What Is Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) in the Workplace?
DEI stands for Diversity Equity & Inclusion and is a practice area that aims to support organisations create a working environment where everyone can feel understood and catered for. The acronym DEI or variations of such EDI have come to encapsulate what it means to be a responsible business and creating a business culture that allows everyone regardless of their circumstances or demographic characteristics to thrive. However, the component parts of the acronym have different definitions and in order to be able to effectively implement these principles it is important to understand what the different components are.
“Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.”
— William Sloane Coffin, Jr
Diversity
Diversity is integral to the survival of any organisation in terms of adapting to change, innovation and appealing to a broad customer base. Without diversity you have a monoculture which is not only deceivingly comfortable but leads to dangerous blind spots where changing dynamics become pitfalls rather than opportunities as everyone thinks and approaches challenges in the same way.
Diversity describes the variety of different demographics that you should have throughout all levels of a business and within its operational teams. This includes a balanced representation based on societal demographics across gender, ethnicity, social background, disabilities and personal circumstances. For an organisation to be considered truly diverse, the expectations would be that its workforce should reflect the societies in which the company operates. The opposite of diversity is homogeneity, which in a fast changing world poses a risk of stagnation, lack of innovation and limited decision making due to people with similar perspectives and lived experiences maintaining the status quo. This phenomenon is often termed as group think
Equity
Equity defines an approach, which acknowledges inbuilt or systemic inequality that applies to people considered “different” and attempts to intervene so workplace practices provide everyone a fair and equitable opportunity to succeed. Differences, which vary from the established normalcy, are often immutable and can cause professional obstacles for underrepresented groups; equity is about mitigating this by acknowledging societal inequalities and therefore different starting points of individuals in order to create fairness of opportunity. An example of equity is contextual recruitment where a candidate’s academic results are considered in relation to average result in their school rather than being measured more broadly against higher resourced schools from the private system. The opposite of Equity would be an assumed meritocracy where everybody is treated the same without acknowledging societal and systemic barriers.
“Diversity is where you count the people, inclusion is where you make the people count!”
-Diversify
Inclusion
The difference between having diversity and having inclusion is the sense of belonging and value that people who are different and outside of the established culture feel. A diversity programme, which is biased in favour of the established culture and only reflects those values, will suffer from inclusion insufficiency, which will erode any initial diversity gains that the programme has achieved.
The established culture, in addition to assimilating people from diverse backgrounds, also needs to be able to absorb new values and ways of thinking and use diversity initiatives as a conduit for achieving this. If a diversity programme becomes a one-way conversation, which is about exporting values and ways of thinking, meaning an individual’s success is measured by the degree of conformity or how well any difference is minimised, then the opportunity is lost. In addition, there should be leadership from the top, but with responsibility (meaning resources, penalties and rewards) spread across management, but centrally accountable.
Inclusion is the action taken to create a culture that allows everyone, whether they have differences or not, to feel they are valued. The opposite of inclusion is exclusion, where there is no action taken to cater to people’s different needs and circumstances, and the expectation is that everyone should just adapt to fit in. However, inclusion involves focusing on differences to create understanding and empathy. Without active inclusion, the lived experiences of colleagues who are different from the majority are often not understood because their experiences or circumstances are not the default. Being the default group affords privilege because this comes with being understood, therefore automatically belonging, being catered to routinely, which means people may be unaware of experiencing it.
It is also important to acknowledge intersectionality when speaking about being inclusive because someone can experience multiple forms of exclusion or they may even experience privilege because of one characteristic matching the default and feel oblivious to this privilege, an example being a non disabled woman of colour may experience discrimination as a result of her race and gender but at the same time experience privilege as a result of not having a disability.
