Equity and Inclusion: The Roots of Organizational Well-Being

(Illustration by Helena Pallarés)

Although more and more organizations are taking steps toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, people of color continue to consistently report feeling undervalued, unsafe, and exhausted from navigating unwelcoming work environments. They see implicit biases play out as micro-aggressions (such as consistently mispronouncing one’s name, confusing one person of color for another, or showing surprise that a person of color is the leader) and experience blatant racist behaviors, such as being the target of racial slurs. People of color also experience more negative outcomes related to hiring, promotions, terminations, and performance evaluations than their white peers. Many remain silent about these experiences for fear of not being believed and losing employment.

These experiences and outcomes are signs of an unhealthy work environment that devalues DEI, and we know that repeated exposure to an unhealthy workplace takes a physical and emotional toll on workers. It negatively impacts employees’ overall well-being—a problem often amplified by systemic disparities in access to health care.  

Centered Self: The Connection Between Inner Well-Being and Social Change

This series, presented in partnership with The Wellbeing Project, India Development Review, The Skoll Foundation, and Schwab Foundation, explores this important but often overlooked connection between inner well-being and effective social change. FOLLOW THIS SERIES

You'll get email alerts when there is new content in this series.

SIGN UP

By contrast, organizations that understand DEI and integrate it into every aspect of what they do are healthier and boast thriving staff communities. In our 36 years of organizational development and DEI consulting work at The Winter’s Group, we’ve seen how supporting individuals’ well-being fosters both individual and organizational resilience, and increases open-mindedness, acceptance, and innovation. We’ve learned that effective well-being strategies are tailored to an organization's values and vision. They also require that leaders model a personal commitment to change; that all staff participate; and that organizations make small shifts to policies, procedures, and practices that enhance well-being.

Traditionally, organizations have addressed DEI from a programmatic perspective, developing training (such as on overcoming implicit bias), implementing employee affinity groups (such as for women or people with disabilities), and establishing diversity councils that advise various departments. While initiatives like these are laudable, they fail to address embedded, systemic racism.

Based on hundreds of focus groups and culture audits, we believe that to truly address systemic racism; enhance the experience of equity, belonging, and inclusion among all employees; and support individual and organizational well-being, organizations need to view DEI not as a checkbox, but as a continuous process of examination and change to organizational culture. It can be useful to think of the process as having three main parts: building internal capacity to develop new skills and competencies, creating an environment where people can productively talk about issues related to race, and developing equitable systems internally and externally.

Building Capacity to Develop New Skills

While senior leadership at any organization holds both the authority and responsibility for modeling a personal commitment to systemic change, all employees should explicitly support and contribute to a workplace culture that promotes DEI. In recent years, the social justice field has begun to emphasize the importance of “collective accountability”—the idea that we are responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions. This concept doesn’t intend to lay blame for past harm, but rather to embrace the idea that even if we did not personally cause the harm, we all have the responsibility to remedy it. Just as organizational well-being begins with individual well-being, collective accountability starts with personal accountability.

To hold the collective accountable, organizations need to make learning about anti-racism mandatory. Learning should be ongoing and embedded in the learning philosophy. In particular, organizations should prioritize the following:

• Self-development, including self-education, self-awareness, self-inquiry, and personal change
• Learning how to respond to interpersonal and group issues; for example, responding to biased comments, addressing inequitable group dynamics, and creating culturally inclusive work and learning groups
• Fostering capacity to create, critically analyze, implement, or advocate for equitable and inclusive organizational norms, policies, and practices
• Creating societal change by effectively collaborating with others to foster social justice

Second, organizations need to make collective accountability for anti-racism and inclusion a core value and add a justice lens to DEI strategies. Justice is the presence of systems and supports (policies, practices, norms) that achieve and sustain fair treatment, as well as equitable opportunities and outcomes, for people of all races. We often think we are supporting equity when our actions are about treating everybody the same; however, we can only achieve equity when everyone can flourish, and we can no longer predict outcomes based on a person’s social identity.

A good first step is to review human resources guidelines. For example, the bereavement policy at one professional services firm prescribed how much time an employee could take off based on familial closeness. This “one-size-fits-all” approach didn’t take into account that some people are raised by a non-blood relative, may need additional time due to different cultural practices, or need to travel to another country for services. The old policy was based on an equality model, treating everyone the same; the revised policy was based on an equity model, providing people with what they need.

Creating an Environment Where DEI Can Grow

Part of the reason we haven’t tackled systemic discrimination and racism is because—for a variety of reasons, including feelings of guilt and shame—we don’t talk about race and racism in the workplace. Yet it’s important to recognize that historical systems based on laws, policies, and practices create inequitable outcomes we can uncover and address because they are explicit. If we don’t talk readily and honestly about systemic racism, we are complicit in it.

