Defining the ideal leader and their qualities is a quest which has weighed upon the finest minds of management theory – as well as selling millions of books. In truth, the ideal leader is shaped by circumstances as much as their inherent traits.

For example, the characteristics of great sporting leaders very rarely translate to business leadership success (although politics, which like sports is often a popularity contest, sees a surprising amount of crossover). Indeed, when it comes to organisational management, we rarely see leaders replicate success when they switch sectors – Sharon White’s tenure at John Lewis is a rare example of public sector leaders even getting a shot in the private sector.

But whilst an organisation’s culture and circumstances will dictate the kind of leader that will excel within it, it’s also true that the leader will dictate their organisation’s culture and circumstances.

This can create a vicious circle, as poor behaviours not only become embedded within the current leadership but also set a requirement for future generations.

But at some point, we must root out the poor behaviours which infest our organisations. Frustratingly, the responsibility for this will almost certainly fall to HR under the auspices of ‘culture change’ or similar. Even more frustratingly, this task will only become a priority when the organisation’s fortunes are waning – these behaviours are claimed as a strength or a ‘secret weapon’ during the good times.

Limiting this task to HR, however, sets the whole endeavour up for failure. For culture change is a leadership task. It’s frequently suggested 80% to 90% of behaviour is influenced by what leaders say and do. Which means any change must begin and be sustained from the top.

At Umbrella HR we are often invited into organisations when these poor behaviours are starting to have negative effects on business metrics. Lack of trust starts to cause disengagement and low morale. Demoralised employees begin to play it safe, reducing risk taking and innovation. This in turn starts to impact external results as sales and service performance metrics start to dive. The organisation just isn’t delivering like it used to.

In these situations we look at the top of the organisation first. This usually involves training senior personnel to replace poor behaviours with inclusive ones. Becoming an inclusive leader who reverses these impacts and builds trust and belonging across the organisation requires competency in six areas. These competencies are:

• Cognizance
• Curiosity
• Cultural intelligence
• Collaboration
• Commitment
• Courage

I feel they can be split into two types – active and demonstrative. Cognizance, curiosity and courage are competencies which must be actively chosen – both when making decisions and how we respond in a challenging situation. These competencies are how we challenge our unconscious biases, by acknowledging how:

• We’re adding our own perspectives to the information before us
• Potentially ignoring other’s perspectives that don’t match ours
• Failing to challenge others doing the same thing

But these competencies are situational – it would be paralysing to demonstrate them for every single action one performs through the day. No-one’s expected to be cognizant, curious or courageous when choosing a sandwich from Tesco.

Our inclusive leadership training

Where the active competencies are noted by others for their presence, the three demonstrative competencies are noted by their absence. Consistency is key. These are the behaviours we live by and are much harder to achieve. One can’t claim to demonstrate cultural intelligence, collaboration, or commitment only some of the time. With these competencies we notice most when people don’t display them, in the form of a faux pas, selfishness or abandonment.  

And this is the link back to culture. When we observe senior leaders doing a thing, we know that we’re supposed to do it too. And when they don’t always do it, we know we don’t have to.

And this resonates with many of the things we discover when we work with organisations on inclusive leadership. When employees report that they feel unheard, or that diverse perspectives are not considered, they often only cite one or two incidences. But one or two is enough. In fact, experiments have shown that even a single incidence of micro exclusion can lead to an immediate 25% decline in an individual’s performance on a team project.

Crucially, while the leader may not realise they’re not being inclusive, those around them will always notice.

So, for truly inclusive leaders, these demonstrative competencies become something more. They make the leader stand out, and by extension become recognised as some of the characteristics of their leadership style.

But our leaders need help. We must recognise that we’re holding them to a higher standard that allows no exception. So, the challenge is to cultivate an environment where the competencies of an inclusive leader become the cultural values of an organisation. In such a workplace we can normalise the competency of courage, demonstrated by junior employees challenging leaders when they fail to demonstrate an inclusive competency.

As always, training interventions have a limited period of effectiveness before we return to old habits. I often say that success is when a participant maintains a behaviour change beyond one night’s sleep!

Peer mentoring can be incredibly helpful at this level for maintaining accountability. With demonstrative behaviours defined by exceptions, one way we can do this is with a weekly session between peers of the same level sharing incidences where they fell short of the competencies. This is a useful reflective exercise which encourages both participants to identify triggers and replay the scenario. Crucially, it also encourages vulnerability, an undervalued leadership trait, due to the need to speak about failure rather than success.

How can I support my senior management to become inclusive leaders?

Work downwards

Inclusive leadership behaviours must be consistently delivered at the top before the next level of the hierarchy can be expected to follow suit.

Manage and reward competencies differently

Active competencies can’t be measured in the same way as demonstrative ones. Design systems that recognise both the difference in when the different types of competencies are displayed, and the amount of effort required to deliver them.

Introduce peer reflection and accountability

Peer mentoring sessions where leaders share situations where they fell short of inclusivity helps promote vulnerability, reflection, and long-term behavioural change.

Reinforce Through Organisational Culture

Embed these competencies as cultural values, not just leadership traits. Normalise inclusion at every level – e.g., junior staff feeling empowered to challenge non-inclusive behaviours.

Go Beyond Training

Training is a start, but for it to have a lasting effect, organisations should encourage ongoing practices (like peer reflection) that build accountability and continuous learning.

Start your inclusive leadership journey with Umbrella HR

This is the second in a two-part series on the future of workplace DEI. Read part one: ‘The Death of DEI?’ here

As I sat down to start writing, the BBC pinged up on my phone to tell me that Google has become the latest major US firm to drop many of its diversity commitments. A little further digging confirms a hypothesis I put forward in the first half of this series; DEI initiatives in private sector organisations which fail to demonstrate how they contribute to increasing shareholder value are toast. And indeed, the financial results published the day before had led to over $200 billion dollars being wiped off the value of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

I’m not going to apologise for sounding like a broken record on this subject; it really is all about the numbers. HR leaders at all levels must do more to understand and demonstrate how their work fits into the organisation’s core results and purpose.

So how do we go forward?

An interesting theory has been put forward by American legal scholar Kenji Yoshino. He suggests there are two types of DEI. The first type is lifting DEI – targeted interventions focused on specific groups. The second is levelling DEI – the removal of bias in decision making.

And the simple fact is that lifting DEI, in both the US and UK, has always been legally tricky. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 allows for positive action in decision making – a form of lifting DEI. However, as the RAF demonstrated recently, the pressure on individuals to reach lifting DEI targets can result in actions that cross the line into illegality.

