The Future of EDI

What is it?

EDI, DEI, or even D&I. Whatever you call it, diversity, inclusion and equity are an important part of any workplace. It spans everything from finding the right people and talent to hire, to retaining them by seamlessly integrating them into the office.

The Black Lives Matter movement lit a proverbial fire under employers to get their houses in order. Charities raced to implement EDI strategies, recruit D&I leads and convene round tables and working groups to discuss internal issues and challenges.

But is the momentum on EDI already waning? Looking ahead to 2023, we’d suggest not. One of the biggest trends we’re likely to see in 2023 is a renewed emphasis on creating belonging in the workplace, with some people even floating the idea of DEIB(elonging) instead of DEI - and, luckily, we cover exactly that right here! This week, we’re diving into the finer details of how to maximise the impact of your EDI programme.

Why Do I Care?

The state of EDI in the third sector isn’t where it should be. This year, a report by the Association of Charitable Foundations found that D&I is the area that organisations have the “furthest to travel” in, and there’s still more middle class white women called Lucy working in the third sector than people of colour.

Despite good intentions across the sector, a lot of current EDI programmes end up looking more like PR exercises and insurance policies. We don’t want to think of EDI as just a series of buzzwords we throw around to look good to our employees, supporters, and stakeholders. The world is becoming more diverse, so we want our workplaces to truly reflect that. In theory, EDI is meant to make sure that all our employees feel supported, welcome, and safe at work. In practice, it should mean the same thing. Of course, there’s the added bonus that diverse and inclusive teams are more innovative, creative, and productive.

But EDI isn’t just about having a diverse workforce for the sake of having a diverse workforce - it’s about being able to understand and reflect the diversity of the world we’re operating in. How are we meant to design for a diverse world if we aren’t equipped to fully understand the diversity of lived experiences? Getting your own house in order - showing your employees that they belong - will give them a model to replicate for your supporters.

Restructure

In 2019, #CharitySoWhite sparked a country-wide conversation about institutional racism in the charity sector. The campaign, started by the self-appointed guard dog of BAME communities in the third sector, created space to have a much-needed discussion about ingrained racism that is a day-to-day reality for many employees, stakeholders, and supporters of the sector alike.

And yet, in the three years since then, the sector hasn’t made much progress. Even just a few months ago, Wellcome, the UK’s richest charity, was found to have let institutional racism “fester” in their organisation. The scale of change that is needed is large - archaic, divisive and discriminatory traditions drive many of the organisational structures, relationships between charity and community, the people and values that are considered important, the data we uncover, and much more.

Hiring a singular D&I lead (who is most likely underfunded and short on time) to fix all of this is a bit of a tall order. Pouring money into an EDI programme that stands alone next to the rest of the organisation isn’t going to work. It’s going to take a concerted effort to restructure every aspect of the organisation, from where accountability lies, to transparency, workers rights, processes and practice, hierarchy, and basically everything else.

Supporting Identities

This is the simple stuff we should all be getting right in the first place. Globally, people are grappling with new dynamics of inclusivity and representation across the board. In a workplace, it’s important we’re ahead of the curve. This is where people spend a large chunk of their lives - it’s important to make it a safe space.

From having adequate healthcare or mental health support for transitioning individuals, to having the proper accessibility programmes in place for all your employees (and no, this isn’t just making sure you have wheelchair access to your office, it’s also making sure you have the appropriate setup for neurodivergent employees), you want to have the appropriate measures in place to support everyone across different identities.

And it’s not just about supporting different identities at work, it’s also about how you’re supporting these identities in the services you provide, the way you interact with your supporters and stakeholders, and your values as an organisation. The way you’re supporting your own employees through EDI will reflect how you ultimately design for diversity, equity and inclusion.

