By Jo Geraghty, Co-founder & Director at Culture Consultancy

When we talk with people about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we often come up against two different perceptions of what that means.

In one corner, you have people who see DEI training as a stick. They dread it and come fully “armoured up”, imagining someone coming in to beat people over the head for not saying the right things, for being a straight, white man “of a certain age” or not having the right policies already in place.

In the other corner you have the opposite – people who see DEI as something fluffy and ultimately inconsequential. Someone will come into the organisation, give a talk about closing gaps or unconscious bias, and after three hours everyone will yawn, stretch, head back to their desks and never think about it again. Arguably a total waste of time, with no lasting impact.

But DEI – true DEI – should never look like either of those scenarios. It should be about working with the people in the room, not against them.

And in order to get that kind of DEI in place, it has to be embedded into your culture every step of the way.

An integral part of culture change from the very beginning

The first step in embedding DEI lies with how you conceptualise and approach it in the first place. Working on culture change and DEI ambitions together isn’t a bold new concept by any means, but all too often DEI work is seen as something separate from the culture – an optional extra that can be done on the side.

If you want to keep innovating and stay competitive, seeking out diverse experiences and embracing the voices that challenge your status quo should be part of your culture. And that means DEI has to be an integral part of your culture too.

This is why our culture change projects always adopt a fully integrated approach to DEI – we work to understand the culture the organisation wants to create, and how DEI can enable that, as well as its strategic priorities as part of the embedding phase.

DEI means listening with direction

One of the core foundations of a diverse, inclusive culture is listening. Individual leaders are not best placed to judge whether their people feel truly welcomed, valued and heard, it’s the people themselves. But this is also where so many DEI programs feel tokenistic and fail – because they listen and stop there.

Recently, we were asked to run some listening sessions for an organisation. They’d set some new DEI ambitions previously and got alignment with the exec group around what was needed. But employee survey feedback was still saying that the company wasn’t as inclusive an environment as people needed it to be.

The problem the organisation was having wasn’t the feedback itself – it was that they didn’t know what to do to turn things around. This isn’t an uncommon situation, and is a big part of why people often feel like DEI is hard work and positive impact is difficult to achieve. 

That’s why our listening sessions with this organisation weren’t just about getting more feedback. It was still important to speak to the people on the ground and get more detail on what was working and what wasn’t. But the crucial part of our work was to build that feedback into actionable, practical ways to make the right changes. We could give them a roadmap, not just an ideal destination, and help to guide them on that journey.

Bringing DEI ‘off the side of the desk’

Of course, once you have your DEI ambitions set, you have to realise them. And one of the reasons why they can struggle to make the impact they should is because this is often seen as a job that sits on the side of someone’s desk.

In order to achieve DEI ambitions, they need to be championed and pushed forward by everybody, with shared buy-in and accountability, not just by a few passionate advocates or allies.

That naturally starts at the top, with senior leaders grasping their crucial role in how they behave and the tone they set, as well as defining the organisation’s level of commitment and getting aligned on where you’re moving from and to, and why. This was something we focussed upon when we worked with Aquila on developing their leadership team: there was a strong focus on helping them raise awareness of some of the challenges, and opportunities, in their business from a DEI perspective – and how they could play their part in enabling positive change.

And after that, the process becomes what we call “bottom up and middle out”.

This is when managers get involved by driving DEI ambitions as part of the overall company culture. Where individual people in teams make diversity, equity and inclusion part of business as usual. It’s during this process that DEI jumps off the side of one person’s desk and into the hands of people who can make the change felt by everyone.

This approach is the core of our embedding process – not just for DEI ambitions, but for culture change in general. It’s how we make sure that an organisation’s new culture feels owned by everyone in that company, and doesn’t need the passion of a few individuals to keep going long into the future.

Want to learn more about embedding DEI ambitions in your organisation? Get in touch to see how Culture Consultancy can help.