Meanwhile, popular means of delivering levelling DEI are often ineffective. An example is blind recruitment. Whilst the commonly cited example of the BBC’s orchestra using some sort of The Voice style selection method certainly makes sense, blind recruitment in other industries has often failed to make a tangible difference.

And that’s because whilst something like orchestral selection can be based almost exclusively on musical skill, most modern recruiters are consciously and unconsciously evaluating hundreds of different signals; many of which are cultural or are absorbed through presence in elite environments.  

The irony is that there’s not a lot of diversity in diversity practice. The playbook is embarrassingly consistent – blame the starting situation on unconscious bias, increase diversity in the employee population, then increase diversity in leadership. But, as we’ve already established, these achievements alone aren’t tied to organisational performance. Hence something that is successful and award winning at the DEI or HR level can be completely irrelevant at the organisational level.

Most importantly, how diversity and inclusion is communicated must change. Some really interesting research has been published by More in Common, the thinktank founded in the aftermath of Jo Cox’s murder, about a group they call the Progressive Activists.

Progressive Activists are one of More in Common’s British Seven segments. Their definition is one that neatly fits with DEI practitioners:

“A passionate and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth, and other forms of privilege. They are politically engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan, and environmentally conscious.”

But what’s interesting is More in Common’s findings about Progressive Activists relative to other groups. Despite making up 8% of the UK population, this group is overrepresented online, in the media and in policy settings. And crucially, More in Common found that not only were Progressive Activists’ views often at odds with the other six identities (who make up 92% of the population), they also dramatically overestimated how many people shared these views by factors of two to three. The research also found this group to be more dogmatic in their views and exclusionary of those who do not fully align with their positions.

It’s worth reflecting on this, as it also factors into why so many organisations here and abroad have begun dismantling DEI efforts.

Because as a profession, we’ve become guilty of the very groupthink and affinity bias that we seek to eliminate in others. Has our response to pushback, apathy and injustice been to become more combative and militant? Possibly. And have our successes been a mirage, driven by a wider social and political drift that has suddenly been reversed by democratic mandate? The fact is that increasing numbers of people are looking to Trump, AfD, Le Pen, Reform and others for the answers to their problems; problems which haven’t been solved by mainstream political ideas – ideas that have included DEI.

Put simply, most people aren’t buying what we’ve been selling. And because of that, most of our colleagues aren’t really fussed about what we do.

There should be affirmative action, and it should be based on colour, but that colour is green. Scott Galloway

Dragon’s Den star Steven Bartlett hosted a roundtable on his Diary of a CEO podcast shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. As they discussed DEI, participant Scott Galloway, Democrat supporter, entrepreneur and business professor, raised the point that, where Ivy League DEI initiatives had increased the number of people of colour in the student population, this was almost exclusively limited to people with similar economic backgrounds to existing students. His point was that affirmative action in these universities was giving a double boost to some students, who already had high levels of wealth privilege. Poor people of colour had no more chance of benefiting from these initiatives than they did before.

The Achilles Heel for DEI in the UK has long been the fact that white working-class boys have worse economic, educational, and employment outcomes than any other group. Our language doesn’t support this huge segment of the population. Where we have delivered benefits to this group, we’ve often focused our words on the others the initiative helped.

We believe that what we’re doing is right. Which means we’re not good at reflecting on whether how we’re doing it is wrong.

That needs to change. The environment has changed. Those we thought were onboard were simply acquiescing to the prevailing narrative for an easy life. We made fundamental assumptions that were wrong.

I believe inclusion, and specifically social inclusion, is the key to the rebirth of DEI. But this must be an inclusion that talks to everyone – in-group and out-group, minority and majority, that invites, rather than imposes.

This is an opportunity for a revolution in DEI. A chance to diverge from the orthodoxy of DEI practice and try new things. What is broken down can be rebuilt stronger and better than before.

But that must start with an acknowledgement that what has come before may be right in theory, but wrong in execution. So, I urge you now to reflect rather than rage.

The new workplace inclusion will be one that delivers tangible benefits through the lenses of employer, society, and the employee. But there must be interdependence, alignment, and demonstratable cause-and-effect. Favouring any one of these three beneficiaries will cause the whole thing to collapse… again.

We must measure and communicate how our inclusion work delivers change across all three of these lenses. The past is a DEI which has been rejected by swathes of society in the US, UK, France and Germany. The future must be one where DEI listens and responds to all voices – just as we’ve always said our organisations should.

Recommendations for Practitioners

1. Reframe DEI in business terms: Connect your initiatives directly to organisational objectives, talent acquisition/retention, and innovation metrics.
2. Broaden your inclusion lens: Develop programs that address socioeconomic diversity alongside other dimensions of difference.
3. Build coalition support: Engage with employees by focusing on common values rather than ideological alignment.
4. Measure what matters: Develop robust measurement frameworks that demonstrate both the human and financial impact of DEI work.
5. Communicate differently: Adjust messaging to resonate with different audiences rather than using specialised language that may alienate.

When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. As President Trump enters the White House for his second term in office, many of the world’s biggest companies are scaling back on diversity and inclusion.

These companies include Meta, Amazon, Walmart, Boeing, Ford, and McDonalds. So, let’s start by dismissing the simpleton’s response. These companies aren’t led by right wing Trump enthusiasts. They’re some of the world’s biggest multinationals. Certainly, Trump’s first term saw them increase spend on DEI. Then what’s changed?

The most cited factor is the Supreme Court decision against Harvard University which found race-based affirmative action in college admissions to be unlawful. But this does seem to be providing cover for wide reaching cuts to diversity programs and the role and influence of DEI in organisations. For example, several of those firms mentioned are winding back on supplier diversity policies, and more are publicly disavowing their commitments to external survey and benchmarking organisations.

So, whilst citing the changing legal landscape, these decisions are clearly influenced by something more.

For several organisations, customer pressure has had a major impact. Molson Coors, Harley-Davidson and John Deere all announced rollbacks to DEI in Summer 2024 (before the US election) triggered by customer action.

But these firms have weathered anti-DEI sentiments in the social and political environments before. And they may have stuck it out, had the academic environment not started raising questions too. Foremost amongst these is the challenge to what are almost considered holy texts in DEI – the McKinsey studies on diverse workforces.

Since 2015 these have been cited as THE business case for diversity and inclusion at work. There have always been issues with these; the finding that diverse teams are more likely to outperform homogenous ones has routinely been grossly misinterpreted as will outperform homogenous teams.

