Benefits of Prioritizing DEIB
When seeking their next role, many candidates are looking for more than a paycheck or even tangible benefits such as healthcare or free snacks in the kitchen. Increasingly, they are prioritizing an employer whose values align with theirs — often, they want to know a potential employer’s stance on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB).
According to our latest data, 47% of tech professionals consider an employer’s DEIB reputation influential when considering new employment, roughly even from last year’s 48%. For recruiters and hiring managers everywhere, this means another factor to consider when sourcing top talent: you can have all the other parts (compensation, mission, even scheduling) in place to land the candidate of your dreams, only to then lose them when they realize the company making the offer doesn’t have a clear vision around DEIB.
Not to mention, there’s also a retention issue here. If a candidate’s stance on DEIB doesn’t align with their company’s, they may be more likely to hunt for a new position. Given the number of tech professionals planning on a fresh job search this year, companies can’t ignore the potential for their best and brightest to walk out the door because of a values misalignment.
Buy-In is Critical
Prioritizing DEIB isn’t just a matter of sending a few company-wide emails or hanging a few posters: employees expect companies to “walk the walk,” and will ask executives to share current DEIB policies, as well as how they are bearing fruit.
The percentage of tech professionals who say a diverse workforce does not improve a company may have increased significantly over the past year (from 8% to 14%), yet a significant majority of respondents still feel a diverse workforce generally makes things better within the workplace. Breaking it down further, 56% said such diversity improves company morale, 55% think it boosts innovation, and 58% believe it translates into improved company collaboration.
of tech professionals said diversity improves company morale.
of tech professionals said diversity boosts innovation.
of tech professionals said diversity translates into improved collaboration.
It’s also worth positioning this conversation in terms of both revenue generation, as well as the cost of not improving DEIB in your workplace. Tracking increases in morale, collaboration, productivity and direct impacts to revenue can help you build a positive and executive-friendly story around DEIB. Mapping out the costs of losing key employees and the true overall cost of not having a diverse talent pool and team can be a strong motivator to not only commit to the work, but also prioritize it above other projects and initiatives (a common obstacle for DEIB efforts). Embedding DEIB throughout aspects of other initiatives and projects across all business units elevates the need for prioritization.
Building Better Workplaces
In this panel discussion with Nancy Harris, Founder and CEO of Restart Consulting, and Kevin Welch, VP of IT Recruiting at Zions Bancorporation, you'll learn why DEIB is especially important to tech professionals and how to build truly diverse teams through inclusive and equitable hiring and retention practices.
How to Influence the Prioritization of DEIB Initiatives
It’s one thing to know why prioritizing DEIB is important. But how do you put theory to practice and actually do it? Here are a few tips to keep in mind when working to build DEIB into the fabric of your organization:
A Performative Commitment Hurts More Than It Helps: Many organizations want to make an internal and even external commitment to being a part of the solution around DEIB, which is great. However, one of the biggest things that can hurt an employer and their external brand is when their DEIB efforts are deemed to be performative (i.e., just for show). Before making any kind of commitment to employees, clients or the market at-large, push the team to have the tough conversations around how DEIB will be tangibly supported with resources, budgets and planning. Start With a Strategy: Strategy is as important to success for DEIB as any other initiative, and perhaps even more so, given the importance of avoiding performativity and demonstrating progress (to employees and to customers). Whenever possible, you want to ensure you are putting concrete goals to every initiative and action in the plan. Wherever you cannot, make sure to map the action back to business metrics. For example, certain initiatives should increase overall employee morale, which could be measured by an annual engagement survey, and could also be a factor in employee retention over time, which could be measured by churn. Set Benchmarks: To set effective goals and build out impactful strategies, you need to understand where you are today. For example, you could:
- Assign a company-wide analysis of employee diversity to your data scientist. You never know the extent of an issue until you have the data. An impartial analysis of your company’s diversity will show you the exact percentages of underrepresented groups, which can give your HR team some guidance on how to source and hire (among other things).
- Task HR with diversifying its talent sourcing by a certain date. It all starts with the candidate pool. If you rely on a third-party firm to source your employees, make a diverse slate of candidates a requirement. Be prepared to further define metrics around this, i.e. 50% of all candidates should be from underrepresented backgrounds. You may also want to consider introducing more targeted referral programs into your hiring process, as that can expand outreach to diverse candidates. Last but certainly not least, consider expanding your sourcing reach to new channels such as targeted job boards or industry associations for underrepresented groups.
- Have marketing determine ways to highlight the contributions of underrepresented groups within the organization. People want to feel valued and appreciated or they’ll leave. Highlighting the presence and contributions of employees from underrepresented groups can boost a sense of belonging, as well as show representation.
- Require the executive team to undergo bias training. It’s difficult to overcome bias, especially unconscious (also known as implicit) ones, but it’s impossible when you’re not even aware of them. Although there may be some resistance to bias training, it’s essential to ensure that everyone in the organization is aligned and doing their best to treat everyone fairly.
- Listen to your employees’ feedback. Companies gather feedback from employees regarding what aspects of the DEIB policy need improvement. Unfortunately, that feedback often doesn’t get considered in strategy development and implementation. Feedback can sometimes be tough and spark a lot of disruption to the status quo, but it’s important to include it in your DEIB strategy and initiatives. Remember, you can take a scaffolded approach to certain issues that will need to be addressed in phases, but it’s important to be sure employee feedback is actually being used and informing action items in the strategy.
By implementing these steps, and proactively sharing them with candidates and employees, you’ll build your DEIB reputation and show the industry at large that you’re collectively committed to real change.