued. When people are intentionally included, it ensures more power sharing in decision-making. While communities tend to be diverse, often not everyone feels as though they belong—particularly those with traditionally marginalized identities such as (but certainly not limited to) people of color, immigrants, and people with disabilities. Local governments can begin addressing this by asking what the current experience is like for these individuals to examine the barriers to inclusion. Inclusion has to be intentionally designed for so that differences are welcomed and various perspectives are respectfully heard.

In short:

Diversity is where everyone is invited to the party
Inclusion means that everyone gets to contribute to the playlist
Equity means that everyone has the opportunity to dance/experience the music

Why is DE&I important for my business and how will improving my DE&I program positively affect my business?

Research has shown many benefits of a diverse and inclusive workplace:

Higher revenue growth
Greater readiness to innovate
Increased ability to recruit a diverse talent pool
5.4 times higher employee retention

On top of that, inclusion in the workplace is one of the most important keys to retention. When employees don’t feel that their ideas, presence or contributions are truly valued or taken seriously by their organization, they will eventually leave.

Our research on company culture shows that when employees trust that they, and their colleagues, will be treated fairly regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or age, they are:

9.8 times more likely to look forward to going to work
6.3 times more likely to have pride in their work
5.4 times more likely to want to stay a long time at their company

Having an inclusive workplace culture will not only help you attract a diverse set of talent but also help you retain the diverse talent you attracted in the first place.

About Talent Intelligence’s Diversity Services: An Interview with CFO Ian Matthews

We sat down with Ian Matthews, CFO of Talent Intelligence, an international talent acquisition company known for their data-driven, analytical approach to talent acquisition. Talent Intelligence has a longstanding tradition of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion and has a proven track record of helping their clients hire and retain a diverse workforce that deeply strengthens their organization and prepares them to succeed in a modern marketplace. Below, he details Talent Intelligence’s practice of helping their clients look inward to identify potential equity issues before they arise and the importance of having a diverse workforce at all levels of your organization.

Could you describe Talent Intelligence’s approach to helping their clients meet their diversity goals?

One service is diversity strategy – we look at the company’s diversity and inclusion goals and concerns, and then address why they are not currently achieving these goals. The first job is really looking at the benefits of making this change. If a business has a workforce that’s lacking diversity, or they’re putting a lot of effort into diversity recruitment – either without success, or the new recruits are just not staying – you’ve got to find out why. Then you work out what needs to change.

If a business has a workforce that’s lacking diversity, or they’re putting a lot of effort into diversity recruitment – either without success, or the new recruits are just not staying – you’ve got to find out why.

That’s always going to be a difficult process – partly because of the money you have to spend to bring people in, but also because the organization is going to have to change the way they do certain things. These changes may be disruptive and cause short term inefficiencies within the organization – so they have to be very clear about why they are making them and what they want to achieve. And then we’ll identify what the problems are with what they’re already doing and what they need to do instead. We’ll then make recommendations to change processes or add processes to their recruitment and their HR efforts.

What are the common mistakes businesses make when it comes to diversity?

The biggest mistake companies make is they target diverse recruitment and bring these new people into a workforce that hasn’t addressed why it has had diversity struggles in the past. These new diverse recruits then don’t feel welcome in that organization because the workplace isn’t set up to accommodate the different viewpoints – and it is these different viewpoints which are the real benefit diversity has for a company.

…That also means having diverse people at the top of the organization that reflect these new people, because if you bring in a particular diverse workforce at the lower level and they look at the senior management see the same old monoculture, they’ll say “This isn’t going to work for me”.

If you have a monoculture, you’re always going to get the same answer. Having a diverse workforce brings you different viewpoints, different thoughts, and gets you to a different place. You need an employee resource group, for example, to back up this new diverse workforce and make them feel included in everything. And that also means having diverse people at the top of the organization that reflect these new people, because if you bring in a particular diverse workforce at the lower level and they look at the senior management see the same old monoculture, they’ll say “This isn’t going to work for me”. So, it needs to be done throughout the entire organization. But it also needs to be done in a way that isn’t exclusionary to the current workforce. Because another problem is if you’re forcing diversity onto people, that’s not inclusive – this will create friction within the organization. The biggest downfall of most companies’ diversity activities is they don’t focus on inclusion first – they focus on recruitment first and then try to change the inclusive nature of the organization. They’ve got to do it the other way round, because otherwise the diverse recruits will just arrive and leave again.

The biggest downfall of most companies’ diversity activities is they don’t focus on inclusion first – they focus on recruitment first and then try to change the inclusive nature of the organization.

It’s a time intensive process – even just the process of identifying what they want to achieve and what they need to do about it, is probably a six-month exercise in itself. Introducing change in an organization that has 50,000 employees – that’s a years-long exercise. It’s mainly internal. We typically wouldn’t be involved in its implementation, because, again, coming in as an outside consulting firm to do that kind of thing is really not going to be taken well by the current incumbents. It doesn’t mean you have to wait two years before you start employing anybody. You have to make the changes hand in hand – but if you haven’t identified them first, there’s no point doing the recruitment. It is a long journey for any large organization. Or even a small organization.