ความหลากหลาย ความเท่าเทียม และการมีส่วนร่วม (DEI )
ความหลากหลาย ความเท่าเทียม และการมีส่วนร่วม คืออะไร?
ความหลากหลาย (Diversity) คือการมีอยู่ของความแตกต่างที่อาจรวมถึงเชื้อชาติ เพศ ศาสนา รสนิยมทางเพศ ชาติพันธุ์ สัญชาติ สถานะทางเศรษฐกิจและสังคม ภาษา การไร้ความสามารถ อายุ ความมุ่งมั่นทางศาสนา หรือมุมมองทางการเมือง
ความเท่าเทียม (Equity) คือกระบวนการของความเป็นธรรม เป็นนโยบายที่จะดำเนินการเพื่อให้แน่ใจว่า กระบวนการและขั้นตอนส่งเสริมความยุติธรรม ความเป็นกลาง รวมถึงการกระจายทรัพยากรโดยสถาบันหรือระบบ
การมีส่วนร่วม (Inclusion) เป็นผลลัพธ์เพื่อให้แน่ใจว่า ผู้ที่มีความหลากหลายรู้สึกและหรือได้รับการต้อนรับ การมีส่วนร่วมอย่างเต็มที่ในกระบวนการตัดสินใจ และโอกาสในการพัฒนาภายในองค์กรหรือกลุ่ม
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace means making all your employees feel involved and engaged so that they can be their whole, authentic selves inside and outside of the office.
It means recognizing, accepting, and appreciating everyone for who they are and what they bring to enhance the employee experience.
24. สุดท้าย คือรายงานประจาปี ความหลากหลาย ความเท่าเทียม และการมีส่วนร่วม ของ Stanford
Graduate School of Business ที่ได้นาการวางแผน DEI ไปใช้จริง รวมถึงการขยายขอบเขตความ
หลากหลาย และการจัดตั้ง "สภา DEI ของนักศึกษา คณาจารย์ และเจ้าหน้าที่"
25. กรณีศึกษาทางธุรกิจ เพื่อจัดลาดับความสาคัญของ DEI
การศึกษาล่าสุดจานวนมาก ระบุถึงผลลัพธ์ที่ดีกว่าเมื่อมีการให้ความสาคัญกับ DEI
จากรายงานขององค์การแรงงานระหว่างประเทศประจาปี ค.ศ. 2019 บริษัทต่างๆ ที่มี วัฒนธรรม
และนโยบายทางธุรกิจของการมีส่วนร่วม (inclusive business cultures and policies) พบว่า มี
นวัตกรรมเพิ่มขึ้ น 59% และการประเมินความสนใจและความต้องการของผู้บริโภคดีขึ้ น 37%
นี่คือการสร้างแนวคิดและการคิดล่วงหน้า ที่บริษัทต่างๆ ในปัจจุบัน จาเป็นต้องอยู่รอดและประสบ
ความสาเร็จ
What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?
Diversity is the presence of difference that may include race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective.
What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?
Equity is the process of fairness. The policy that one would implement to ensure processes and procedures promote justness, impartiality, and distribution of resources by institutions or systems.
What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?
Inclusion is an outcome to ensure those that are diverse actually feel and/or are welcomed. To the degree to which diverse individuals are able to participate fully in the decision-making processes and development opportunities within an organization or group.
Why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Matters?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace means making all your employees feel involved and engaged so that they can be their whole, authentic selves inside and outside of the office.
It means recognizing, accepting, and appreciating everyone for who they are and what they bring to enhance the employee experience.
By embracing DEI, you are building an organizational culture centered around the needs of your employees so that they can learn, inspire, and do their best work, which directly translates to success throughout your organization.
And the business case for DEI is stronger than ever, with diverse companies outperforming their less diverse peers. According to McKinsey & Company, organizations in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity among executives were 36% more likely to achieve above-average profitability.
What Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Really Mean
The workplace is changing in profound ways. From the ways we communicate, to corporate culture and how we do our jobs on a daily basis; the pace of change can be dizzying. Add to the mix new technologies and the permanent marks of a global pandemic. It’s easy to see why companies must constantly innovate their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.
What Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Really Mean
This is especially true for talent acquisition and hiring, where the competition for top people is as steep as ever. As is the incentive for building workplaces around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
After all, it’s people at the core of innovation and inclusive groups tend to yield better results.
