Large Company Adoption Guide
What if you don’t run the show but want to increase diversity and inclusion in your business unit, your geographic territory or your functional area?
With a little creativity, you can draw on the principles and adapt many of the tactics from the Playbooks to your sphere of influence within a large corporate setting. Here are a few tips on how to do so:
Do Your Homework
Chances are you're not the first person to have had this idea! Initiatives are likely going on throughout your company. Building on existing efforts means you don’t have to start from scratch and you’ll find folks who can help you move this work forward, so start by doing a little homework. If you don’t find what you were hoping for, well, you’ve identified the gaps!
Board and executive leadership on D&I are extremely valuable. At the same time, many of the actions in the Playbooks can be influenced, if not 100% implemented, much closer to the front-lines. Whether you start with your immediate team, your group, your line of business or your country, you can push conversations and model practices and processes that can contribute to diversity and inclusion in your area and beyond.
At the same time, you always want to make sure you’re working with HR, not at odds with them. Some things, like equal opportunity statements, simply have to come from Corporate, enough said. (If in doubt, always ask your legal department!) Or you may have a strict set of job descriptions or job posting and hiring procedures you need to follow. Even if you have great flexibility, try to take advantage of the HR team’s expertise and systems, while realizing that corporate HR teams are usually handling very large volumes of candidates and employees so may not be able to be as responsive as you like.
With a little creativity, you can draw on the principles and adapt many of the tactics from the Playbooks to your sphere of influence within a large corporate setting. Here are a few tips on how to do so:
Do Your Homework
Chances are you're not the first person to have had this idea! Initiatives are likely going on throughout your company. Building on existing efforts means you don’t have to start from scratch and you’ll find folks who can help you move this work forward, so start by doing a little homework. If you don’t find what you were hoping for, well, you’ve identified the gaps!
- Do diversity, inclusion, valuing difference, equality, valuing employees or similar terms come up in your organization’s mission, vision, values or ethics statements? Use them to anchor your conversations about opportunities for your part of the organization to contribute.
- Does your company have a Diversity & Inclusion position or office? If so, start by learning what they do, their goals, metrics and priority initiatives. They are experts and chances are they are busier than ever and thinly staffed, so start by asking how you can help advance their work, rather than jumping in with your own ideas.
- Does your company have a Corporate Social Responsibility lead? Perhaps an annual Corporate Responsibility or Environmental, Social, and Governance report? Come up to speed on the goals, metrics and programs that have been identified to date. If not, consider reviewing the reports of other companies in your space to encourage yours to follow their lead.
Board and executive leadership on D&I are extremely valuable. At the same time, many of the actions in the Playbooks can be influenced, if not 100% implemented, much closer to the front-lines. Whether you start with your immediate team, your group, your line of business or your country, you can push conversations and model practices and processes that can contribute to diversity and inclusion in your area and beyond.
- You’re in the perfect position to make a compelling business case for increasing diversity and inclusion because you understand your group’s strategy and pain points better than anyone. Prepare to tailor your case for improving D&I based on the needs of your area of the business: Do you believe you will be able to improve retention in a high-turnover geography or function? Could you gain insights into new customer segments you don’t fully understand? Could greater diversity help speed up your new product development process?
- Build the buy-in: They don’t need to be at the corporate board level, but in a corporate setting it’s important to find more well-positioned sponsors for this work. Talk with the most senior folks you believe would support improving D&I about why this work is personally important to you and run them through the business case. It’s always helpful to also have ready examples of what competitors or companies they admire are doing in this domain and/or metrics for your industry or geography.
- Does your group have its own vision, values or mission statement? That can be a great place to start a conversation about including a diversity statement or how existing aspirational language could get translated into tangible D&I commitments.
- Identify strategies and tactics you can roll out or improve at your group level, whether or not you get support from corporate HR. For example:
- Can you set group level accountability metrics for example, for diversity in hiring and in promotions? For employee engagement and satisfaction, with a breakdown of responses to understand if there are disparities among employee groups?
- Can you offer or better yet require training on implicit bias or inclusive language?
- Can you adjust your recruiting and hiring tactics … and habits, including with training if needed?
- Can you ensure there’s a thoughtful process for giving out assignments? For offering visibility opportunities with more senior management?
- Can you review your group’s performance and compensation practices and regularly evaluate how they play out?
- Can you ensure formal and informal group socializing opportunities and “perks” are truly inclusive?
- Can you formally recognize managers or supervisors who are doing a particularly good job at various aspects of diversity and inclusion?
- Can you collaborate with other functional or business units, for example to increase mobility and promotion opportunities for people of color in your respective areas?
- Once you’ve started something in motion, build D&I goals and strategies into your strategic plans and annual planning and budgeting.
At the same time, you always want to make sure you’re working with HR, not at odds with them. Some things, like equal opportunity statements, simply have to come from Corporate, enough said. (If in doubt, always ask your legal department!) Or you may have a strict set of job descriptions or job posting and hiring procedures you need to follow. Even if you have great flexibility, try to take advantage of the HR team’s expertise and systems, while realizing that corporate HR teams are usually handling very large volumes of candidates and employees so may not be able to be as responsive as you like.
- Do your homework (see above) to see how things are being done today. Read recent job postings from your company, see where jobs seem to get posted, talk to folks who’ve been involved in recent hires or promotion discussions. If your group has an HR partner, get the scoop on D&I initiatives from them.
- Find your allies. For example, ask around to identify which internal recruiters are likely to be more interested in or skilled at building more diverse pools of candidates, which HR data analysts might be eager to analyze stats on the speed of promotions among different groups of employees, etc.
- Think scalability. Understand that HR leaders might love your idea but be asking themselves, “could we realistically do this across our entire organization”.
- Offer your group to pilot new practices: HR team members may have ideas or practices they’d like to test on a small scale with a friendly partner.
- Remember, you’re the internal customer. If you have a strong business case and buy-in from your sponsors, set a high bar and work with HR so they can reach it. If needed, consider offering additional resources, for example to reach a target group of potential candidates or to sponsor a tailored recruiting event.
- Once you’ve had some success, celebrate it and explain how you got there so that other groups within the company can learn from your experience… and from your mistakes along the way.
- Showcase your efforts, or simply your outcomes, in an internal or industry website or publication, to hold yourselves accountable, inspire others…. and potentially even improve your attractiveness to future employees.
- Be generous with credit for your success – and keep tracking to make sure your groups’ results continue to improve!
- Share your results on the examples page of the Racial Equity Playbook website.
