The wave of protesters marching for Black Lives Matter has accelerated major change at a variety of companies including executive resignations over racist behavior and discussions on how to bolster underrepresented voices in the workplace. In response, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has laid out seven steps organizations can take to promote diversity.
The first step is actively acknowledging the prevalence of systemic racism and remembering that you can do better—to rebuild a racially just world means taking one step each day toward that goal.
Organizations should also be transparent in their commitments to diversity and inclusion. This means using concrete language that expresses a clear understanding of why you’re using that language and how you’ll accomplish your goals.
The influence of these commitments largely depends on the level of diversity in your leadership team. To truly uproot systemic racism in the workplace, organizations must promote black and Latino employees to executive roles. Black people account for just 3.2 percent of senior leadership roles at corporations and hold only 0.8 percent of Fortune 500 positions. And Latinos hold fewer than two percent of these positions.
The WEF suggests companies capture anonymized data on who’s hired, who’s promoted and who leaves to reveal any hiring trends around gender identity, race and ethnicity; then make that information publicly accessible.
When promoting people of diverse backgrounds, avoid approaching the process with a scarcity mentality; promoting diverse employees doesn’t mean you can’t promote others.
Lastly, WEF encourages organizations to continue the dialogue at the internal leadership level, the internal management level and at the all-staff level to expose and break down unconscious biases.
Though companies have publicly expressed a commitment to increasing representation in the workplace and educating themselves and employees about systemic racism, many leaders reported feeling ill-equipped or afraid to address these issues. That’s what president and CEO of the nonprofit Living Cities, Ben Hecht, found in speaking to two dozen executives of Fortune 500 companies, an experience he shared in the Harvard Business Review.
Abandoning mainstream norms around organizational leadership provided Hecht with three valuable lessons for moving toward racial equity at Living Cities. Hecht says the first step was addressing the norms, values and practices that advantage white people and ways of working, to the oppression of underrepresented groups. That meant understanding history, exploring personal biases and building empathy. To do this, Hecht and his team underwent multi-day anti-racism trainings, facilitated by Living Cities’ permanent, in-house staff, Colleagues Operationalizing Racial Equity, or CORE. New staff members are required to take this training within 90 days of hire.
“For me, in my role as CEO, that meant relinquishing some of my formal authority to a group of more inclusive decision-makers so that our most mission-critical decisions reflected a diversity of perspectives, even if I would have made a different decision on my own,” says Hecht.
The second lesson Hecht learned is that organizations must understand and embrace conflict. To help staff and leadership become more comfortable with conflict, Living Cities uses a “comfort, stretch, panic” framework to discern boundaries and commit to staying engaged when faced with challenges.
Like the WEF, Hecht found that tracking staff engagement, satisfaction and tenure by race, role and level are helpful for identifying disparities. Additionally, Living Cities’ annual competency survey reveals how race impacts the company while holding each staff member accountable.
“Instead of trying to change some people to fit the organization, we must focus on transforming our organizations to fit all people,” says Hecht.
