Top 8 Best Practices to Build a Better DEI Strategy

Diversity, equity, and inclusion or better known as the DEI strategy, is a tool for challenging and changing systemic challenges and establishing organizational practices in order to create an inclusive and diverse workplace.

Companies today are increasingly opting for DEI strategies, as they help onboard higher quality talent, increase company innovation rate, and gain more success in the global marketplace. Here’s how you can do the same.

For starters, you can establish a mission statement, showcasing your company’s commitment towards its employees and expressing what your organization and you believe in. Plus, you can collect employee data to tailor plans accordingly and address problems timely. These could include data such as age, family status, gender, language, race, sexual orientation, etc. More importantly, you must transparent about how your company intends to use this data, which would foster belief amongst your employees about your commitment towards building diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives in your organization.

Furthermore, you can also analyze collected data to identify concerns or needs to instill a sense of belonging amongst employees and develop an individualized and flexible plan that also includes community-related goals. Lastly, you must implement the plan to see and measure how your DEI strategy works, answer questions, and listen to employee perspectives to make it better.

The DEI strategist will be in charge of a wide variety of account strategic management and monitoring within the developing organization. They will also design and implement DEI initiatives across the company.

You can improve diversity, equality, and inclusion in your workplace by developing an inclusive company culture, establishing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and involving your entire team in key decisions to get them more involved in your DEI efforts.

What’s more, you can also create an equitable hiring procedure, revisit employee benefits, and focus on pay equity while making offers, during raise cycles, and during promotions, to foster equality in the workplace.

Lastly, you can enhance inclusion in your organization by acting on team member inputs and feedback, revisiting employee benefits to identify drawbacks and make them more inclusive, and providing DEI education to employees.

DEI metrics are a measure of your organization's diversity, equity, and inclusion (and belonging) activities. It assists your company in evaluating DEI outcomes and development. There are measures that can assist you in tracking this both directly and indirectly. They also enable you to set goals and build accountability.

One of the key ways one can positively impact inclusion and diversity is by becoming culturally competent. This means taking time to learn about various races, cultures, backgrounds, and religions of one’s colleagues, asking coworkers to explain the practices and customs of their culture, and familiarizing oneself with diversity-related terms. These are just some of the ways one can develop their understanding of various cultures to play a major role in embracing diversity and inclusion while creating DEI in the workplace.