But a study published by two leading business professors seems to have reduced the McKinsey studies from foundational texts to what they may well have been all along – shiny marketing material for the consulting sector. Professors Green and Hand tried to replicate the results of the McKinsey studies but were unable to do so. They concluded that there was no evidence to support the argument that diverse teams can be expected on average to outperform homogenous ones.

In isolation, we might be able to condemn the consultancy industry for its largesse and continue with other arguments which make the business case. But two independently written papers^{[1], [2]} into diversity training programs, citing more than 40 studies, both shared the conclusion that some DEI training programs end up exacerbating and entrenching divisions in the workplace.

So, these are the environmental factors that have led to a change of corporate wisdom in the US. But there’s a fundamental factor not discussed in polite circles which is the real reason that these firms are happy to take any backlash from their DEI climbdowns.

Their DEI initiatives have failed to make a positive difference to shareholder value.

So, what does this mean to us in the UK, and you as a DEI practitioner?

Well, it’s always been a question of money. In the UK particularly, we tend to see DEI as part of HR. NI increases are set to raise employment costs for larger employers and larger employers are the ones most likely to have invested in DEI initiatives. I would expect to see savings demanded from HR to counter the impact of this cost increase, and these savings to come from discretionary spending budgets, especially DEI.

DEI teams who have been reliant on studies like McKinsey’s to drive their business case are likely to be in trouble as the pendulum swings away from what some are calling ‘peak DEI’. However, those who have been matching DEI initiatives to business priorities are likely to have more success, as they will be able to evidence impact and return on investment against organisational goals.

Regular readers won’t find this approach to be a surprise. In 2023 I showed you how to build an EDI strategy which is integrated with the organisational strategy and demonstrably tackles commercial challenges, not just social. In November 24 I wrote about adopting a model of constant delivery in DEI, which is much harder to remove and defund than sporadic celebrations.  

As we leave ‘peak DEI’, we can certainly expect to see salaries in the profession fall from their peak. But there will be increased opportunities for commercially savvy practitioners who are able to connect DEI through customer, workforce, and organisational strategy.

With employers seeing cost pressures increase in 2025, doing more with less will be crucial to maintaining momentum in DEI. Mobilising internal resources is key to this and will help practitioners gain better understanding of opportunities for DEI to answer specific organisational challenges.

What do you need to do?

Review your business case

The business case for DEI in your organisation must be centred on your organisation. If you can’t make a business case based on your organisation’s unique challenges and strengths, it may as well not exist. Read Creating an EDI Strategy and Plan to learn how to align DEI with commercial needs.

Assemble your team

Bring DEI advocates together from across the organisation to help deliver your strategy. DEI should be a spider web connecting people and ideas across the organisation, not a dictatorial spur of the HR function.

Talk to decision makers

Ask senior leaders what bothers them. This will reveal the problems they need someone to solve. Any initiative (DEI or otherwise) that doesn’t work towards those problems is at risk of being shut down. Anything that can solve them is likely to be of critical importance to the organisation. Taking the scenario I use in Creating an EDI Strategy and Plan, most senior leaders in your organisation don’t give a damn about how many women are in leadership positions, but they give a great many damns about losing female customers to competitor X.

This is the first piece in a two-part series on the future of workplace DEI. Continue reading with part two: ‘The Rebirth of DEI’ here

[1] https://aristotlefoundation.org/press-releases/press-release-february-13-2024-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-dei-training-what-does-the-research-tell-us/

[2] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf

Black History Month, LGBT History Month, Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

Awareness events have become a go-to for any good NGO wanting to raise the profile of its cause. They’ll flood their selected date with compelling research, newspaper column inches and a bumper fundraising campaign.

But I think that we, as HR and diversity leaders, have been swept up by the (admittedly, very good) PR around these events.

We’re put under pressure to deliver ‘our own’ events on these dates. Which puts us under even more pressure to decide which events to mark, and which ones not to. And even when your schedule and calendar is lovingly crafted to celebrate every single date, when International Women’s Day rolls around, someone will promptly remark,

“When’s International Men’s Day then?”

To which you respond,

“It was November 19; you replied to our email calling it ‘woke’.”

I believe we’ve got lazy. We’ve let outside organisations set the internal agenda for our organisation.

We’ve stopped thinking about what our organisation needs and started following the crowd.

And that’s a big problem, because visibility feeds perception. If an organisational focus on ethnicity (specifically Black ethnicity) is only visible for one month of the year, the perception is that the organisation doesn’t care about ethnicity for the other eleven months.

Meanwhile, you’ve celebrated both LGBT History Month and Trans Awareness Week. That’s five weeks total of LGBT activity and visibility; the perception is that LGBT is a higher priority.

It’s this kind of thing that causes real damage to DEI efforts. It confirms that the aim is diversity-washing rather than contributing to the bottom line. It demonstrates that the approach is generic, not bespoke to the organisation’s needs. And worst of all, it means employees can ignore DEI until their ‘thing’ comes around.

So, my advice is to start your calendar again. Begin with solid HR principles; which events will affect the operations of the organisation? These are dates where you can expect a higher-than-normal amount of leave requests or absences.

This is also where the groundwork you’ve done with diversity monitoring comes into play. If Muslim employees make up a large proportion of workers in a specific business unit, there may be a need for additional resourcing during and at the end of Ramadan. Equally, a sunny Bank Holiday may result in an increased absence rate on Tuesday morning. Or a Pride celebration could cause an increase in leave requests. Whilst very different situations, all are foreseeable and, using data, the potential effect is predictable.

Once you’ve identified business impacts, it’s time to identify dates. But what to do on these dates?

Scheduling activity around them is, for the reasons described above, lazy and counterproductive. Furthermore, activity should be delivered constantly, not annually.

We make a similar mistake with training; we know the theory about repetition embedding learning, but instead deliver once a year refresher on health and safety, which are disregarded within a month.

Regular, low effort activity embeds change far better than annual showcases. However, we’re drawn towards flashy Hollywood deliverables because of what they can do for us and our performance reviews.

Regular, low effort activity is also the perfect deliverable for employee resource groups. This reduces the workload on you, and helps you manage the output of your ERGs. Some organisations struggle with this. ERGs, especially those helmed by particularly powerful individuals (and this can be in a formal or informal hierarchy), can run away with themselves, becoming a lobby group somewhat detached from other organisational structures. Having a clear and agreed set of deliverables focuses the ERG and its leadership and sets expectations.

So once again, what of the notable dates?

Well, I see them as opportunities to celebrate, not to do. The problem of course with regular, low effort activity, is that incremental effects are less visible, and thus create the perception that little has changed. A notable date is a great opportunity to measure the current position against twelve months ago, report and celebrate progress, and set goals for the next twelve months.

