If you are an executive or a CEO trying your best to lead a broader cultural transformation, here are some ways through which you can do it:
Understand Where You Are
You can’t reach a destination if you don’t know where to start. Conducting a baseline survey or analyzing the starting point is where you should be initiating the process. Begin by understanding what the key pain points of your diverse employees are. Do surveys, check the stats, experiment with the current data, and get feedback.
When you work on taking a stock of your current position, the solution will be to see where you will go from there. Start planning to implement the interventions to counter the current disappointing DEI facts of your company.
Where Is The Bias?
As much as it is important to know where you need to start from, it is equally significant to address the elephant in the room. Yes, it is that deep-ingrained unconscious bias that you and the other employees are not even aware of. To lead the cultural change, address the bias in recruiting, retaining, and treating your employees of color.
Take help from experts who will help you identify these biases. Once you know what you are fighting against, develop toolkits to bring them into the light, and encourage behavioral change.
Work Together
You alone or a few other executives won’t bring the change. The entire workforce must engage regardless of their color, race, or gender. Various researches have shown that companies with the highest overall engagements are the ones where there is no difference in opinion between men and women. Moreover, the companies whose employees do not engage in crucial change discussions have weaker financial performance too.
The company executives should ensure they foster peer-to-peer discussions on diversity and belonging. The employees of all backgrounds should interact more, hold themselves, and each other accountable. This way, you will not only increase the engagement among them, but the diversity & inclusion will slowly start seeping into the core of the organization.
Train Leaders, Develop Talent!
An important step in revamping the organization for the much-required change is training leaders and producing talent that can sustain it for a long time. Most of the initiatives required to uphold DEI fail because they run the course after some time and there is no one left to continue advocating for them. You need a leader at all levels that understand the agenda not just now, but months and years from now as well.
The cultural change should not be short-lived but must stay within your organization forever. There will be challenges and issues, but when you create a team that knows how to sustain this change, good things will happen for your company and your employees.
Related Article: HISPANIC AND LATINX DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION IN THE WORKPLACE
