Dr Adrienne Milner is an expert in culture and policy change addressing race-ethnic, sexual, and other types of inequity to improve organisational outcomes. As Director of DEI and Insights at Unthink, she uses advanced statistics. qualitative methodology, and policy analysis to support a wide variety of clients to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion. Below she shares her thoughts on how to drive DEI impact through policy change:
Most companies are struggling with DEI initiatives, fatigue, and most importantly, producing measurable and sustainable results. This isn’t necessarily because of incompetence or bad intentions, but rather, the way DEI practitioners, HR directors, and Employee Resource Groups have been conditioned to implement DEI.
The first instinct of leaders and those responsible for DEI is often to train people. But upskilling your people is just one element of driving positive change. While trainings increase DEI knowledge, they don’t necessarily produce behavioural changes, let alone result in consistent, long-lasting, structural improvements.
Policies and processes can serve as powerful change agents that reinforce desired performance and outcomes while preventing unwanted conduct and practices. While most people believe that cultural change should precede policy change (e.g., ‘we aren’t ready for something this progressive’), sometimes policies need to come first.
Consider Brown v Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which deemed racial segregation unconstitutional. At the time of Brown, white Americans were highly resistant to desegregation. However, the policy mandating that white children attend desegregated schools has shifted racial attitudes dramatically; for the past several decades, racial segregation has been considered abhorrent.
A current example of how policy can affect the way people think and behave is mixed-gender sport competition. Whether children support gender integration in sport is actually most dependent on whether or not their school offers mixed-gender sporting opportunities. In fact, the more gender integrated sports teams there are within a school, the more likely children (both girls and boys) are likely to support mixed-gender competition.
In terms of changing your organisational policies to promote DEI, the key is ensuring your policies are appropriate and adequate to drive positive change. The next step is assessing whether policies are properly implemented. For example, to combat anxiety and stress, an investment bank expanded their health and wellbeing policy to include a 24-hour anonymous mental health hotline. However, policy implementation analysis revealed the line was not in fact confidential which resulted in employees either not using the hotline at all or amplified stress related to their privacy and job security when they used the line, the opposite effect of what the initiative was trying to achieve.
Improving your DEI policies requires honest introspection and assessment of both the intended and unintended consequences of current policies and considering how adjustments could result in better outcomes. For example, expanding parental policies to include adoption is a great first step, but could you also embed policy supporting employees to become foster parents? If current company policy is to only speak on panels where women are represented, could this be extended to include race-ethnically diverse panels?
There is also an element of creativity to designing policies that drive DEI change to meet your organisation’s unique needs. For instance, a business who serves extremely wealthy cliental was effectively excluding candidates whose wardrobe would not be viewed positively by their clients from the recruitment process. The solution was a policy providing new joiners a wardrobe budget and professional consultation to remove this barrier (which in essence had no influence on actual job performance) to employment at the firm.
A further consideration on why to invest time and resources in effective DEI policies is that they remove the guesswork. Instead of managers wondering if they should approve time off for fostering, employees contemplating whether to accept the speaking engagement, or recruiters questioning if they should hire the best candidate despite their wardrobe, the policy is already there. When you do DEI policy right, it creates cultural change aligned to your organizational vision, mission, and values which may not be achieved even from the best DEI training.