Diversity
There’s a tendency to refer to people, or a person, as “diverse.” Even with the best intentions, referring to people this way feels a lot like euphemism for “outside the majority,” or “different from the dominant group.”
This framing of diversity is misleading at best, because it assumes we’re all the same. At worst, it’s a damaging oversimplification that alienates people, rather than include them. It’s a problem we’ve seen echoed among many job seekers, talent acquisition specialists, and HR professionals.
Blanket treatment of diversity doesn’t work because all perceptions of diversity are the same.
In our own experience, we’ve found that some groups, such as millennials, perceive so-called “workplace diversity” as a combination of many different backgrounds. At the same time, older generations tend to view diversity more through the lens of equal and fair representation.
We like to conceptualize diversity as an embodiment of a group’s composition, likely made up of many or all of the diversity types listed above. It’s a composite of the various differences represented—and talking to each other—therein.
Take the following Staff Diversity Numbers, 2019 from NPR, for instance. While this annual report might look like a simple breakdown of the “percentage of people represented from a given group,” it’s more like a starting point for understanding how those percentages intersect and impact the company’s culture, morale, and objectives.
There are insights embedded within this chart, insights that might help inform new diversity initiatives.
Equity
Whereas diversity refers to all the many ways that people differ, equity is about creating fair access, opportunity, and advancement for all those different people. It’s about creating a fair playing field, to use a familiar metaphor.
Here’s a useful illustration of equity from the Northwestern Health Unit.
Of course, issues of access, opportunity, and advancement extend far beyond how we get ourselves to work.
Women, for example, are historically underrepresented, as are various minorities throughout the United States and the rest of the world. It’s a problem that persists even today (as the data we shared above helps to show).
Successful equity initiatives, then, must build fairness and equal treatment into the very fabric of an organization.
This requires a design for creating, maintaining, and protecting equity organization-wide—a framework that supports equitable talent screening, hiring, workplace standards, and so on.
Inclusion
There’s a common misconception that environments in which diversity and equity are priorities naturally beget inclusion.
You’ve built equitable practices into your organizational processes, after all, leading to far more diverse, well-represented teams.
People have to feel included in a company like this, right?
Not always, as it turns out.
Inclusion is the extent to which various team members, employees, and other people feel a sense of belonging and value within a given organizational setting.
The important distinction here is that even among the most diverse teams, there’s not always a feeling of inclusion.
Women might be well represented at the senior management level, but still not feel included due to longstanding gender norms, salary discrepancies, and other factors.
Evaluating an organization’s inclusion starts with empathy. Why? Consider the fact that some 48% of employees believe that respect the most important to creating an inclusive workplace (Quantum Workplace report).
That means not only respecting people’s differences but considering the environment more broadly—from their point of view. Namely:
1. Balance of experience for less represented groups.
2. Barriers to entry both structural and societal that might be at play.
3. Blind spots and assumptions that might be working against a more inclusive environment.
Again, it’s useful to consider these aspects of inclusion from the employee’s point of view. Do they feel a sense of community and connection? Do they feel like they contribute on a daily basis? Do they feel a shared sense of purpose with their coworkers and peers?
What Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Looks Like at Leading Organizations
Transparency is an essential part of successful DEI initiatives.
This is why so many of the world’s leading brands now provide annual DEI reports that are publicly available online.
These reports depict useful insights into the state of DEI today, as well as specific measures and programs that companies are implementing to get the needle moving in the right direction.
The Google 2020 Diversity Annual Report comes to mind.
Here we see one of the world’s leading tech companies not only reporting on its diversity in hiring for the year (see the graphic below) but detailing the specific work it is doing to address inequities and obstacles to education in the communities in which Google works.
The Ford Foundation also publishes an annual diversity and inclusion update. The report details high-level diversity metrics across the organization, as well as specific DEI initiatives, such as the development of operationalized “inclusive leadership competencies” and “organizational citizenship behaviors.”
Finally, here is the Annual Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Report from Stanford Graduate School of Business. As you’ll see, Stanford has put DEI planning into action, including expanded diversity outreach and the formation of a new “DEI council of students, faculty, and staff.”
The Business Case for Prioritizing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Many recent studies indicate better results when they prioritize DEI.
According to a 2019 global report from the International Labour Organization, companies with more “inclusive business cultures and policies” see a 59% increase in innovation and 37% better “assessment of consumer interest and demand.”
This is the kind of idea generation and forward-thinking that companies now need to survive and succeed.
