From the start of workplace diversity training in the mid-1960s to the addition of “equity” to corporate diversity policies after the murder of George Floyd by police, DEI language has gone through many changes.
Maybe your company focuses on diversity and inclusion (D&I), diversity, inclusion and belonging (DIB) or diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB). Whatever your language and acronym of choice are, there’s usually a reason for it and a particular order of focus.
According to Dr. Stephanie Creary, an assistant professor of management specializing in identity and diversity at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, companies add concepts to the lexicon because someone perceives that the previous concept did not include that piece.
In our conversation, we focused on why some companies have added “belonging” to the lexicon after “inclusion.”
“Belonging modifies inclusion,” she said. “What has happened is as companies talked about inclusion and inclusive culture, they were using the same words to talk about the behavior and the experience and that got to be a bit confusing.”
To give an example of inclusion as a behavior, Creary said some companies want managers and other employees to treat each other in an inclusive way by inviting someone from a group that is historically excluded to lunch or making sure they aren’t being interrupted in meetings.
Some companies struggled to figure out what inclusion actually meant, what those behaviors actually looked like, and for a while were just saying they wanted an inclusive culture without following through with the actions to back that up.
“But once people started talking about what it meant when someone said they felt included, the word belonging started to replace that word ‘sense of inclusion,’” she said.
Creary added that inclusion and belonging are used interchangeably by some organizations, but that there are layers to what belonging actually is.
“Belonging is this emotional connection that people have to their work, whether that’s a team, whether that’s a department, whether that’s an organization, and it’s this emotional connection of where you feel like you’re accepted by the people around you and you feel comfortable in that connection,” she said.
Inclusion initiatives weren’t making people feel this connection, which is why “the word belonging is picking up more of the nature of the connection, that connection experience people should have,” she added.
Companies learned when looking at departments with high inclusion scores that employees were still leaving those departments even though they were being invited to lunch and given the chance to have their contributions heard. That’s because how companies were measuring inclusion was not related to belonging metrics. They still didn’t feel comfortable or like they were accepted. They didn’t feel like they belonged.
Creating a Sense of Belonging
According to a study led by Creary at the Wharton School, most employees feel a sense of belonging when their manager is involved.
Employees at the companies surveyed “somewhat agreed” that they “felt a positive sense of belonging,” and there were no racial/ethnic or gender differences in belonging of those who responded.
When asked about practices that improve belonging, 42.3% of respondents said the experience of belonging at work was driven by their manager and what their manager does, 29.6% said the belonging experience was driven by workplace policies and 28.1% said there were mentorship and sponsorship programs that made them feel a sense of belonging.
The managerial involvement piece of this relates to what managers do with respect to DEI initiatives specifically, Creary said.
“It’s not just do I have a manager that takes us out to lunch and buys pizza? It’s the manager being somewhat facile on the topic of DEI and integrating that into the team,” she said.
Managerial involvement and workplace policies go hand-in-hand. Many companies have DEI-related policies and policies that create a sense of belonging, but it is on the manager to enforce those policies. Employees want to see alignment between workplace DEI policies and managers.
Managers can help create that sense of belonging for all employees by highlighting the accomplishments of their team members and by creating spaces such as Teams chats or Slack channels where employees can share personal stories and good news not related to work. These tools are especially helpful for remote employees to share and celebrate what makes them unique.
Be Cautious and Intentional with DEI Language
Dr. Creary said, “one of the things that often happens in the DEI space is people just copy one another as opposed to really thinking through what they are trying to achieve in their organization and what initiatives will help them reach those outcomes.”
The addition of belonging to DEI language is an example of this as it started being implemented by a lot of tech companies in the 2010s because of harassment cases following the #MeToo movement and public criticism of “bro culture.”
Creary added that she’s been contacted by a lot of people about belonging because “it’s a word that sounds great as opposed to it really being the thing that they need to focus on because they didn’t.”
