4 Components of an Effective DEI Strategy and How To Achieve Them

An effective DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) strategy is crucial for any organization striving to create an equitable and inclusive workplace where all employees can do their best work.

Whether you're just beginning your DEI journey or looking to refine existing initiatives, understanding the fundamentals of DEI strategy will keep you from spinning your wheels on well-meaning but ineffective initiatives.

In this guide, we'll deep dive into why every organization needs a DEI strategy, explore common pitfalls, and provide an actionable framework for implementing an effective DEI strategy at our organization. Let's get started.

1. What is DEI?
2. What is a DEI strategy?
3. DEI Strategy Examples: What Not To Do
4. Components of an Effective DEI Strategy & How To Achieve Them

What is DEI?

Diversity, inclusion, equity, and (increasingly) belonging are words that are often used interchangeably, but these are four distinct (and yet interrelated) components of a healthy workplace.

We developed the model below to ensure a holistic and transparent approach to DEIB. We believe it’s important for our clients—and anyone undertaking a DEI strategy—to understand which areas we are targeting with each intervention, as well as where they can expect to see results.

• Diversity: Diversity means recruiting and hiring a demographically representative workforce.

• Equity: Equity requires developing, promoting, and compensating all employees fairly and objectively.

• Inclusion: Inclusion means creating a culture where employees from all demographic backgrounds feel supported, valued, and able to participate. We think of this as the organizational "infrastructure" that HR and leadership teams intentionally build.

• Belonging: Belonging happens when all employees feel connected to their colleagues, psychologically safe, and able to bring important parts of their identities to work.

Together, these four components lead to better employee engagement, retention, and performance and drive organizational success.

What is a DEI strategy?

A DEI or DEIB strategy is a comprehensive and forward-looking roadmap to dismantle unfair biases, address structural barriers, and foster an environment where all employees have the opportunity to thrive and excel in their roles.

Having a strategy first is essential when it comes to DEIB because it lays the foundation for coherent and purposeful action. Without a clear strategy, organizations often implement scattered and disconnected initiatives, making it challenging to communicate effectively with employees, gauge progress or ensure meaningful outcomes.

By starting with a DEIB strategy, organizations can define why diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are important to their organization, and then proceed to develop targeted tactics that align with their vision and business goals. This synergy between strategy and tactics maximizes the chances of success in attracting diverse talent, supporting a fair environment, and fostering a culture where all individuals can contribute their best.

DEI Strategy Examples: What Not To Do

Defining a DEI strategy in the workplace becomes clearer when we identify what doesn't constitute an impactful DEI strategy. Here are three examples of what falls short as an effective DEI strategy:

1. A DEI strategy shouldn’t be a company-wide training

When companies decide they want to invest in DEIB, their first action will often be to run a one-off training about something like unconscious bias or allyship with their entire organization. But there are a number of problems with a trainings-first approach:

• Research shows that one-off training doesn’t work. A 2019 meta-analysis of almost 500 studies demonstrated that unconscious bias training doesn't change biased behavior.

• An emphasis on training puts the entire responsibility of improving DEIB onto the employees themselves. Yet, much more than a couple of trainings is needed to hold people accountable for improving their processes and behaviors.

• People aren’t motivated to change their behaviors if they aren’t getting cues from their company that DEIB is a priority. Leaders need to be vocal about the importance of DEIB and there needs to be an overarching DEI strategy that is tied to a broader company goal, so it doesn’t seem like just a “nice to have” or unrelated add-on.

2. A DEI strategy shouldn’t be led by ERGs

Another common mistake is making ERGs (employee resource groups) or DEIB task forces without enough organizational power responsible for owning DEIB initiatives and driving related efforts forward for their organizations.

This approach is ineffective and likely to fail for a few reasons:

• DEIB is a big job. It can't be done effectively long-term by a group of employees who also have other day jobs. It’s very easy for ERG members and leaders to become burnt out and overwhelmed because they’re taking on important strategic initiatives on top of all of their other responsibilities, so that shouldn’t be asked of them.

