Achieving Authentic Diversity Requires Selecting Suitable Fact-based Strategies
Perry C. Douglas
June 25, 2024
Just recently I wrote an article about how diversity programs don’t work, and that the data shows organizations should try and authentically achieve diversity, internally, and on their own. That quick reactive and ill-considered, disingenuous, and emotionally-based responses from outside forces are void of any reality-based strategy and usually end up being failures.
The other day, a friend of mine forwarded to me an article titled Why even ‘woke’ companies are turning their backs on HR ‘snake-oil’ sellers.
The article was based on a study that found “HR departments at some of Britain’s biggest businesses have recently been feeling defensive and on the backfoot.”
This is in line, however, with the data I put forward in a past article “The evidence shows that a top-down, forced emotional pursuit of racial equity or an Anti-Black-Racism approach to diversity is not effective. These types of programs have tended to be reactionary, trendy, feel-good and politically expedient. Misguided and ineffective, they have become more of a distraction than anything else. Even counterproductive and harmful to the Black communities they were meant to serve.”
Again, for the record, this is not an attempt to speak against diversity in the workplace. Just like in society, diversity strengthens communities and so too, workplace communities. So diversity is absolutely necessary.
The point looking to be made here is how we can genuinely go about selecting the right strategies to effectively influence diversity in the workplace.
Again, strategy is the foundation: Harvard Business Review “found that the top-down approach with the usual tools — diversity training, hiring tests, performance ratings, grievance systems — tend to make things worse, not better. This kind of force-feeding can activate bias and encourage rebellion.”
The article produced data analysis that shows how top-down outside consultants are part of the problem.
Hiring outside consultants ends up “Wasting millions of pounds on pointless diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes,” the report says.
This independently commissioned report by Kemi Badenoch, the UK Business Secretary, discovered that popular/trendy and so-called ESG (environmental, social and governance) practices had little to no tangible impact on boosting diversity or reducing prejudice.
Ms. Badenoch went on to warn British companies against outsourcing or delegating to workplace training consultants with “potentially conflicting incentives” who are ultimately selling “snake oil”.
And this is the problem — consultants! Like bloodsuckers, after the tragic George Floyd event consultants jumped onto the wokeness train, parlaying DEI into a new disingenuous business opportunity and industry.
Badenoch told The Times: “There are lots of people who just cook up stuff and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got a course. Why don’t you buy my course?’ … They’ve been making money out of selling stuff that is not evidence-based.” Badenoch’s report was also damning for HR departments who are now facing questions from their superiors about why they fell prey to so-called snake oil sellers in the first place.
Many of these decisions were driven by consultant firms rolling out divisive training programmes in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, designed to spread awareness around unconscious bias, white privilege and gender pronouns. These consultants have no concern, however, about whether this would be good for businesses and society. They only saw dollar signs and sold contrived quick fixes without any data to back up their hastily designed bogus programs.
So the challenge now for organizations authentically seeking diversity “has been spotting the DEI snake oil sellers in an increasingly crowded market of management consultants, all vying for shrinking budgets.”
Big consultants particularly, led by the usual suspects like McKinsey and Company, PWC, Boston Consulting etc., created an ESG industry, championing dubious diversity, equity and inclusion as the “magic key to unlock higher profits and productivity.”
They pushed that being seen as an “inclusive” employer would allow them to access broader pools of talent, recruiting employees who reflected the customers they were trying to sell to. The most nonsense part was that it would even help the stock price of publicly traded companies that had robust ESG policies.
That one, of course, was championed by none other than BlackRock — who are constantly making up fake concepts to sell more mutual fund products and collect higher fees.
Researchers have cast doubts on studies by consultancy giant McKinsey which claimed more diverse companies earn higher profits, often cited by consultants to justify increased DEI spending. However, a study in Econ Journal Watch in April found that McKinsey’s lauded studies were based on data that cannot be replicated.
The report also says that the results show a group-think mentality to DEI/ESG, which feeds through to bad business decisions. Led by outside consultants that end up being hyper-counterproductive — alienating customers and the diverse workforce they set out to attract.