She said “they don’t know that people’s sense of belonging is poor” and that “energy gets misplaced sometimes in an effort to keep up with what everyone else is doing.”
While it is understandable that DEI-focused companies want to have a competitive advantage and robust initiatives, it doesn’t always make sense to model one company’s DEI initiatives off what another company is doing when they are two very different companies in different industries, Creary said.
Equity is another example of DEI language added to the lexicon of many companies in light of the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. While companies added equity to their DEI language and talked about it publicly, it’s unclear if all organizations had outcomes that supported equity.
It’s dangerous to add DEI language without thinking about how it affects your organization or its outcomes because it could be seen as virtue signaling, which is when someone expresses opinions or sentiments to show their good character or stance on a particular issue in a public way.
According to Santa Clara University, virtue signaling is often carried out by people of privilege. In the case of people or companies publicly supporting Black Lives Matter, this might have been done by changing social media profile pictures to a BLM photo, using the BLM hashtag or participating in #BlackoutTuesday on social media in 2020. These aren’t ideal ways to support these efforts because many who posted black squares in place of their social media pictures did little to actually support the BLM cause. And some just wanted to show they were “good white people” and not racist.
So how can companies go beyond being performative to do a good job of focusing on racial equity? Rather than publicly supporting causes like BLM, organizations should start by looking internally to address issues of racism through information, investments and incentives, Harvard Business Review suggests.
To do this, companies must first get all employees to understand that racism is a reality and raise awareness to increase equity. HBR has also identified five stages companies must go through to “move from understanding the underlying condition, to developing genuine concern, to focusing on correction.”
1. Problem Awareness: While some might think racism is a known problem, some studies show that white people feel as if there is more anti-white racism today than there is anti-Black racism. And even if company leaders acknowledge racism out in the world, they don’t always recognize or believe there’s racism within the organization. To promote racial equity, organizations must first debunk the anti-white racism theory and understand the problem and where it comes from.
2. Root-Cause Analysis: There are many factors that contribute to racism such as biases, personality traits and perceived threats, but most racism is a result of established laws, cultural norms and institutional practices. When issues of racism come up, many managers blame it on the individual and “roll out training to ‘fix’ the employees without paying attention to what might be a ‘toxic organizational culture.’”
“It is much easier to pinpoint and blame individuals when problems arise,” HBR writes. “When police departments face crises related to racism, the knee-jerk response is to fire the officers involved or replace the police chief, rather than examining how the culture licenses, or even encourages discriminatory behavior.”
3. Empathy: Once companies and employees recognize racism is a problem, they then have to figure out if they care enough to do something about it because there is a difference between sympathy and empathy. Empathy leads to confronting a problem rather than feeling pity as with sympathy. Companies can increase empathy through education and exposure.
4. Strategy: The strategy phase comes after a foundation has been established and is the “what do we do about it” stage. Actionable strategies for change to combat discrimination can be formed by “running interventions on personal attitudes, formal institutional policies and informal cultural norms” at the same time.
HBR added that “establishing an anti-racist organizational culture, tied to core values and modeled by behavior from the CEO and other top leaders at the company, can influence both individual attitudes and institutional policies.”
5. Sacrifice: Last but not least, achieving better DEI efforts takes time, energy, resources and commitment to make it happen. Some might think that achieving one goal means sacrificing another, but that’s not always the case. Increasing diversity does not mean giving up principles of fairness or merit, nor does it mean diverse candidates are given “special” treatment. Fairness also does not mean everyone needs to be treated equally – or the same – it means everyone should be treated equitably.
Fairness requires leaders to look at barriers that exist and the unlevel playing field that is there for people of color because of systemic racism, which requires them to make difficult or controversial calls.
“For example, it might make sense to have an employee resource group for Black employees but not white employees. Fair outcomes may require a process of treating people differently. To be clear, different treatment is not the same as ‘special’ treatment—the latter is tied to favoritism, not equity,” HBR said.