• ERGs members and leaders often lack the authority to make important decisions about company policies or allocate budget or other resources to large process change projects — things that are key parts of a comprehensive DEI strategy. For example, if you want to ensure a more equitable performance management system, the leader of an ERG probably doesn't have the power or influence to change how performance reviews are conducted within your organization.

3. A DEI strategy shouldn’t be a recruiting strategy

Another commonly failing scenario is over-anchoring on inclusive recruiting and sourcing efforts to broaden talent pools. This is a problem for two reasons:

1. Recruiting and hiring are an important part of a balanced DEI strategy and there are many benefits to having a diverse company, but diversity without inclusion, equity, and belonging is like a leaky bucket. While diverse talent may be attracted to the company due to its inclusive hiring practices, their experience within the organization becomes crucial in determining whether they stay and thrive or leave for better opportunities.

2. Overemphasizing recruiting efforts without prioritizing inclusion, equity, and belonging will lead to churn that can contribute to diversity fatigue and a false narrative that DEI “doesn’t work.” That’s why it’s important to understand that a recruiting strategy alone isn’t a DEIB strategy. Organizations must focus on fostering equity, inclusion, and belonging as well.

4 Components of an Effective DEI Strategy & How To Achieve Them

To achieve meaningful results, your DEI strategy should be comprehensive and well-rounded, addressing crucial components of the employee lifecycle.

An effective DEI strategy is built on four key components:

1. A Holistic Approach
2. Evidence-Informed Solutions Tailored to Your Needs
3. Buy-in From Leadership
4. Clear Internal Ownership & Accountability

1. A Holistic Approach

The first component of an effective DEI strategy is that it has to be holistic.

Your DEIB strategy has to address more than just inclusive recruiting and hiring efforts, it has to include inclusion, equity, and belonging as well. A comprehensive DEIB strategy should address:

• Diversity: How will you enrich your talent pool by recruiting a demographically representative workforce and eliminating biases in the hiring process?

• Equity: How will you make sure everyone has an equal shot at success, and ensure that you develop, promote, and compensate employees fairly and objectively?

• Inclusion: How will you create a culture where employees from all demographic backgrounds feel supported, valued, and able to participate?

• Belonging: How will you promote retention and engagement by helping all employees feel connected to their colleagues, psychologically safe, and able to bring important parts of their identities to work?

Addressing both process and people

A holistic DEIB strategy goes beyond acknowledging all four aspects of DEIB—it also incorporates both systemic and individual changes.

For example, let’s say that your organization has found that there are inequitable trends in promotions, so you suspect bias is creeping into how employee performance is evaluated.

To address the disparity in your performance management system, you would need to:

1. Make changes to your performance management process, including how performance review forms are worded, to identify and combat potential bias in your evaluation practices.
   
   

2. Train individual managers to spot the biases common in performance reviews and feedback and give them tools for challenging those biases through behavior-based manager training.

Successful organizations adopt a holistic DEI strategy that addresses all components of DEIB and that works to engrain those changes at the company process level as well as the individual level.

2. Evidence-Informed Solutions Tailored to Your Needs

The next critical component of an effective DEI strategy is that it needs to be evidence-informed and based on your organization’s needs. This component has three steps:

1. Identify your DEIB needs with a DEIB assessment
2. Involve your people with interviews, focus groups & a DEIB survey
3. Leverage evidence-backed initiatives

#1 Identify your DEIB needs with a DEIB assessment that examines your specific data and processes

To figure out what your most pressing DEIB needs are, first, you have to do a DEIB assessment.

Examine processes and policies that most affect DEIB:

• For diversity, look at your recruiting strategies, including where you source from and how you write job descriptions. Then screen your entire hiring process end-to-end, from how you screen and interview candidates, to how you train interviewers and run debriefs, and who actually makes it through your hiring funnel.

• For equity, you want to look at your entire performance management system (including performance reviews, promotion process, manager feedback, mentorship/sponsorship, and other development opportunities, etc.), promotion and retention outcomes, and your compensation strategy.

• To understand inclusion at your company, look at your company values as well as HR policies like parental leave, PTO, flexibility policies, and harassment reporting. You also want to examine your benefits as well as your online presence and, if it’s relevant for you, your physical office space.