The results have been that businesses and organizations, “once eager to spend thousands of pounds on winning DEI accolades and awards, are now quietly backtracking.” The DEI backlash is happening globally. Zoom, Meta, Tesla, Lyft and many more are just a tiny few of the organizations that have responded to the backlash by slashing or eliminating diversity teams.
Further, HR teams are now demanding that external consultants prove to business leaders that their DEI schemes will actually boost sales, performance, employee retention and productivity. Of course, they have not been able to prove any of that.
So unless schemes can be effectively measured, business leaders will quickly lose interest and diversity and society will suffer.
The report also warned that “HR consultants” only pretend to be more data-driven but simply “repackage” their old offerings with the latest corporate catchphrases, buzzwords, and nice PowerPoint presentations. Just selling “snake oil” at the end of the day.
There is no integrity in the consulting business, many are peddling unproven remedies said one consultant from the article. Nevertheless, with the increased scrutiny on HR/DEI and ESG consultants who don’t have the evidence to back up their claims; will be sifted from the market.
A consulting-free world
There must be more of a focused strategy approach for diversity and enterprise value. The quick-fix and disingenuous approaches simply have failed and have created a backlash against the programs that they’re supposed to help.
For strategies to be effective, they must be data-driven, fact-based and analytical, toward generating good insights that are empirically warrantable. Which can then be intelligently applied to develop proper bottom-up internally driven strategies, in the best overall interest of organizations and society.
Numerous proven diversity tactics have been able to move the needle, such as recruiting initiatives, mentoring programs, and diversity task forces. The common denominator was that those successes were bottom-up and employee-driven — internalized developed processes and strategies.
So force-feeding of diversity programs can activate bias rather than stamp it out. And social scientists have found people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy.
Three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives extensively, found that companies get better traction and results when they don’t employ top-down control tactics on employees.
The data also shows that more authentic bottom-up approaches like increasing on-the-job contact with minority workers, B2B and B2C collaborations and community involvement promote social accountability. Making people less reluctant to resist, giving them more incentive to engage when they feel it’s not forced. They become more open, fair-minded and empathetic.
“Decades of social science research point to a simple truth: You won’t get managers on board by blaming and shaming them with rules and reeducation.” Instead, “interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses.”
More studies show that voluntary training evokes the opposite response (“I chose to show up, so I must be pro-diversity”), leading to better results: increases of 9% to 13% in Black men, Hispanic men, and Asian American men and women in management five years out (with no decline in white or Black women).
Research from the University of Toronto reinforces those findings: In a study where white subjects read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward Blacks. When people felt pressure to agree with it, the reading strengthened their bias against Blacks. When they felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced bias.
The Harvard study quoted earlier highlights three strategies that several companies have gotten consistently more positive results with voluntary tactics. Strategies that don’t focus on forcing people. There are three basic principles: engage managers in solving the problem, expose them to people from different groups, and encourage social accountability for change.
So the more effective strategies have proven to be the ones that have been more genuinely engaging and empowering of humans to solve their problems themselves. They tend to take ownership that way.
Contact between groups can also lessen biases because their preconceived biases become diminished by the reality of their human interactions. Social accountability, encourages people to take responsibility and be socially accountable, as no reasonable person wants to be out of step with societal norms or seen to be biased, or worse a bigot.
Consider this field study conducted by MIT’s Sloan School of Management: A firm found it consistently gave African Americans smaller raises than whites, even when they had identical job titles and performance ratings. The study suggested transparency to activate social accountability. The firm then began to post each unit’s average performance rating and pay raise by race and gender. Once managers realized that employees, peers, and superiors would know which parts of the company favoured whites, the gap in raises all but disappeared.
These results by no means make diversity and inclusion automatic but it does say that selecting the right strategy is paramount. And that success is driven by facts. So building the right data-driven, advanced analytical strategies and applying them effectively with relevance and empathy, creates useful and reliable insights which can applied bottom-up to real-life societal problems. Ultimately generating highly useful and relevant strategies that can move the workplace and society forward benefits humanity.
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