Tying a reflection point to a notable date establishes a target, making your DEI initiatives timebound and SMART. It also forces you to change outputs from delivering events to sharing progress.

I’ve no doubt that this is a challenging proposal, and that many of you will tell me that this can’t work in your organisation. There are several challenges inherent with this approach:

• Constant reporting cycle

Instead of an end of year report containing all progress on all streams, this approach requires each stream to be reported on individually. Progress on ethnicity may be reported in October, LGBT issues in February, neurodiversity in March. This approach demands results; one can’t obfuscate and hide lack of progress behind strong achievements in other areas

• Employee attachment

It’s obvious, but people are emotionally attached to things that are important to them. Additionally, we often grow engagement by making our events fun. This results in chasing vanity metrics like attendance or participation. But fun events for an ingroup aren’t a DEI strategy on their own. We can overcome this issue by tying celebrations of a notable date with celebrations of results and progress.

• Resourcing

Keeping many low intensity programmes running all year round is a more challenging proposition than the project-based approach one can adopt with a date-centric agenda.

This is good.

If you’re reading this, you likely describe yourself as an HR or DEI leader. Leaders, by definition, require followers. People who believe in your destination and trust you to be able to keep them safe on the journey.

The DEI agenda generates more passion, goodwill, and offers of support, than any other workplace initiative I’ve ever been involved in. These are your people to lead. Whether they take the form of ERGs, working groups or champions, they believe in what you’re doing and will happily contribute. Use them.

Our Calendar is the perfect tool for shaping your DEI agenda for the year. It’ll help you see which dates are important to your teammates, when your organisation’s operations are likely to be affected, and when ‘things’ should ‘happen’.

But it is just that – a tool. A blunt instrument. How you use it will determine what form your agenda takes and how successful your ideas are.

You have only twelve months.

Don’t waste them.

Get our Diversity Calendar

As I was pondering this piece, the ‘first rule of systems engineering’ popped into my head. This is popularly written as:

“Everything interacts with everything else.”

The point of this rule is to remind the systems engineer that any changes made will have knock-on effects. Optimising one piece of a system in isolation does not mean an optimisation to the system’s performance as a whole – in fact, it can often bring about the opposite effect.

And of course, our workplaces are systems. Every department, team, individual, is a component of the larger system. The individual contribution of each of these pieces means very little; it’s the cumulative impact across disciplines, projects, and departments that delivers organisational results. Most organisations abhor the ‘rockstar’ employee for this very reason – they’re an unpredictable and outsized component that can potentially cause similarly outsized damage.

Whilst this is a very dispassionate and dehumanising take, it speaks to the underlying nature of the modern workplace. Everybody is intentionally replaceable, else the whole system grinds to a halt.

But this take stands in contrast to how we speak about diversity and inclusion. After all, one of the key benefits of EDI is improved creativity and innovation; utilising the unique experiences and skills of all employees to unlock new opportunities.

The truth is that innovation and stability have always stood in conflict with each other. The workplace system exists in a state of balance, where risk lines are determined by whether something pushes that balance past a tipping point.

Which brings me, in a tortured and roundabout way, to neurodiversity.

Because, of all the aspects of diversity we talk about in the workplace, neurodiversity (and neurodiverse individuals) are those most likely to upset that balance.

Why do I think that? Why neurodiversity, more so than race, or age, or gender?

Because neurodiversity is fundamentally an issue of behaviour. Neurodiverse individuals, almost by definition, demonstrate behaviour that doesn’t fit societal or organisational norms. And we do a disservice by trying to ignore this. Indeed, the CIPD’s Neuroinclusion at work guidance mentions behaviour in the context of the neurodiverse individual only once across thousands of words.

And ‘different’ behaviour is, historically, classed as socially bad behaviour. The system, in all forms, penalises different. It contradicts the social contract and undermines cohesion. And some of the behaviour of neurodiverse individuals can often be a violation of societal expectations.

Coming back to the workplace as a system, we see that neurodiverse behaviours can be incorporated up until the point that they push past the unwritten balance point. But this balance point is different in different parts of the system. Having a neurodiverse team member has a greater impact on a team than the organisation as a whole.

This is where the theory and real world collide. Almost every line manager wants a hassle-free life. Removing stress factors is important to their mental health. Minimising team conflict is a key part of that. So their ideal is to build a team with diverse complementary skills and homogenous behavioural expectations. 

In practice, this has meant that success for underrepresented groups derives from adapting and adopting the behaviours and cultural norms of the dominant workplace culture. That’s not the point of EDI initiatives, of course, but it means the numbers improve, which is the real metric that leaders want to see.

But this fake inclusion is revealed as a sham by the experiences of neurodiverse individuals, where bringing their ‘whole self’ to work is penalised.

And I think that’s because we spend so much time thinking about the what of EDI, we’ve completely neglected to think about the how. EDI so often forms a bolt-on to an existing process or operation in the workplace system. Recruitment: now with added EDI considerations. Progression: the same, but allegedly different. Innovation: but not too much.

With all these things, we’re ensuring we don’t break the system. By just changing things a little bit, we achieve progress, whilst not disrupting the balance.

But, actually, the balance does need to be disrupted. When EDI is seen as an ‘add on’, it’s easy to also be seen as a potential ‘take off’. Something we’re seeing across the world.

Instead, we should be looking at EDI as an environmental factor. Are we building environments in our workplaces where inclusion is truly practiced, or just seen as part of the recruitment process? This doesn’t just apply for neurodiversity – outcomes across many underrepresented characteristics are lower because EDI in recruitment and the other areas HR controls brings diversity into an organisation, but the working environment and organisational culture rewards and forces employees into conformity.

To truly promote neurodiversity and reduce conflict in the workplace, organisations must go beyond just recruitment and look at the whole system. As I shared at the beginning, focusing on improving a single part can lead to lower performance across the whole.

Five ways to improve outcomes for neurodiverse employees

1. Educating the workforce: Provide comprehensive training to all employees, especially leaders and managers, on neurodiversity and the benefits of an inclusive workplace. This will help dispel myths, build empathy, and equip them with the skills to manage and support neurodiverse team members effectively.

2. Adapting the work environment: Assess and modify the physical workspace, communication methods, and processes to accommodate the needs of neurodiverse individuals. This could involve providing quiet spaces, offering alternative communication channels, and allowing flexible work arrangements.

3. Encouraging open dialogue: Create safe spaces where neurodiverse employees feel comfortable sharing their experiences, challenges, and suggestions for improvement. This open dialogue can help identify areas for growth and foster a culture of understanding and acceptance.