• In terms of the practices that influence belonging, look at how managers are trained to support all employees across differences, how connected and psychologically safe employees feel, your onboarding practices, and how your ERGs or DEIB taskforces are running if you have them.

Throughout the assessment, focus on identifying areas where processes and policies deviate from best practices in HR and DEIB, and where disparities in experiences exist among different groups. This evaluation will help pinpoint your organization's most pressing DEIB needs, guiding the development of targeted initiatives.

#2 Involve people with interviews, group sessions & a DEIB survey to truly understand their concerns

The next big step with your assessment is hearing from your employees. Ideally, this takes the form of:

• 1:1 interviews

• Group feedback sessions

• A comprehensive DEIB survey

In combination with employee interviews, it’s critically important to administer a DEI survey so that you can gather a comprehensive dataset on employee experiences by demographics.

However, designing effective DEIB surveys can be challenging, as many often lack questions that can provide actionable insights.

Perhaps you learn, for example, that women at your company are less likely to say they have a voice compared to men. What does that mean in terms of solutions? What is going wrong?

Is it that an executive said something sexist? Is it that managers are systematically excluding the women on their teams? Or is it that individual contributors are interrupting women in meetings? We don’t really know how to act based on the results of this question.

Asking “actionable” questions means that you know what action you will take if you see worrisome results.

Here's an example:

"My manager actively seeks out my opinion on important matters."

If you found disparities in responses to this question, the corresponding action would be to train managers to identify biases that prevent them from valuing the opinions of some and to give them behavioral tools to solicit all of the voices on their team.

#3 Leverage evidence-based strategies after assessing your DEIB landscape

After conducting a DEIB assessment to understand your organization's specific needs and challenges, it’s time to identify evidence-based initiatives that will drive meaningful change. Too often people get swayed by interesting ideas on social media, but just because an initiative sounds promising doesn't mean it will work. Ensuring that your actions are backed by evidence is key to moving the needle in the desired direction.

Here are valuable sources you can start looking into for evidence-based solutions that you can use to inform your strategies:

1. Academic Journals (via Google Scholar): Academic research from economics, social psychology, and sociology provides valuable insights into DEI best practices and their impact on organizational success. By referencing peer-reviewed studies and research articles on platforms like Google Scholar, you can access strategies that have been rigorously tested.
   
   

2. Management and Business Publications: Publications like the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes often feature articles on DEI strategies and their implications for businesses. These sources can offer practical approaches informed by successful case studies.
   
   

3. Company Blogs: Many organizations openly share their DEI initiatives. Focus on companies that share their own organizations’ results (be wary of announcements of initiatives that don’t back up enthusiasm with measurable outcomes).

While evidence-based solutions serve as a strong foundation, it's essential to adapt them to meet your organization's unique requirements.

Tailor your DEI initiatives to align with the insights gained from the assessment, considering the specific challenges and resources within your organization.

By combining evidence-based strategies with a customized approach, you can develop a robust DEI roadmap that resonates with your company's values and objectives.

3. Buy-in From Leadership

Obtaining leadership buy-in for DEI initiatives is vital for driving impactful change within the organization. However, that doesn’t mean that leaders literally need to project manage the strategy or even lead an initiative.

Instead, the key lies in ensuring that leaders genuinely understand and believe in the importance of DEIB for the company, for two significant reasons:​​

1. DEIB efforts require changing processes and company leaders are the ones with organizational power to allocate the budget and resources needed to make those changes happen.

2. Leaders set the tone from the top. If it doesn’t seem like leadership is prioritizing DEIB, then it’s going to be pretty hard to convince the people of your organization that they should prioritize it.

How to get leadership buy-in for DEI initiatives

1. Make leadership understand the business case for DEIB. There is a wealth of evidence that organizations have improved financial performance, employee engagement, innovation, and retention, when they are more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, and when employees have a strong sense of belonging.

Data examples to prove the business case for DEI initiatives include:

• Financial performance: A McKinsey analysis found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.