Indeed, the benefits of a mature Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Program extends its reach to financial outcomes, as well.
A Kellogg Insight study of 49 gender-diversity announcements by tech companies from 2014 to 2018 revealed that “if two companies released their diversity figures on the same day, the stock price of the company with 40 percent women would increase by one percentage point more than the stock price of a company with 30 percent women.”
So we know the shareholders are listening.
This shareholder might also be interested in another study from McKinsey & Company, which found that organizations with gender-diverse executive teams were 25% more likely to outperform on profitability, while those with ethnically and culturally diverse executive teams were 36% more likely to achieve above-average profitability.
The ongoing challenges of inequity and underrepresentation
As clear as the ties between DEI and business success might be, underrepresentation remains a very real problem. The ILO study of companies from 1991 and 2018 also showed that women’s representation in management was 36% at its best (in North America) and 10% at its worst (in the Middle East and North Africa).
And the 2020 diversity report from LinkedIn provides another window into the state of play today, in which we see that, despite the company’s best efforts, latinos, black people, and people living with disabilities are still severely outnumbered.
Attracting top talent and supporting DEI go hand in hand
While this small sampling of marketplace diversity trends isn’t all bad, it’s not all good, either.
There’s still a lot of work to do. Beyond securing productivity and financial gains, businesses need to create diverse workplaces if they want any chance of attracting the next generation of talent.
Attracting top talent and supporting DEI go hand in hand
For many job seekers, diverse work environments are a must-have requirement for prospective employers. According to a report from Glassdoor, “67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities.”
Making Formal Strides Toward DEI Maturity
What successful organizations have in common is formalized DEI framework, built on three core pillars:
1. Clearly defined and disseminated stance on DEI. In DEI mature companies, diversity, equity, and inclusion permeate the company’s mission, strategies, and practices in ways visible to the entire organization2. Specific plans and programs in support of DEI. Words, of course, only go so far. DEI mature companies have in place, or plans for, things like forward-thinking hiring and onboarding practices, DEI steering committees, and regular people and culture programs.
3. A means for measuring and reporting on performance. Beyond ideating and launching DEI programs, most mature companies have robust means for measuring and monitoring the performance of these programs, including supporting software and regular reporting.
Indeed, to be successful, diversity, equity, and inclusion have to be comprehensive—a top-to-bottom business strategy, rather than just an HR program.
To be clear, the definitions and distinctions we’ve made between diversity, equity, and inclusion will depend on the industry, business needs, and context.
However, this kind of closer scrutiny of DEI is necessary for laying the foundations for a robust and sustainable DEI program.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace
The purpose of DEI training is to encourage self awareness, cultural competency, and empathy in employees; addressing unconscious bias, as well promoting as an overall safe, welcoming workplace environment for those of all race, creed, and ethnicity.
The implementation, monitoring, and upkeep of a DEI informed workplace improves coworker relations and teamwork, with growing evidence showing the value of time spent on these programs.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Academia
Though the term and application was more prominent in the civil rather than the corporate sector, many of the academic institutions started making commitments to DEI in different ways, including creating documents, programs and appointing dedicated staff members.
Information on DEI for both students and professors is now widespread in colleges and universities, with many schools requiring training and meetings on the topic.
Another angle to DEI in education considers public schools and general K-12 education. The focus here is on teachers and administrative staff. Extending this lens of equity to lower education is duplicating what has already been seen in higher education: the creation and upkeep of a safe and supported environment for diverse students.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Medicine
Acknowledging the importance of diversity of awareness in medicine and treatment has been a massive step in the medical world. The realm of both academic and applied medicine has been historically white, cisgender, and straight, and many diverse individuals have spoken about alienating experiences in this field.
DEI is vital in medicine as physical differences in diverse individuals that in the past have led to improper care and less than ideal interactions with medical staff. It has also been shown that greater diversity can strengthen both research teams and patient relations.
“Diversity” describes a wide variety of differences that may exist amongst people in any setting, including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual identity, disability, neurodiversity, and others.
“Equity” is the concept of providing equal opportunities through a personalized approach, utilizing unequal distribution of resources to ‘level the playing field.’ Applying equity includes factoring in a variety of disparities within society that affect individuals to varying levels.
“Inclusion” details the desired outcome; ensuring that those who fall under the title of “diverse” genuinely feel safe, welcome, and included. Inclusion is a step past integration, where diverse individuals blend completely into the environment without a second thought.