A good starting point is making sure everyone understands and acknowledges that systemic racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of physical characteristics (such as skin color), in a way that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities while benefitting others. This understanding sets the stage for organizations to encourage dialogue by:

1. Creating safe spaces for people of color and white people to acknowledge the emotional toll bias, discrimination, and racism have on people of color, and to engage in honest conversation, learning, and healing. Discussions in these environments yield the best results when an unbiased facilitator leads the conversations. It can be important for people of color and white people to first have their own spaces for dialogue to do their separate work, before coming together to forge mutual understanding. In these separate sessions, people of color can work with their peers on their experiences with internalized and structural racism.

For white people, this approach provides time and space to work intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to learn from each other about these ideas, rather than relying on people of color to teach them (as often occurs in integrated spaces). During these discussions, it’s also important to acknowledge and talk about whiteness. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 15 percent of white people say race is core to their identity compared to 75 percent of Black people, 59 percent of Latinxs, and 56 percent of Asian Americans. We can’t effectively discuss racism if white people don’t recognize and understand the role of whiteness in a racialized society.

When the groups come together, establishing ground rules at the onset of conversation helps to ameliorate the concerns that both groups may have about saying the “wrong thing.” Here’s an example:

We hold grace and space for mistakes

We face our fears and name them

We give permission to call people “in and out”

Encouraging empathy is another valuable tool for inspiring actions that help address racism. One client of ours, for example, organized “empathy circles”—gatherings that emphasize listening, learning, and acknowledging different lived experiences—for employees to share their experiences with racism, bias, and discrimination.

2. Creating an ongoing educational process to build DEI competencies. Shifting a culture toward DEI isn’t a “one and done” exercise. Organizations that haven’t engaged in previous cultural self-understanding efforts should start with self-awareness and explore questions such as:

• How do I think of myself—who am I (for example, in terms of gender, ethnicity, occupation) and how do my identities influence my experience of the world? Which identities are most important to me?
• In what ways do my identities intersect to create a unique experience?
• How do my identities influence how I see myself and how others see me?
• What cultural messages, practices, and norms have influenced my worldview?
• In what ways do my identities afford me access, power, and privilege?

As an example of an effective organizational learning process, leaders at one large financial services organization took an assessment called the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) to determine their ability to bridge cultural differences. This psychometric tool measures the extent to which a person’s worldview is monocultural (using only our own cultural experience to make sense of the world) or intercultural (using a variety of cultures to make sense of the world). It’s based on the theory that the more we experience cultural differences, the more adept we become at appropriately navigating cultural differences and commonalities. Based on the results of the IDI, which illustrated the collective readiness of the leaders, the organization tailored experiential learning experiences which the leaders participated in over 12 to 18 months prior to retaking the IDI. The follow-up results, as reported by their teams, revealed that these leaders were more effective at leading in an inclusive way. They continue to engage in learning experiences annually to hone their skills.

Implementing Equitable Systems Internally and Externally

Organizations interested in creating healthy cultures where staff flourish embed equity and inclusion into all internal and external structures and processes, including information technology (issues related to biases and access), marketing and branding, communications, operations, and finance. Performance reviews, for example, should address how leadership and staff:

• Embrace, integrate, and adapt to different cultural styles
• Deal with conflict due to cultural differences and the dynamics of inequality
• Engage effectively in dialogue about social identities, diversity, and oppression issues

By integrating changes to organizational policies, communications and personal development procedures, and workflow management, organizations can integrate DEI to enhance organizational well-being. If needed, outside experts can help develop the capacity to revise structures that don’t support justice and DEI, interrogate existing policies and practices, and share results with all staff.

Leaders often assume they know what is best for marginalized employees and take a top-down approach. This reinforces existing power structures and perpetuates inequity. As a contrasting example, one major developer, marketer, and distributor of performance products used an equity-centered design process to establish an “inclusion council.” This diverse group of employees, representing different levels of the organization, examined all aspects of the business through a justice lens and ensured that policies and practices were fair and equitable. One outcome was that it prevented the company from launching a marketing campaign that was unintentionally insensitive to people of color.

Individual and organizational well-being increase when organizations go beyond seeing DEI as a one-and-done checkbox and instead take incremental steps to tackle systemic racism. Creating a healthy organizational culture is an ongoing process and the collective responsibility of leadership and staff. Engaging all employees in an organization-wide process to learn about racism and to better understand each other’s lived experience, and embedding justice and DEI in policies, procedures, and structures enhances belonging and inclusion. And when organizations engage in this way, they contribute to actions others are taking across sectors to create societal change and foster justice.

Read more stories by Mary-Frances Winters.