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Where Did DEI Come From?
In many ways, Corporate America’s relationship with taking action to address DEI metrics (or trying to improve inclusion at all) began in the 1980s and ’90s with sensitivity trainings. These trainings focused on a single session highlighting the differences between employees and how to “acknowledge” these differences—and typically ended with a “hug it out” moment. The knowledge was promptly put on the shelf and forgotten by the workplace majority members whom the training was meant to impact most. It’s not surprising to learn that this type of training is now known to be ineffective, and even the term sensitivity training is no longer used.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as more and more sex-based discrimination lawsuits were being filed and settled for massive sums of money, Corporate America as a whole began to care more about DEI. In fact, these lawsuits had a twofold impact—DEI training rose in the list of HR requirements, and so did the expectation that employees sign arbitration agreements as part of accepting their offer letters.
Unfortunately, these DEI trainings aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. Corporate America is naturally most concerned with checking boxes to prevent liability and litigation. As a result, these trainings are typically just a “cover our asses” move to point to in the case of a discrimination claim from an employee. “But wait, how could we have discriminated against you when we have these comprehensive inclusion trainings?!”
Today, we’re using much of the same DEI initiatives and research that were first created in the 1960s, and it’s not working. In fact, three of the most common diversity interventions used in Corporate America today (diversity training, grievance procedures, and standardized performance rating processes) make firms less diverse, because managers are resistant to perceived strong-arming.1
The methodologies for furthering DEI initiatives in the workplace today break down into three specific categories.
Employee Resource Group Lobbying
The oldest form of DEI initiative in the workplace is the employee resource group (ERG). Founded at first for a sense of community but later leveraged as an opportunity to voice needs and identify disparities, today they offer a space for sharing voices, staving off isolation, and providing a collective reprieve. ERGs offer tremendous benefits to the organizations that host them—leadership development and increased retention rates, educational opportunities, recruitment, pipeline development, and so much more.
The downside of ERGs for employees is tremendous. Leading or organizing an ERG is largely volunteer work that often goes unrecognized in performance and promotion conversations. ERG budgets are often limited (and were decreased further in 2020 and beyond thanks to COVID-19 and the idea that virtual events cost less money—more on this in the next paragraph). Leadership changes over often, and continuity can be stifled with employee departures. The massive amount of emotional labor that ERG members and leaders undergo in educating the broader corporate community cannot be understated either—sometimes even joining an ERG is akin to waving a flag saying “I’m open for your identity-related Q&A.”
As COVID-19 prompted a move to primarily virtual events for ERGs, many companies reduced the budget allocated to ERG programming,2
despite many of these same groups needing community now more than ever. This reduction in budget collided head-on with misconceptions around virtual events. Pre-COVID, the prevailing belief was that you could pay the same speaker less money for a virtual event because they didn’t have to travel and the work was “easier”—but they likely were putting the same amount of labor into producing the content they shared, and virtual presentations are not without their own moderation and engagement issues. As COVID hit, this belief prevailed, and speakers who could once command $15,000–$20,000 per speaking engagement were now being offered $1,000 for a virtual event, if they were lucky. This reduction in budget cost many ERGs the opportunity to host impactful speakers or to pay those speakers appropriately for their expertise and labor. More specifically, within the ERG space, many of these speakers held one or more marginalized identities, further compounding the impact of COVID on their livelihood.
As a whole, ERGs are often entirely undervalued for what they do for an organization. ERGs often bring tens or hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of profit to an organization3
while operating on budgets with which most community groups couldn’t even fill an event snack table. ERGs within an organization are also often not equally funded, furthering the inequity and access to opportunity. With this in mind, there are certainly ways to refresh the ways we create community for underrepresented employees at work.
