Question, do you have a DE&I statement for your organization? Many of you do, and for those that do, congrats! For those that do not have a DE&I statement, do not fret because I'm going to let you in on a little secret, they don't really mean much. To many organizations, the DE&I statement is an aspiration, a message tied to an ideal but not to outcomes or something to be measured. The intent of these statements is to serve as a light post that illuminates the DE&I path that they're traveling on. It's their North Star, which spotlights the organization's culture, which in turn controls the climate of its behavioral world. Organizational culture does this by setting the norms that represent the collective view of the way work is done at your organization. It defines what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within it. Someone once told me that culture is defined by the worst behavior that is tolerated by the organization. If that is the case, organizational climate is the effect of that tolerance. It is how employees see or perceive workplace culture through their own individual viewpoint. For better or worse, whether it is frigid with little commitment or scorching hot on the DE&I continuum, both culture and climate work together to affect employee behavior. If for better, culture can shape attitudes and behaviors in enduring ways and when properly aligned with climate, culture can unleash bolts of positivity toward a shared purpose. All of that is what should be captured in your DE&I statement. Let me show you how. First thing I want you to do is find a diverse team with stakeholders or people that either care about this work or have some say as to how this work gets done at your organization. Have them collect a series of DE&I statements that reflect the sentiments that they want for their own organization, such as specific messages, aspirations, or themes. Once they do that, write down key passages that the group finds most accurately reflects those sentiments but fits within your organizational culture. Then as a group, define what audiences they intend to send those messages to. Is it internal or external? For alumni, customers, employees, think who is going to care about this statement? Finally, once the statement is written, share with others so that it is clear to you that the message you intended was actually the message that was received. With your DE&I statement done, I strongly encourage you to connect an evaluation or an assessment to it so that you know that you are meeting the spirit of that message. How you get this done is really up to you. However, the simplest way for you to do this is to observe behavior over time, and then take what you've seen and reduce it to anecdotal notes. Those observations could be over behaviors, trends, or everything you think connects to the statement, or a desired outcome such as establishing discrimination free environments. If your statement says that you value inclusion, for example, your assessment could be that over time, you've noticed that there has been more inclusive efforts and then you write all of those things down. Obviously, anecdotal notes take time and time is at a premium for all of us. But compounding that challenge is that your notes may be viewed as bias or that maybe you have an agenda, especially if you are the DE&I person for your organization. Not cool. However, I want you to consider the following. Have your peers provide the assessment. Peer review assessment could be where you invite a group of experts in the field of the functional area under review to come in and evaluate the effectiveness of said function at your organization. If DE&I is under review, invite DE&I experts to review your DE&I activities by looking at policies, procedures, interviewing personnel from the DE&I office, patrons and partners of that office, stake holders, etc. Then reduce their anecdotal observations into a report. Along with their recommendations, a peer review provides an outsider's insight as to how others see you, and what others would do if they were in your shoes. But the most common assessment people think of when trying to determine how far along the DE&I continuum your organization is, is reviewing the numbers. Meaning if you're assessing how well your investment is working with recruitment, to some people, the only indicator that really matters are the numbers for hiring more under-represented minorities up or not? Are the number of diverse talent in your pipeline up or not, and so on. By assessing the effectiveness of a program quantitatively, you have the numbers to support your position that a certain practice be adopted or eliminated. If you are astray or off your path, your assessment serves as a prompt to course correct and get back on track. Just remember, targets imply accountability. Like when you have a sales target, you hold people accountable to meet it, same thing here. This isn't about feeling good about ourselves, it's about being our best selves. Now, there are a bunch of assessments related to DE&I, so you can buy them or you can build them. Either way, consider assessing these key areas. First, do a workforce assessment and look at the demographic makeup of your organization every year. Additionally, consider doing a barrier analysis assessment, which identifies barriers to equal opportunities at your organization. Now, this assessment is published by the Equal Opportunity Commission, and the analysis was designed to examine disparities in a single occupation, but can also be used to analyze overall disparities within the entire organization by looking at critical phases of the employment life cycle. Second, you need to do an assessment of your organization's student, client, and supplier diversity. What you want to assess here is how your organization influence diversity in the marketplace through such factors as the types of students you admit, clients you cater to, the vendors you do business with, as well as how you engage in diversity related interests or projects in communities of black and indigenous people of color. Another big thing you must assess every few years is your workplace cultural climate, bringing it back to the very beginning of this conversation. A cultural climate assessment is like a report that tells you what damage the organizational culture has had on the perceptions of your employees, or if your organization's DE&I investments have actually paid off, and have created a workplace where everyone feels leveraged, excepted, developed, and safe. If you want to know if your leaders are committed to that recruitment plan you just launched or if they are diverse adverse, this is how you find out. Now, you need a survey instrument to collect all this information. You can find a ready-made survey with a simple Google search for cultural climate assessments. Pick one or combine a few to make an instrument that is responsive to your needs and go from there. But whichever you choose, consider these final points. One, make sure your assessment is bias free. Have people review the instrument to make sure there's no context in it that serves as a barrier to your employees. Barriers could be unclear or ultra complex instructions, technology that is not accessible or available to every employee, or using language, terminology or examples geared at a select audience, but not easily understood or relatable by all. Check for and remove barriers as well as be intentional about having as many inclusive options as possible. By including inclusive options, you are doing Number 2, which is creating a culturally responsive assessment. Do this by being mindful of the needs of your employees and ask questions that matter to them because it will improve their everyday lives. Now, the third thing that I want you to consider is instead of committing to something transactional, commit to something more transformational. When I say transactional, I mean, picking certain things to respond to and not others, or not responding at all. The problem being, if you're not careful, transactional assessments silently reinforce systems of power and oppression, especially if you handle the delicate issues brutishly, such as fire folks but leave the system that supported those folks in place. When I say be transformational, I'm asking you to use the climate assessment as a way to really create a socially just environment for your organization. This means asking really tough questions so that you can deconstruct systems of oppression or exclusion. That could be really uncomfortable, but it's necessary when it's responsive to the needs of your employees. Some parts of this DE&I path are bumpy, but that is why it's important that we focus on that North Star. Until we arrive, we stay the course. Until next week.
