Meet your DEI goals in a time of economic insecurity.

As macroeconomic headwinds impact many sectors and companies, DEI practitioners and business leaders may be confronted with the challenge of delivering on their commitment to DEI while budgets are being squeezed.

This comes at a time when the work of building equity into our companies is hardly “complete”. According to a nationally representative survey of LGBTQIA+ conducted by the Center for American Progress, two in three transgender people have experienced some form of discrimination in the previous year, including 65% of transgender people of colour, in the USA.

When 44% of trans folks report that they are more often than not treated as if they were not smart, compared to 21% of cisgender heterosexual respondents, it is evident that workplace inequity as it relates to pay, promotion and leadership is a reflection of the wider transphobic environment we live in.

Particular realities play out for Asian American women in the workplace, who experience racialised and gendered sexual harassment that denies them access to leadership opportunities, as studied by Margaret Chin. Evidence from LeanIn.org suggests that Asian women are often unfairly overlooked at work, even when their overall performance ratings are strong. Further, Asian women are less likely than other groups of women to receive positive feedback on their leadership abilities.

We could go on and on and on. When faced with such profound inequities, the question for DEI practitioners remains: how do we act in service of equity for marginalised communities in these current economic conditions?

The days of awareness raising are over. It’s time for people to build the requisite knowledge, skills and tools to robustly act at the cultural and structural level of any company. The focus needs to be two-fold, addressing the cultural level and the structural level:

1. The cultural level

We need to level-set across the whole company, creating shared paradigms for employees to understand how inequity shows up around them, and combining this with practical skills to make different, better, daily micro decisions in service of equity.

A workplace culture can be defined as a summary of the prevailing goals, values, practices, beliefs, and ways of working in a company’s ecosystem. A company culture may be inhibit or further equitable change. To increase the likelihood that folks will prioritise making equitable daily decisions, we need to provide staff with the resources to a) understand inequity when it’s showing up b) have the skill to disrupt it when they identify it.

There are a few options to give people access to these steps in a cost effective manner. The question becomes, how do you strike the right balance between robust upskilling, length of education and cost?

Short, sharp unconscious bias training might emerge as a recommendation. However, we know that unconscious bias training has been highly deployed but has limited impact historically. The evidence for its effectiveness is questionable, largely because ‘unconscious bias’ misdiagnoses the nature of inequity and how it is generated, enabled and maintained in our workplaces.

The lowest cost option is no doubt an e-learning solution, whatever the content. But, as with all offerings, all DEI e-learning aren’t necessarily equal in quality. If you pursue an e-learning option, consider the following as you evaluate solutions:

• Interactivity – learners can’t be passive for the knowledge and skills to take hold;
• Foundational knowledge – does it support understanding of what a system of inequity is, how to apply an intersectional lens and what equity means in practice?
• Workplace scenarios – participants need to have an opportunity to put their new knowledge into action with real life scenarios; and
• Engagement – no one wants to be bored. Learning needs to be dynamic. Including multimedia in the experience will help prevent a lack of engagement.

For an even lower cost option, leaders could also pursue a library of self-guided learning, such as blogs, podcasts and videos, many of which are likely to be freely available on the internet. The disadvantage of these free resources is that they are likely to be focused on “awareness” vs action.

The challenge becomes ensuring that this resource will be effective if people aren’t personally motivated to invest their time in learning. Leaders need to create the conditions to encourage people to engage in this learning. Perhaps this looks like insisting all team managers allocate 30 mins every three weeks to a free flowing discussion of one of the resources with their teams.

Another way this could look is creating a complete company curriculum calendar, where everyone will read/listen/watch a set curriculum on the same cadence throughout the year. Depending on your internal practices, you may also encourage people to post their insights on company blogs to generate momentum.

2. The structural level

Those with the greatest power and influence in companies need to be up-tooled to know which company-wide levers to pull and re-design to scale equity through policy, process and product.

Structural change is hard. It’s hard because it’s actually a deep technical skill that relies on precise and specific understandings of the mechanisms of inequity, historically and in the present.

Structural change offers the greatest opportunity to scale equitable transformation that avoids the need to rely on winning individuals’ “hearts and minds,” which won’t ever be 100% guaranteed across your staff body. It is also the most cost effective approach to scalable transformation, though in many ways it can be the heaviest lift.

“Structures” – a term that is regularly used in DEI without consistency – can be imagined through the analogy of a transport network: the roads, roundabouts, junctions, traffic lights, stop signs, pavements, speed limits, speed cameras and so on. A transport network is the infrastructure for how people move through space. In our society at large, and therefore in our companies, there are equivalent “transport networks” that advantage some people and disadvantage others, based on their identities.

Working on internal company structures means working on the internal transport network and designing it so that harm is as unlikely as possible and that it is, at its best, optimised for equitable outcomes for the marginalized people that are moving through it.

An example of an internal structure is your recruitment policy. It might be that you redesign this structure so that all interviews are done virtually; that you automatically instigate live captioning; that you pay travel and other costs if they are required to those who can’t afford them; that you ask and use people’s pronouns accurately; that you do not ask people for their address; that you do not do background checks and that you do not require people to reveal any prior criminal history.

Taking an issue-first approach, instead of a single-identity first approach, will also allow you to be strategic and high impact focused in how you further equity, as well as affording you the space to act intersectionally.

Re-designing internal structures to optimise for equity establishes the guardrails for what is encouraged and permissible from staff. It doesn’t require the re-wiring of individuals’ brains, or winning individuals’ hearts and minds, because you are re-wiring the company instead.

As any committed DEI, HR or business leader knows, whether it’s across Race, Sexuality, Gender, Disability or faith, inequities shape the working world profoundly and we aren’t doing enough to stop their impact in their tracks.

The transformative impact of anything we implement will always be compromised to the extent investment in efforts are limited. Just as that new IT system won’t design and integrate itself, so too disrupting historical systems of inequity that permeate all aspects of our society and working life today, won’t happen on its own.

Budget constraints should not serve as an excuse to fail to deliver on DEI goals – company leaders need to take an intentional, inclusive approach to building an equitable workplace and take advantage of all available tools.

Hanna Naima McCloskey is the Founder and CEO of Fearless Futures in London, UK.