Grassroots-Led Initiatives
Employee activists are becoming increasingly common as social issues come to the forefront of society. Nearly four in ten employees in Corporate America today identify as employee activists and stand willing to call out their employers publicly.4
Furthermore, 95 percent of companies expect a rise in the number of employees using Twitter (and other platforms) to raise complaints and concerns.5
Recent examples of employee activism include the 2018 Google Walkout (a response to executive accountability regarding sexual harassment); the 2019 Walmart Walkout (after a mass shooting at a Walmart in Texas); the 2019 Wayfair Walkout (in response to furnishing migrant holding facilities); and countless 2020–2021 protests and petitions in the face of COVID-19-related responses and working conditions.
Although 2021 was characterized as the year of the labor shortage (read: actually a wage shortage), it would be more accurate to characterize it as the year of organizing. The year saw employees of all kinds, union and nonunion, bolstered by strength in numbers and the growing awareness of workplace conditions. Alongside the organizing movement was a record number of “quits” (workers who sought new jobs with better pay and working conditions), tallying more than four million throughout the year.6
What makes 2021 even more unusual is the growing diversification of industries represented by strikes; it was one of the largest twenty-first-century strike years, but also the most cross-sectional in terms of industry representation seen in quite some time.
“Strike waves,” as they are often called, are precipitated by incendiary triggers. These triggers may bubble below the surface until they reach a boiling point that demands attention. The 2020–2021 period saw one such breaking point with a number of triggers, including a resurgent women’s movement, a cry for improved LGBTQIA+ rights, the immigrant workers’ movement, the increasing volume of conversations to halt climate change, and the rise of Black Lives Matter and accompanying conversations. These triggers, coupled with flat (or actually declining) wage growth, escalating inflation, and a global pandemic, made the breaking point seemed inevitable.
Responses to these grassroots initiatives are critical. Corporate response tends to vary widely, from nonresponse to crackdowns and everything in between, with attentive and engaged responses that demonstrate vulnerability, accountability, and actual action succeeding best. Corporate America also assumes that an apolitical response is a good response, but this isn’t always the case—especially today, when 64 percent of consumers worldwide take companies’ social or political positions into consideration when making purchasing decisions.7
Public Relations Activities
The slimiest and most unproductive of today’s DEI initiatives is public relations activities. They really shouldn’t even be called DEI initiatives, but many organizations earn praise for the equality of their workplace through these initiatives.
Most of us are well aware of the 2017 Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner handing a can of soda to a police officer. In the background are protesters with generic signage and overwhelmingly positive demeanors. The police officer accepts the can with a smile, and the commercial ends on a celebratory note. But the reality is, protests look nothing like that, and police brutality is more rampant than ever. This tone-deaf commercial attempting to celebrate unity and understanding became a pop culture meme, a stand-in for everything wrong with the way we understand current social justice initiatives.
What many people don’t realize or fail to appreciate is that commercials and PR moves like the Pepsi commercial are oftentimes just that—moves. Corporations are quick to align themselves with social initiatives while faltering in promoting DEI within their own organizations. JPMorgan Chase announced a $30 billion commitment to racial equality in the same year that accusations of racism in Private Client accounts were published in the New York Times.8
Google announced the lackluster results of the investigation into firing Timnit Gebru and fired another team member from the AI team, both during Black History Month.9
Quicken Loans is headquartered in Detroit, the Blackest city in America; meanwhile, the @blackatquickenloans Instagram account highlights countless stories of exclusion and discrimination within company walls.
When company PR initiatives don’t align with what’s actually going on within the organization, the mistrust grows not only with consumers but also with employees (especially because employees can see behind the proverbial curtain). Company culture suffers, retention becomes increasingly difficult, and recruitment is nearly impossible. These PR initiatives serve to further isolate the workforce that the company has hired for the express purpose of bolstering its numbers of underrepresented employees. Even worse, many underrepresented employees cannot afford to leave a toxic company, or are worried about leaving the company too soon and having to explain their short tenure in a future interview, so they stay, trapped in the toxic culture behind the smokescreen of magnificently crafted PR.
So how do we fix the DEI issues in Corporate America when we’re relying on work that is sixty-plus years old and only taking action to stanch the flow of discrimination litigation and present a squeaky-clean image instead of actually driving toward a more inclusive workplace?
