Even as CEOs and politicians have denounced diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices, data show that many of these policies remain important for employees, creating a tricky situation for companies.
Employers “are threading a pretty difficult needle,” says Joelle Emerson, CEO and co-founder of Paradigm, a firm that provides services related to culture and inclusion. “You simultaneously want to reassure your employees, ‘We care about you. Our values have not changed,’ and you want to reduce risk, which may mean evolving some of your programs or how you talk about this stuff externally.”
We spoke with Emerson about how leaders can reassure employees and build buy-in for inclusion as “basic business hygiene” and how to interpret the barrage of headlines about DEI rollbacks. Here are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
How are you making the case for the continued importance of inclusion even as it seems like many corporate leaders are de-emphasizing the importance of culture and human-centric policies?
We’re in a different moment where companies’ priorities may be shifting more broadly around how important culture is. It’s a confusing moment, but what isn’t confusing is that companies need to have the basic business hygiene in place that’s capable of positioning them for the future.
The workforce globally is becoming more diverse across a range of dimensions. You don’t have to think culture is your number one priority to care about whether you’re going to be able to hire enough people given the diversifying workforce. Our data at Paradigm Research from thousands of companies show that there are pretty critical gaps in how companies are designing hiring, culture, and experience strategies for underrepresented groups. If that continues, companies are simply not going to be able to attract and retain top talent.
So in the conversations I’m having with executive and leadership teams, we’re talking about how you build a future-ready workplace. How do you build a company that is going to be a place people want to work over the next decade? When people who are different from each other are brought together—which will happen more and more—how do you make sure those people can collaborate, they can communicate, and they can get their work done really well?
How do you make sense of all of the headlines about DEI rollbacks?
We’re trying to understand what is actually changing on the ground through an anonymous survey that asks about how specific initiatives, programs, and budgets are changing. Our hypothesis is that it might look different in reality than it does from the headlines.
The headlines make everything seem really binary: Apple and Costco are doubling down and Walmart and Meta are giving up on DEI. Even from the announcements themselves, I don’t interpret that to be what’s actually happening. What does it actually mean when a company like Walmart says, ‘We’re not doing DEI. We’re focused on creating a culture of belonging going forward,’ and the headline says, ‘Walmart quits DEI.’ That’s actually not what I think that means.
So we want to know, when you say you’re no longer doing DEI, what does that actually mean? Have you just changed the language? Are there external partnerships you’re no longer participating in? Are you actually changing your hiring practices? Are you changing your training programs? Our hypothesis is that fewer things are changing than we might be led to believe, and that companies are probably all evolving a similar set of things—which probably makes sense from a legal and regulatory standpoint—and are mostly likely not evolving away from some of the core practices that we think are most important.
What are those core practices that make up ‘good business hygiene?’
Organizations should double down on making sure the work they’re doing is in service of fairness, of consistency, of experience, of inclusion for everyone. That means looking at all the different things you’re doing and asking, ‘Is this helping us build a culture for everyone?’ To be clear, a culture for everyone isn’t like an identity-agnostic culture. It’s a culture that recognizes that if we want to create a great place for everyone to work, we need to ask ourselves, ‘For whom are we not doing that today?’ And then we need to solve and address the gaps we uncover.
It also means moving away from more siloed practices to embedded practices. When I saw companies in 2021 launch diversity hiring strategies, my question was, ‘Why do you need that separate hiring strategy? Why is your core hiring strategy not about casting a wide net for talent and applying consistent standards so the best person gets hired?’ Make your entire hiring strategy about that and that’s going to be more impactful, more sustainable, and, in our experience, more resilient to moments like this.
One last trend is a change in how companies are talking about the work they’re doing. I’m sure you’re seeing a lot of companies moving away from the acronym DEI. I don’t see that as a bad thing or a compromise on values. Companies have relied on that umbrella term to categorize hundreds of different types of initiatives, so people are talking past each other. When you say, ‘We do DEI hiring,” I have no idea what that means. Instead, talk about how you go to a wider set of universities than you used to or you train hiring managers to ask consistent questions of all candidates.
Language is evolving to become more precise and more clear. That will help communicate to the large majority of Americans who believe in this stuff that these are not controversial practices. These are things that actually most of us across the political spectrum agree on. Oftentimes, the broader political landscape can make it seem like there’s a lot of division within companies on whether building representative teams, fair practices, and inclusive cultures are controversial. In reality, these values are often pretty widely held.