Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Why We Havent Fixed Our Diversity Problems

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Why We Haven’t Fixed Our Diversity Problems I’ll be the first to say I don’t have all the answers when it comes to diversity and inclusion. I don’t think anyone does, but least of all me. The closest I’ve come to discrimination is being told I had to be three times as smart, competent, and amusing as male speakers because I was a small, young-looking woman. And, sometimes people ask “odd” questions about my religion (Judaism). But just because we don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions. The question I’m constantly addressing with other human capital experts today involves why we haven’t made greater progress with respect to DI in the organizational setting. It doesn’t quite make sense. After all, the business case has been clear for decades. Diverse organizations perform better, are more innovative, and have more engaged employees. In terms of our collective degree of tolerance for those different than ourselves, we’ve come a long way. We now even have software that’s supposed to help us mitigate unconscious bias. So why is DI still such a thorny problem? Here are three speculations. Issue #1: We focus too much on recruitment. Most organizations understand the need to solicit talent from diverse sources and are successful at doing just that. Thanks to new partnerships with high schools, universities, associations, and community groups we may never have engaged with in the past, new employees come in the door looking and thinking differently. Here’s the thing, though. What happens after these diverse hires start? Usually, they’re simply swallowed up by the system. We fail to create an onboarding experience that’s customized to be rewarding to the individual, we don’t provide them with the right skill acquisition and we don’t provide mentors to whom they can relate. So they leave â€" often with speed and disillusionment â€" and we are forced to start over with fresh recruits. Issue #2: We make DI a program rather than a culture. This second problem is related to why diverse hires don’t stay. The DI “function” is often relegated to a single person, or maybe a team, that’s responsible for creating initiatives. Beyond talent acquisition, such programs might include affinity groups and unconscious bias training. But many employees, especially those in the millennial generation, find a narrow focus on DI stranger than no focus at all. A 28-year-old recently told me: “When I work at a company, I just want to walk into the lobby and see all kinds of people. I should have no idea whether they’re in the c-suite or a cube based on how they look. It’s weird when a company tries too hard, you know? We’re a diverse country, why isn’t this more natural?” And how do we make it “more natural,” exactly? The importance of DI must be embedded in the organization’s vision and goals, consistently communicated from the top, and reflected in measurement of performance. Issue #3: We’re creating biased software. Hiring and performance management software that removes common barriers to inclusion and prompts us to awareness of potential bias is no doubt a brilliant invention. But this software is currently designed and programmed by a very non-diverse pool of people from a limited number of organizations, and this setup has the potential for technology to make bias worse. If we truly want to leverage algorithms as partners in this cause, educational institutions and software companies need to train and employ developers who accurately represent today’s employee populations. This is the only way to ensure that the resulting products come to the table with the right lens. Want to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of the next generation of DI? Join SilkRoad’s human capital futurist Alexandra Levit for a free webinar on December 10, 2019 at 2PM EST.