Are you accountable to the experience you are inviting people to when hiring diverse talent?

DEI goes beyond hiring. After recruiting employees from marginalized groups, hiring is still the beginning of the journey. Creating an equitable workplace means you not only hire POC and employees from marginalized groups, you also support, nurture, and retain those employees. In short, hold yourself accountable to the experience you create for them. 

That work often falls to the marginalized people you've hired, leaving them to advocate for harassment-free workplaces, address microaggressions, and create opportunities for mentorship and development. In 2020, the human resources consulting firm Mercer found only 3% of executives in US industries surveyed were people of color. They also found that diversity diminishes as rank increases across all industries. That means that if BIPOC want to stay in an industry long enough to make it to executive ranks, they need to take care of themselves and each other. It also means that without those supports, companies aren't retaining POC.

Some companies have employee resource groups (ERGs) where employees from marginalized groups can share their experiences with workplace harassment or find support and professional development. These are often started by employees volunteering their time and capacity—say hello to your leadership talent. But even if you're not seeing these kinds of conversations and there's no official ERG, you can trust that your marginalized employees are sharing their frustrations with and strategies for navigating the systems that favor dominant culture in your workplace. They're just not sharing them with you.

What can you do as a manager to retain and support your marginalized employees?

1. Invest in them. Provide a budget for ERGs that can support events, retreats, or mentorship. Encourage leadership development for employees who demonstrate independence, reliability, and community-mindedness. These qualities might not look the same in people outside of dominant culture, so acknowledge that they're working around cultural norms that don't include them. 

2. Don't tokenize or objectify them. It's common to rely on marginalized employees to represent the diversity of the company in publicity or recruitment. There's nothing wrong with celebrating your employees and their work, but if you only highlight your BIPOC and LGBTQ team members when you need to impress outsiders, you're reducing them to props. 

3. Audit your company culture. Relying on your employees from marginalized groups to identify areas of inequity is an undue burden. It's not their responsibility to make the environment work for them. Evaluate your company's practices, recruitment pipelines, and anything that's done because it's the way it's always been done.

Ultimately, creating a diverse workplace is exactly what will keep your company relevant and profitable- it also requires investment in the culture you are inviting folks to be a part of. And if you are looking for support in doing just that, The Opt-In is ready to partner with you.