How to Transform Your Company with a DEIB Strategy

Companies that truly care about diversity, equity, and inclusion—and the addition of belonging to that conversation making it DEIB—in the workplace, know that they need to do more than say a few nice words during Black History Month or LGBTQ Pride Month. When leadership takes the time to develop a comprehensive and effective, year-round DEIB strategy for the company, employees flourish—and so does the company itself.

Businesses must take the necessary steps to ensure their DEIB initiatives are successful. This is key to creating an inclusive environment that embraces all backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives.

There aren’t many steps to creating a DEIB strategy, but each step requires adequate time and deliberation for success. Here’s a quick overview:

Analyze DEIB starting point
Define DEIB goals
Choose DEIB leaders
Assess minimum resources needed for success
Determine how to measure success

Don’t worry if this feels like a lot! I’m going to walk you through each step to developing a DEIB strategy for your business.

What is a DEIB Strategy?

It’s a comprehensive plan used by organizations to create and foster a workplace that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion. A good DEIB strategy outlines the objectives of the organization in terms of:

fostering a diverse workforce
creating equitable policies and procedures
implementing anti-discrimination practices
developing an inclusive culture
celebrating workplace diversities

A DEIB strategy also determines what needs to happen to meet those objectives. This includes assessing where your company currently stands on DEIB in the workplace and creating small, actionable steps to work toward your DEI goals.

Ideally, a small task force of DEIB leaders will work together to create and implement your company’s DEI strategy, with full support from all executive leaders.

How to Develop a DEIB Strategy

When crafting a DEIB strategy, it’s important to keep in mind the organization’s core values, mission statement, and long-term goals. This will help ensure that each DEIB initiative serves to advance those objectives.

Additionally, businesses should also consider how their current practices may be perpetuating systemic inequities or fostering exclusionary environments. By identifying any areas of improvement within your organization’s processes or policies, you can begin making changes that will help create a more equitable work environment.

What is Your Current DEIB Status?

The first step in any DEIB strategy is to assess the company’s current state of DEIB in the workplace. This allows leadership to understand the baseline of where the organization currently stands in terms of its DEIB policies and practices. This assessment should include a comprehensive analysis of:

Hiring practices
Training programs
Workplace culture
Anti-discrimination policies

While an internal team can assess a company’s current DEIB status, this is also a service you can outsource. Insight Global offers an Inclusion Analysis to our clients. We start by sending a completely anonymous survey to a selected group of employees to identify:

where the company is in their DEIB journey
personal understanding of DEIB topics
reception of the organization’s current DEIB implementations (if any)
psychological safety

From there, our experts get your company started with a DEIB strategy. We offer recommendations based on the survey results, and we create an engagement plan to help your business implement those recommendations.

Once you know where the company is starting, you can set achievable DEIB goals.

What are Your DEIB Goals?

When crafting a DEIB strategy, it’s important to set goals. These goals should encompass both the short-term and long-term objectives of your DEIB initiatives, and they should also relate the tangible and intangible benefits DEIB success will bring to your organization and employees.

One way to create DEIB goals is to use the SMART goal-setting framework. This means setting goals that are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

Some examples of goals that a company might set include:

Increasing the number of women in leadership positions by X% in the next Y years.
Developing and implementing unconscious bias training for all employees in the next 12 months.
Creating an employee resource group program in the next 3 months so employees can create their own social and professional networks.
Updating existing anti-discrimination policies in the next 3 months.

If one of your goals is to recruit diverse employees, watch this video guide by DEIB expert Tyler Horne.

For accountability, consider publishing your company’s current DEIB status and future DEIB goals.

For example, Insight Global recently released our 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report, which includes our DEIB initiatives and goals. One goal relates to hiring. We have publicly shared our current statistics as well as our goal for future hiring.

25.04 percent of new hires in 2022 identified as diverse.
We’ve set a goal of having 30 percent of new hires in 2025 come from underrepresented groups.

Even if you’re not ready to make a public announcement about your business’s DEIB strategy, you should share all relevant information internally. Transparency in the workplace builds trust among employees.

Who Will Oversee the DEIB Strategy?

Part of developing a DEIB strategy is determining who will oversee and implement it. This could include an individual or a team of individuals whose primary objective is to ensure DEIB initiatives are successful.

When choosing people to oversee and implement your company’s DEIB strategy, look for these qualifications:

Experience with DEIB policies, practices, and implementation
Knowledge of the business benefits of DEIB strategies
Enthusiasm for DEIB in the workplace

Depending on the size of your organization, you may choose to create a full-time DEIB role. Another option is to divide the responsibilities among the existing Human Resources (HR) team. Your company could also tap existing DEIB leaders and ask if they would be willing to serve on a DEIB committee.

However, be careful not to ask minority employees to pay what is referred to as the “diversity tax.” Just because someone comes from an underrepresented group doesn’t mean they want to lead DEIB initiatives. And for those who do want to do DEIB work, make sure their contributions are recognized in a meaningful way. McKinsey found that women leaders are more likely than their male counterparts to do DEIB work, but 40 percent of them didn’t receive any workplace recognition for it.

What Resources Do You Need?

When developing your DEIB strategy, it is important to consider what resources will be necessary for implementation. This might include things like budget, staff, training, etc. Once you understand the resources you’ll need, you can start to develop a plan for how to obtain them.

Here are some possible needs:

Purchasing or creating DEIB training materials
Hiring DEIB consultants or experts
Providing financial support for DEI initiatives such as mentorship programs

Meeting DEI goals will take a financial investment, but don’t forget all the benefits of creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environment.

For a small company on a tight budget, look into free DEIB resources you can offer employees. Insight Global offers a free DEIB in the workplace video series to get you started.

How Will You Measure Success?

When creating DEIB goals, ideally you create measurable goals. However, there’s more than one way to measure success, even for the same goal. That’s why this separate step is necessary in creating a DEI strategy.

Organizations should consider using a variety of metrics to assess the effectiveness of DEIB initiatives, including:

Retention rates
Employee satisfaction surveys
DEI training participation
Successful DEI initiatives completed

Additionally, consider conducting regular reviews of DEIB policies and practices. This can help to ensure that DEIB initiatives remain effective. This will also allow organizations to modify DEIB strategies as needed to better meet DEIB goals.