4. Reviewing policies and practices: Scrutinise existing policies and practices, such as performance criteria, to ensure they are fair and inclusive for neurodiverse individuals. Involving neurodiverse employees in this process will help you gain valuable insights and perspectives.

5. Celebrating neurodiversity: Actively promote and celebrate neurodiversity as a source of strength and competitive advantage for the organisation. Highlighting the accomplishments and contributions of neurodiverse employees will help position neurodiversity as a key aspect of the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts.

Deliver on-demand training with our Microlearning solutions

Despite years of effort, the UK’s gender pay gap remains stubbornly wide.

Surprisingly, and despite the introduction of legislation, including the requirement for gender pay gap reporting, environmental factors have delivered the most significant changes; as seen below, both the financial crisis in 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic in 2019 produced sharper improvements to pay equality than 20 years of policy.

Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests legal and policy interventions do nothing but enact the law of unintended consequences without delivering change. For example, the oft-repeated story of major London firm’s tactic of addressing potential bad news in the run up to 2017’s introduction of Gender Pay Gap Reporting by outsourcing the low-paid cleaning and secretarial roles (that were dominated by women) ensured wonderful pay-gap figures for their organisations, whilst changing absolutely nothing at the national level (as seen by the chart above).  In fact, moving those low paid employees to insecure agency contracts presumably did far more damage to the social fabric than the pay gap did.

The same applies to other interventions, such as Women on Boards. Whilst the intent was to encourage the promotion of more women into senior roles, the outcome was simply that a few women took on a large number of non-executive positions. Alas, this was all too predictable; the Norwegians (who introduced quotas for women on boards in 2003) even have a name for the phenomena – Golden Skirts.

Time to look in the mirror!

That the first instinct of many was to massage bad figures shouldn’t be surprising, but focusing on the blunt instrument of reporting meant that became the objective, rather than delivering change. And not investigating how pay gaps affect our organisations is a missed opportunity. Because the pay gap represents a failure to optimise our organisations and have the right people in the right roles. It’s a numerical value of missing or underused talent.

Failure to recruit women in senior roles or more men in junior roles coupled with bias in the recruitment process and the inability to provide progression for individuals are all big issues.  But fundamentally the pay gap is a parenthood penalty. The parent who loses more year’s workplace experience due to childcare responsibilities will never catch up with someone who doesn’t lose that time. The parent with primary childcare responsibilities is more likely to take part-time, low responsibility job roles. And that parent is overwhelmingly likely to be a woman.

It is only by accepting this unpalatable truth that we can seek to deliver change. There are dozens of unconnected decisions and policies that are contributing to the motherhood penalty in your organisation. Enhanced pay for maternity but not shared parental leave. Lack of job sharing in senior positions. Support for new mothers returning to the workplace that ends about three months after maternity leave is up.

I feel a lot of blame rests on Protected Characteristics. They’ve become the be-all and end-all of diversity and inclusion to the exclusion of all else. We’ve become blinkered to the ‘big nine’ and forgotten about the breadth of the human experience.  Particularly damaging is the Pregnancy and Maternity protection, which absolves employers of the need to do anything at all once the period of maternity leave ends.

And if you don’t believe me, look at your diversity monitoring forms. I’d wager you have no way to report what proportion of your employees have responsibility for young children, or are working part-time purely for that reason, or are reliant on ad-hoc, undocumented permissions from their line manager to manage childcare.

Time for change

As someone who believed pay gap reporting would have a greater impact than it has, I hold my hands up. It will be social and environmental factors that make the most difference to how fast the gender pay gap closes, not more legislation.

That causes me a great deal of concern about ethnicity pay gap reporting, something supposedly high on the impending Labour government’s priorities. Will the next government learn from the non-impact of gender pay gap reporting, or simply seize headline figures as a pointy stick to poke the opposition during that week’s media grid?

For me, there are two key areas that HR teams can work on to create real change in your organisations. The first is training. A good bias and inclusion training programme doesn’t limit itself to the legal minimum requirements but encourages the learner to explore the context of their decision making in the round. By setting out a list of things that one can’t discriminate against, you inadvertently give the learner a somewhat larger list of things which one is allowed to. My belief is that childcare responsibilities definitely fall into that second list where this happens.

The second area is auditing and data. If, as I supposed earlier, you don’t have data on your employee’s parenthood responsibilities, you’re missing a huge part of the employee puzzle. This information affects succession planning, internal job applications, retention and leaving rates.

I’ll finish this piece with several unrelated but definitely interconnected facts. The UK has been unable to improve productivity for years. The UK is increasingly facing skills shortages, and the recent anomaly of buying skills into organisations rather than focusing on training existing employees is coming to an end. Young women are predominantly better educated than men and actually see a pay gap in their favour up until their early thirties. And finally, the average age of women at the birth of their first child is 30.9 years old.

Making the workplace work for mothers of young children is the key to unlocking the gender pay gap. But it’s also the key to unlocking the productivity of UK PLC and filling the skills gaps plaguing our workforces. We simply can’t afford to keep pushing women to the side just because they have young children.

This year I’m challenging readers to recognise their greatest asset – the employees who go above and beyond to make their organisations better places to work. I’m referring, of course, to staff networks.

Whether you call them Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), Employee Forums, or Workplace Alliances, staff networks are one of the most effective tools your organisation has for:

• generating ideas and getting feedback
• providing safe spaces for people
• developing visible role models
• delivering and implementing EDI agenda items
• recognising and celebrating diversity
• helping to create an inclusive culture where people feel they belong

But they’re not without risk. Risk that, if not managed, can result in damage to your work and the organisation.

Two of those risks are opposite ends of the spectrum. Firstly, it’s possible for employee networks to dominate informal power dynamics, cutting out official chains of authority and proper procedures and structures. Indeed, whilst this can be an advantage, cutting through needless bureaucracy to achieve goals and change quickly, it can also represent a threat to processes that exist for very good reasons.

Secondly, and in contrast, and as is more commonly the case, employee networks can be seen by senior leaders as simply collections of staff members that can be used as on-demand sounding boards.  This eliminates any of the advantages of staff networks listed earlier.

In fact, the most successful groups sit between these two extremes. They are given agency to set and work on their own agendas, but within a framework that ensures accountability and alignment with other business priorities.

But how does one reach this sweet spot? If your employee networks seem a little lacklustre, or you just want to revitalise your group’s members and add some spark to your ERGs, read on.

Professionalise group management

Involvement with networks is very similar to non-profit volunteering. Members are taking on additional unpaid roles to help improve the organisation. However, whilst most organisations are thrilled that members are doing ‘free’ work, forward-thinking employers recognise that the best way to retain and grow the value of staff networks is to see administrative staff network positions as key drivers of growth, retention, and ideas.