• Better employee engagement and retention: Changeboard research showed that in companies with diverse leaders, employees work 12% harder, are 19% more likely to stay longer with the organisation, and collaborate up to 57% more effectively with peers.

• Innovation: Companies with above-average diversity are 70% more likely to report capturing a new market in the past 12 months.

For more facts and even a PPT you can send your boss, see Peoplism’s Business Case for Diversity resource.

2. Think about what business goals, priorities, or problems the leadership team is currently focusing on that improved DEIB can help solve. Chances are, many of them — like recruiting, engagement, retention, and sales — are tied to outcomes that are also influenced by DEIB efforts. Once you figure out their priorities, re-frame it back to the leadership team: “If we invested in more robust DEIB efforts, it would also positively impact these three issues that we’ve been trying to solve for this year.”

3. Work with leadership to create a shared vision for DEIB efforts. At Peoplism, we do this as part of our assessment process, because we find it helps leaders feel more dedicated to the work, and it gives them a clearer picture of why it matters

Peoplism's DEIB assessment process involves a three-step vision-setting approach for leaders:

1. We help each executive find a personal connection to the work. Outside of why DEIB is good for business, we ask them to think about why they as human beings actually care about this.

2. We ask them to identify their fears around this work and then confront the fears head-on because these fears can transform into roadblocks further down the road when you’re trying to accomplish various initiatives.

3. We ask executives to articulate why they think DEIB efforts are important for their organization specifically. Not boilerplate language, but truly why is it important to you as a company, your employees, your industry, your product, your positionality in the market, and the community you serve and/or the community around you?

4. Clear Internal Ownership & Accountability

In order to see significant impact and change, it’s essential to establish a foundation for long-term commitment. This involves defining clear metrics of success and establishing a robust system of accountability.

While iIt’s often helpful to partner with a DEIB consultant to guide you through the DEI strategy process, anyone external to your organization cannot truly own your DEI strategy. You need internal resources for that.

Internal ownership of your DEI strategy

Who should assume ownership of your DEI strategy internally? Consider the following roles:

• Head of People

• Head of Talent

• Head of Learning and Development

• DEIB Lead

• Head of Operations

If you work in a small company, this may all be one person or maybe two people, but if you’re in a larger company this might be five different people who oversee different areas that you have to bring together. But because DEIB efforts are going to touch on all of these areas, it’s important that these functions are taking a coordinated approach, with each person actively owning their part of the DEI strategy.

Accountability for your DEI strategy

Ensuring real and lasting change as part of your DEI strategy requires two essential tools for accountability:

1. Follow-up DEI Surveys: An annual DEIB survey serves as a powerful mechanism to gauge the effectiveness of your initiatives and identify areas for improvement. Conducting annual follow-up assessments with DEIB surveys, complemented by interviews and focus groups, allows you to track progress and make data-driven decisions.

2. Regular Reporting on DEI Results: Accountability also entails regularly communicating the organization's DEI efforts and their impact on employees. Just like any other major company initiative, make DEIB a regular part of the conversation during all-hands meetings or similar gatherings. Reporting the results at least once a quarter fosters transparency, builds trust, and demonstrates your commitment to driving meaningful change.

Integrate DEIB into company priorities

The key to a successful DEIB strategy lies in integrating DEIB into your company's core priorities.

This entails raising the bar on key practices like recruiting, management, and employee engagement. The impact of DEIB is far-reaching, driving positive change across all aspects of your organization.

With a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, your recruiting efforts become more representative and welcoming. Management practices prioritize fairness and provide a supportive environment for employees to thrive. Consequently, your team experiences heightened engagement, collaboration, and overall well-being.

By implementing a DEIB strategy, you can see measurable results. For example, one of our clients, Everlaw, saw the following impact just one year after implementing a comprehensive DEI strategy:

• 9% increase in employees reporting they feel they belong

• 11% increase in LGTBQ employees saying they feel respected at work

• 11% increase in women saying their manager gives them useful and effective feedback

At Peoplism, we help organizations create and implement a comprehensive, customized, and attainable DEI strategy that achieves measurable results.

From assessments to surveys, from trainings to process management, we can help you make an impact with DEI.

Contact us and make progress!