Many opportunities to bid for projects sent to us at Full Colour centre on reviews of policies and procedures. There is an assumption underpinning all these invitations to tender: “if only we could get the right documents in place, we could transform our organisation on equity, diversity and inclusion”.
It is true that systems and processes are foundation stones for creating real change on EDI, but in and of themselves they will not transform your organisation. Why?
People implement your systems and processes
You can have the best systems in the world, but the mindset and behaviours of your people is what really impacts equity, diversity and inclusion.
Where do you start?
When deciding what action to take on EDI, it is important to first identify what you want to have achieved by a specific point in time. This is not about articulating vague ambitions like “we want to be more inclusive” or “we want to be more diverse”. Given your starting point – where you are now in relation to EDI – what measurable, precisely defined change do you want to have achieved by your chosen point in time?
Once you’ve work that out, there are various places you could choose to focus your efforts. It is a judgement call as to which will move you further faster, but my advice is to focus on people if you want meaningful results.
To help you decide, I’ve created the following model. Feel free to use it, but please credit Full Colour if you do. ????
Full Colour© model on where to focus EDI work
Where to focus your EDI efforts: Full Colour model©
There are four different “domains” you could choose to focus on, depending on what you’ve decided to achieve.
Policies and procedures
A lot of effort goes into getting recruitment policies and procedures right to attract a more diverse candidate pool. But what happens once you’ve recruited people with minoritized characteristics?
How are you building inclusion and equity into your induction? How are you addressing line managers’ approach to managing diverse teams or growing into inclusive leaders? How are principles of equity and inclusion built into your performance reviews? A fuller list of areas to think about is in the diagram above.
Employee life cycle
A more holistic approach would be to consider the employee life cycle.
What do you want each stage of employees’ time with you to feel like? What skills do your managers and leaders need to create that feeling? What are the differing needs of employees around that lifecycle and how can you build inclusion and equity into this?
Internal relationships
The biggest factor in an employee’s experience of your organisation is the relationships they have with others. When talking to people who have had negative experiences relating to equity, inclusion or diversity, they almost always talk about patterns of behaviour in those around them.
How do you uncover these patterns of behaviour? How do you find out what is really going on in relationships? How will you make clear the principles you expect people to live by in forming and growing relationships? How will you hold people to account for upholding those principles? What if those veering away most from these principles are your leaders?
Culture
This is the biggie. How do you know what your culture and sub-cultures are? Leaders, in particular, can be blind to this because they fail to recognise that people are likely to behave differently around them.
Culture is your values made manifest. By values I don’t mean those words and phrases you put in your annual report, but the real, lived experience of what it feels like to be part of your organisation plus “the way we do things around here”.
If you want some help working out where to focus your EDI efforts, reach out on [email protected].