These organisations recognise that the best way to maximise the value of networks is to professionalise their structures, ensuring that those driving the agenda forward are compensated and supported fairly.

Paying fairly for roles (including guaranteed time allowed during working hours) and responsibility is often an excellent way to identify and upskill emerging talent, whilst also discouraging senior figures from taking leadership roles in the network; these individuals are better utilised as ambassadors and advisors, as a leadership role in a network could inhibit their ability to make challenges or discourage junior employees from raising their voices. It also helps create boundaries between ‘network work’ and the day job.

Recruitment and selection for group roles can be a tricky subject. Groups and their members will be understandably resistant to ‘corporate’ imposing their own candidates in these roles. But organisations aren’t democracies, and HR has a responsibility to ensure paid roles are being filled by the right candidates.

There is, of course, an easy way to solve this problem that I have seen used effectively in organisations with outstanding networks. That is for group members to nominate and vote for candidates to form the shortlist, with HR interviewing and appointing the best candidates.

As HR professionals, we wouldn’t create any other role without identifying training and development needs. However, precisely because we aren’t professionalising them, these sort of voluntary or extra-curricular workplace roles often slip through the net. Running a successful employee network requires a skill set likely to be unique in the organisation, and only by supporting and upskilling role holders will you be able to get the most out of your networks.

Give networks agency

People thrive with boundaries – hence why firms offering unlimited annual leave usually see employees take less than they would if given an allowance. The same applies for staff networks. Without clear limits, networks are more likely to err on the side of caution, avoiding the risk of pushing too far.

Agreeing scope and limits with the network’s executive gives them a boundary and a target. The answer to ‘can we do this?’ changes from ‘we’ll check’ to a straight yes or no. It empowers network reps to crack on with activity within the remit of its powers without having to request authorisation. Giving networks agency in this way is a fantastic way to turn a network from a talking house to an ideas factory. It also gives members the opportunity to take on projects and tasks that help them upskill and build experience that may not be otherwise available – especially for members of under-represented groups.

Assign budget

We don’t expect any other business unit to create outcomes from thin air, and we shouldn’t expect networks to deliver the world for free, or worse, go through some sort of internal tendering process every time they need to spend money.

As with giving networks agency, this allows members to develop and evidence skills they’d not be able to in their normal role, as well as giving networks freedom to deliver projects and initiatives in their own way.

Inter-network collaboration

Teamwork makes the dream work, and when multiple networks collaborate to deliver an initiative, the results can be unprecedented. Often networks can be working on similar projects, and the risk of silo behaviour can be high. Prevent this by having a single point of contact for all networks within the HR team, who can identify opportunities for link-up. Another great way to energise collaboration between networks is to create ambassador roles for employees who are members of more than one network, who can take responsibility for sharing information and ideas.

External engagement

By taking on responsibility in a staff network, members have already identified themselves as being passionate advocates and ambassadors for the organisation. Rather than sit back and complain, or quietly quit, they’ve volunteered to help it change.

These employees are exactly who you should be recruiting for engagement activities. They can tell a unique story about your organisation as well as promoting their network’s successes.

A well-managed staff network is a real multiplier in an organisation – offering opportunities for cross-functional collaboration, sharing, and networking. For under-represented groups they can often give a rare chance of projects and visibility that organisational barriers may otherwise prevent.

So please, take these ideas back into your own organisations and discover what your employees can deliver when given proper support and agency.

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We have the experience required to help your employees set up, run and maintain ERGs. We work with chairs to keep the groups relevant, give them direction and most importantly focus on outputs.

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The gender pay gap remains a significant issue in most UK workplaces, and the most recent statistics indicate that women still earn 14.9% less than men. In 2017, the UK government introduced gender pay gap reporting legislation, which requires all companies with over 250 employees to report their gender pay gap data. But reporting alone isn’t enough. The HR world has a critical role to play in using this data to identify and address pay disparities.

Data collection and analysis

The first step in using data to address our gender pay gaps is to collect and analyse the relevant information. This includes gathering data on employee salaries, job titles, work levels/grades, and other contextual information such as experience and education level.

This information can then be analysed to identify any disparities in pay between male and female employees. We can also use these insights to identify any barriers that may be preventing women from joining or advancing within the organisation, such as a lack of representation and role models in senior positions or unequal access to training and development opportunities.

Developing strategies

Once the data has been analysed, we can begin to develop strategies to address any disparities or barriers that have been identified. The gender pay gap reporting legislation gives organisations the option to publish an action plan alongside their pay gap data, outlining the steps they will take to close their pay gap. I’d encourage you to do this, as it demonstrates organisational commitment and keeps leaders focused!

One effective strategy is to conduct a pay analysis, which involves comparing the salaries of male and female employees who hold similar positions within the organisation. There is often confusion between equal pay and the gender pay gap, with some employers mistakenly assuming they have addressed the issue by paying men and women the same for the same work.

Despite this, differences due to scales or banding can become embedded into an employee’s pay over multiple years. If disparities are identified, adjustments can be made to ensure that all employees are being paid fairly for their work.

Another strategy is to implement policies that support women in the workplace, such as proactively offering flexible working arrangements or providing training and development opportunities to help women advance within the organisation. By creating a more supportive environment for women, companies can both help to close their gender pay gap and ensure all employees have the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Communicating Results

Under the gender pay gap reporting legislation, companies are required to publish their pay gap data on their website and the government’s gender pay gap reporting portal. It is also important to communicate the results of any data analysis and strategies implemented to address the gender pay gap to all employees. This includes sharing information on any changes to pay structures or policies that have been made, as well as providing regular updates on progress toward closing the pay gap.

By communicating openly and transparently with employees, companies can build trust and create a more inclusive workplace culture.

Blaming COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the UK workforce and the gender pay gap. With many companies facing financial challenges and a shift to remote work, progress in closing the pay gap has slowed down or even stagnated. However, this shouldn’t be seen as an excuse to ignore the issue. Instead, HR professionals should use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate their strategies and ensure that they are doing everything possible to close the gap.

Improving Quality and Quantity

One of the key challenges in using data to tackle the gender pay gap is ensuring that the data is accurate and relevant. HR professionals must ensure that they are collecting high-quality data on a regular basis, including data on bonuses, overtime, and other benefits that may contribute to pay disparities. We should also look to combine our payroll data with data from employee surveys and focus groups to gain a better understanding of the experiences of female employees and identify any additional barriers to closing the pay gap.

