We surveyed over 500 HR decision-makers and 1,000 employees to learn what actions employers are taking to make diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) a meaningful and measurable reality in their organization and how those efforts impact employees. Here are the top highlights from the report that captures progress, priorities, and opportunities for strengthening DEI initiatives.
1. How Employers Address DEI
Companies are making changes when it comes to advancing diversity. While many organizations are on their way to improving DEI in their workplace, there are 5 common tactics that organizations are using. However, there’s an opportunity for organizations to better leverage practices to advance diversity, like offering bias training for recruitment teams, using anonymized resume review, or creating a partnership to source more diverse talent.
2. Communication Efforts Around DEI
Despite best efforts, communication around an organization’s DEI strategy isn’t reaching employees as effectively as organizations would hope. In fact, 24% of employees have shared that their company has done nothing this year to improve DEI – this number is even higher at companies with fewer than 20 employees. Here’s how organizations are most commonly communicating their DEI initiatives to employees.
3. Challenges to Increasing DEI Efforts + Measuring for Success
This year, the hiring process from onboarding to team building to employee development – all shifted online. This created many strategic and technological challenges for HR teams, making it more difficult for organizations to prioritize DEI efforts as there’s a greater need to ensure continuity. Measuring the effectiveness of DEI efforts also created a large hurdle, with many teams finding it hard to dedicate time to it on top of their existing work. When we asked what employer’s top 3 priorities were for the year, this is what we found.
4. Future DEI Efforts
As employers continue on their journey to continuously increase and improve DEI, they report that they’ve made progress – 87% of HR decision-makers say their efforts have increased at least somewhat over the past year. There will always be improvement that can be made for DEI efforts, but we found the top 3 for companies today.
It’s vital to remember that DEI is not a project – it’s an ongoing, ever-evolving effort that involves every individual at an organization and touches nearly every aspect of work.
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