It’s worth revisiting our article about the six dimensions of identity here, where we cover some of the macro trends and influences that are impacting how identity plays out in lived experiences. But, for your convenience, here are some of the key takeaways:

1. Race & Ethnicity: As we mention above, the 2020 murder of George Floyd kickstarted a society-wide conversation about race and ethnicity, with some notable progress for inclusion of underrepresented racial groups (URGs). Two years on, it seems that the progress has not been sustainable. Microaggressions are common in charity working environments, whilst URGs struggle more with mental health problems and are often passed over for promotions.
2. Sexual Orientation: At work, LGBTQ+ people tend to feel marginalised and pressured into code-switching - no surprise then that they face higher rates of mental health problems (specifically attributed to work). With a lot of events focussed around pride month, it’s important to remember that LGBTQ+ employees are LGBTQ+ all year round.
3. Gender and Gender Identity: Gender and Gender Identity: The past decade has seen significant progress for gender equality in the workplace. Yet, the pandemic reversed a lot of progress that had been made. Uneven burdens of domestic work and childcare continue to force women out of the labour market, and sexual harassment in the workplace remains prevalent (especially when working from home - a new problem for the hybrid workplace). Meanwhile, transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid people experience all this and more, with the number of trans people openly identifying at work decreasing by over 10% in the past five years. This space remains in need of progress.
4. Disability: The number of people identifying at disabled is growing, as people are feeling more comfortable self reporting. But only 4% of companies include disability in their D&I strategies. There’s a widely-reported lack of workplace support for the needs of disabled employees, particularly as our understanding of disabilities grows.
5. Age: People aged over 50 tend to feel excluded and left behind in both society and work. They’re often seen as a poor long-term investment for companies - instead of the human beings they actually are. Brands and organisations also tend to exclude older generations from their marketing, and/or promote inaccurate stereotypes of aging.
6. Socio-Economic Background: Low-income individuals are more likely to experience low-quality work, limited progression, and low mobility; issues which are compounded when it’s a generational pattern. It’s a challenge to address given the massive range of contributing and inter-related factors that can contribute to this problem, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prioritising and designing for inclusion.

AI In The Workplace

AI in the workplace has gotten a bad rep over the past years. It should’ve taken the human bias out of hiring and office culture itself, but instead it’s been shown to double down on this bias. In 2018, Amazon had to scrap its AI recruiting tool for being biased against women, and the Harvard Business Review famously found that AI recruiting algorithms have a strong anti-POC bias. AI replicates the data it learnt from, so if your office has a history of hiring white men with a degree from a Russell Group university, your AI is going to target exactly those people over and over again.

But expect this to be changing in the near future - in fact, it already is. Now that we’re aware of these problems, we can start training AI to be consciously bias-free. Expect to see AI used to identify patterns and potential biases within organisations instead. For example, it can look at the language of your job postings (we already covered some of the AI softwares that do this here), the way your recruiting managers are talking during interviews, or the consistency of the goals you’re setting for your existing employees. Be warned though - with AI’s previous biases already exposed, it’s worth keeping a human eye on the AI.

Alternative Credentials

Stop hiring based on the university credentials of applicants. Do they really need a degree to be able to do that job? Most likely not - access to universities in the UK isn’t diverse or inclusive at all, is a poor metric of the job potential of a candidate, and is dropping in value. Hiring based on university credentials is excluding a whole section of the talent pool, and is unlikely to do you any favours if you’re genuinely committed to EDI.

Think about it - jobs typically require a combination of hard and soft skills. Hard skills are easily testable beyond university credentials, through anything from pre-employment testing, job history or course accreditation. The real value of a university degree isn’t in the hard skills (most organisations teach their new hires everything from scratch anyways), it’s in the soft skills: the people skills, team-working experience, etc. But none of those soft skills are exclusive to university graduates. In fact, research shows students aren’t actually learning these skills in university, and that there’s a large gap between the soft skills employers expect graduates to have and the skills they actually have.

The bottom line: get rid of degree requirements and switch to skill-based hiring. Unless a degree is absolutely necessary, and most likely it’s not, there’s no reason to base a candidate’s worth on a piece of paper.