Using Data from Multiple Sources

In addition to internal workforce data, HR professionals can use data from external sources to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the gender pay gap. For example, they can review industry-wide salary surveys and government statistics on pay disparities to identify trends and compare their own pay gap data to industry benchmarks. By using data strategically from multiple sources, HR professionals can develop more informed strategies to address pay disparities and improve overall equity in the workplace.

Inclusive Recruitment

Tackling the pay gap starts in recruitment. But reducing opportunities for bias to creep into hiring processes is only one part of the puzzle. One often neglected piece is to ensure you’re advertising inclusively in the first place. This is much harder to do, as things like inclusive language may conflict with approved style guides, and increasing the number of locations to advertise increases the cost of the recruitment process. This is often to the detriment of diversity in the mid-level roles which feed into management pipelines, as the roles themselves aren’t seen to justify the extra expense.

Measuring your recruitment properly and at scale can help identify inequalities that may not seem obvious at the individual level. By recording at each stage of the process (applications, shortlisting, appointments, offers made and accepted) statistical anomalies become clearer and barriers become more visible.

We like to concentrate on getting more people into the pipeline, but often forget about the women who exit it. Exit interviews are often a formality but but done right can provide valuable insights into what’s going wrong with your retention strategy.

Socioeconomic Factors

While the gender pay gap is often attributed to differences in salaries between men and women in the same roles, there are several other socioeconomic factors that can contribute to pay disparities. For example, the choice to have children and the cost of childcare can limit women’s career progression and earning potential. HR professionals must take a holistic approach to addressing pay disparities, including addressing these socio-economic factors and promoting policies that support women’s career advancement and work-life balance.

We also need to recognise that many mothers make the choice to prioritise their children and deprioritise their careers beyond maternity and even beyond early years. This can include avoiding extra responsibility, choosing roles solely on the criteria of working patterns (often in a different industry or business area than before) or eschewing development opportunities.

Tackling the gender pay gap requires a commitment from HR leaders to use data and analytics to identify and address disparities in pay. The gender pay gap reporting legislation provides a framework for companies to collect and report their pay gap data and develop action plans to close the gap. HR professionals must collect high-quality workforce data, use data strategically from multiple sources, and develop effective strategies to address pay disparities. They must also consider socio-economic factors that contribute to pay disparities and ensure that their policies support women’s career advancement and work-life balance.

By taking such a comprehensive approach to closing the pay gap, we can create more inclusive workplaces that support the success of all employees, regardless of gender. Coupled with collecting and analysing data, developing effective strategies, and communicating openly with employees, data-led HR can make a real difference to employee’s lives that extends far beyond organisational level pay gaps.

D&I has never been more on the minds of our organisation’s senior leaders. Far from the old days of having to urge action, we’ve moved to a stage where many leaders are not only embracing D&I action, but also getting heavily involved through mentoring, listening to ERGs and employees, and sharing their own stories.

Nonetheless, whilst the desire to take action is there, that doesn’t mean our leaders have the expertise and skills to actually deliver D&I progress. That’s where you come in. This month we’ll explore how you can identify organisational D&I priorities, equip leaders for success and go above and beyond your peers.

The minimum

Whilst we may consider legal compliance the starting point, it’s often the case that legacy or informal policies, procedures or paperwork may not be up to scratch. Examples may include boilerplate text that gets added to job descriptions or policies as a matter of course, or line managers whose methods are tolerated as the results are good and their current team is happy.

Scratching the surface of any organisation often uncovers well-established behaviours. Part of the D&I journey is to identify and break old un-inclusive practices and procedures to obtain the benefits of an inclusive working environment. And this isn’t an activity that only takes place at the beginning of the journey; it’s a challenge to tackle throughout.

It’s at this early stage that we can establish the organisation’s current situation and challenges. Performing a D&I audit allows us to set a baseline and a starting position as well as identifying initial priorities.

From here we can develop a plan and a set of objectives. It’s also at this stage we can begin to manage the expectations of senior leaders. We find most, if not all, leaders start their own D&I journey considering D&I to be like a project, with a defined start date, a team working on delivery, and a predicted end date.

“In twelve months, we’ll be highly inclusive and a role model for our sector.”

That’s not an unusual sentiment and needs to be challenged early on. By not doing so we find ourselves having difficult conversations at a much later date – closer to the perceived ‘project end date’ and with less enthusiasm for taking action.

First Steps

Undertaking an audit of any kind may seem like an overwhelming prospect, something most people prefer to avoid, because who knows what it might uncover?

Our approach focuses on establishing a starting point for your agenda, a fresh start, an opportunity to gain traction.

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Above

Going above the legal minimum is an indication to your workforce that the organisation is serious about taking action. It’s at this point you begin to take definitive steps towards the short-term objectives you set after your audit.

The actions you take at this initial stage should be completely defined by these measurable objectives. The reasons for this are twofold; hitting clearly set objectives indicates that the organisation is progressing along its plan, maintaining the momentum and interest of leaders. The second reason is to maintain focus on the issues that challenge your organisation. Whilst your contemporaries may be happily rolling out unconscious bias training around their workforce whilst shouting ‘look how much we’re doing’, your organisation may be better off building ERGs and acting on the concerns of underrepresented employee groups.

The actions you take at this early stage establish the tone and importance of D&I in your organisation. ‘Firework’ initiatives that quickly fizzle out after a lot of early noise and activity are a common way of ensuring the employee belief that D&I will go away if you ignore it.

The aim of organisational D&I is to ensure that every employee considers the D&I implications of every decision they take and action they make. It’s to create a culture where every member of an organisation takes ownership of the organisation’s success and its objectives.

The biggest challenge to D&I initiatives isn’t objections but apathy. It’s not a vocal minority that will kill your efforts, it’s the silent majority who ignore them. That’s why we like to see active engagement and advocacy of D&I initiatives from senior leaders, not just at the beginning, but continuously.

Beyond

Maintaining a level of D&I engagement across your organisation above the legal minimum for any length of time is a challenge in itself. It requires constant reinforcement and reinvention, agilely changing programmes which aren’t working before they reach a stage of failure.

Going even further isn’t something that can be achieved by a D&I team, the HR function or even the senior leadership. It represents a level of buy-in to the importance of D&I that only a handful of organisations are even close to achieving.

It relies on a demonstration of how diversity and inclusion has impacted on organisational success; hard numbers showing the effect on customers or service users, profits or budgets, employee happiness and opportunities.

This takes time. One exceptional month, quarter or year is an anomaly; successive ones become a pattern. Improvement becomes self-sustaining as employees feel free to challenge and innovate. Leaders become enablers, rather than controllers.

Taking action

So what can you do?

One

Go back to the beginning. No matter what stage you’re at on your organisational journey, it’s always worth periodically checking policies, paperwork and procedures. This isn’t just about bad habits slipping in and becoming embedded, although shortcuts will always try to undo your hard work. Language is constantly changing, especially in the D&I space, and what was correct can quickly become inappropriate.

Two

Take another look at your objectives. Check that they are SMART and aligned to actual numbers. Make sure you have a clearly defined idea of what D&I success looks like, then share it. Share it with the board, but also on notice boards. D&I isn’t suited to being opaque – making your plans and ideas as transparent as possible not only reduces the opportunity for objections but also encourages people from across the organisation to contribute their own ideas and become involved.

Three

Identify self-sustaining activity. If it’s constantly being driven by D&I practitioners or HR, then your ideas aren’t landing properly. This is where empowering employee resource groups comes into its own; for a small budgetary outlay you end up with a group of usually underrepresented employees who feel empowered, deliver huge amounts of activity, and are embedded in functions and teams in all parts of the organisation.

Next Steps

Our experienced D&I consultants can help you implement a D&I strategy that’s tailored for you, your workforce and the people you need to attract.

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Let’s begin with a quick history lesson. After the success of the Davies Review into women on boards – a coalition government initiative pushing for 25% of the boards of FTSE 100 companies to be made up of women – the Hampton-Alexander Review was launched with the target of women holding 33% of board positions in FTSE 350 companies.

As I pointed out during the Davies Review, these targets were largely accomplished using a small pool of female non-executive directors sitting on multiple boards, rather than appointing women to senior executive director roles. In Norway, where 40% women on boards is enshrined in law, they call this phenomenon the Golden Skirts.

My point is that whenever a government tries to create change, the finest minds in the affected organisations will find a loophole that maintains the status quo. So, when the government announced they would be introducing gender pay gap reporting, I was completely unsurprised to see several large organisations outsource reception and cleaning contractors. The low paid, almost entirely female workers in those roles would have dramatically skewed their results. So, they were removed from the balance sheet.

As we know, the root causes of the gender pay gap are primarily social and cultural factors rather than ‘big bad bosses’. Childcare and caring responsibilities fall overwhelmingly on women, forcing them to make a choice between career or family that men rarely must make. The nature of pregnancy and post-partum recovery means that the vast majority of women neither can nor wish to return straight to work after giving birth.

I’ve also argued before that, unless racists are diligent enough to identify which part of the Indian subcontinent someone is from before discriminating against them, a purely bias-based explanation for the race pay gap doesn’t make sense. The difference in outcomes between Indian workers and Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers is too significant. The same applies to a lesser extent between Black African workers and Black Caribbean workers.

So once again, we must consider that culture and individual choice contribute to the race pay gap. In a multicultural society, should we be pushing monocultural values on work and the pursuit of money? If anything, the demand for hybrid and homeworking suggests that the dominant pre-pandemic working culture is being rejected by increasing numbers from all backgrounds.

DELIVERING ON DATA

In my view this means there will always be race and gender pay gaps. The alternative is to overrule women’s choices to spend time with and nurture their children by forcing them back to work. Or to forcibly replace family and community values with individualism.

But acknowledging that there likely will always be some level of pay gap doesn’t mean accepting the status quo. We wouldn’t accept the existence of external factors as an excuse for not taking action on internal factors in any other area of our organisations.

It’s our responsibility as HR professionals to identify discrepancies and anomalies in our workforces. The amount of information at our disposal means new skills are crucial for HR – we’re now data analysts, modellers and scientists. Make no mistake, the HR professional of 2030 will be just as proficient with SQL and Python as they are with appraisals and redundancy.

The data we already hold on our workforces is more than sufficient to identify specific issues on pay gaps, down to department and even team level. But of course, without the will to make change, change won’t happen. As I mentioned earlier, change is resisted. Loopholes will be found to avoid making widespread change.

FIRST STEPS

Help employees explore the issues that contribute to pay gaps with our Gender Pay Gap Fact Sheet.

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PROBLEM SOLVED?

A US study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology looked at 1,500 companies across 20 years, and found female senior managers under a female CEO earnt 16% less than female senior managers under a male CEO. The authors concluded that the presence of a female CEO resulted in gender diversity being marked as ‘done’, and the incentive to retain and promote other women into senior roles is removed.

This tick box approach to diversity is of concern in relation to pay gaps. We’ve seen that if a loophole can be found, it’ll be taken. Public reporting incentivises organisations to remove the issue (by outsourcing low paid roles) rather than doing the desired action of equalising the gender split at all pay grades. Why worry about recruiting and developing women for top executive positions when you can simply add a ‘Golden Skirt’ to your board.

We have to think in the medium to long term. If it takes 15 to 20 years for someone to reach a senior position then we’re currently seeing the outcomes of initiatives launched in the early noughties.

Large organisations will already have sufficient data to assess their actions over this time frame. Smaller ones may not. What we can’t do is fall back into the trap of launching an initiative and replacing it after two or three years, when clearly it’s only impacting a tiny proportion of an employee’s lifecycle.

And this links in with the short-termism of the modern career in general. With many employees moving employer to progress to higher roles rather than internal promotions, it raises the question of who is responsible at all? With individualism driving career moves, should the question of development also rest with the individual? What incentive does an employer have to promote groups with pay gaps, if they’re simply providing a springboard to their next role?  Only diversity as a public relations exercise, which is the same incentive that leads to organisations with a female CEO ticking the box of gender diversity and marking it complete.

TAKING ACTION

So what can you do?

ONE

Resolve what we control. Whilst many pay gap factors are out of our hands, there’s still plenty we can do. De-biasing processes might not be headline grabbing, but it has a long-term effect.

TWO

Targets not quotas. But more specifically, targets that have buy-in from senior leaders. If you force an organisation to do something, it’ll find a way to meet the letter of the law without actually achieving the intent or spirit. Targets represent an ambition rather than an obligation. Targets driven by senior leaders, who have a disproportionate influence on organisational culture, are far more likely to achieve their intended goals.

THREE

Get to grips with data. Advanced data skills are like gold dust in the HR world, but are normalised in other business areas. The ability to spot trends and patterns in your datasets allows you to target and focus your policies and initiatives, removes guesswork and allows you to quantify your impact. HR has long been seen as lacking the business nous of other departments, but proper use of data will quickly change this image.

NEXT STEPS

Use our International Women’s Day Fact Sheet to share some important facts about how misogyny and sexism still exist today.

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