Setting up a diversity and inclusion working group: A workshop kit

Before you start:

A few important factors will determine how successful a diversity working group can be. The first one is leadership buy-in. If you’re a lone ranger in a team that doesn’t see this as a priority, it will be a lot harder to effect change. Once you’ve established that this is a priority, and have leadership sponsorship that is more than lip service, get to work. Gather your people, kick off the work, establish a baseline, set goals, and GO!

If you need articles to prove why diversity and inclusion matter, beyond the because it’s 2020 or because it is right, there’s plenty out there for how it leads to better business outcomes, including McKinsey’s comprehensive report, Harvard Business Review, and Catalyst, to name a few.

I wrote this a long while ago, and neglected Medium entirely, so some of it is more pre-covid-workshop appropriate. However, collaborative post-it workshops are still pretty easy to do- you can use Miro, Lucidchart or any other collaboration tool for running multi-participant workshops.

Setting up a working group

Try to cap it off at max. 10 people. It’s near impossible to accommodate the calendars of that many people if you try to have any sort of continuity and followthrough, and workshops with more participants than that can drag and get derailed. Depending on how large the company is, how many functions there are etc., make sure different areas of the business are represented (so that each team has a diversity champion in it, rather than one team being in charge); different life experiences and background (make sure the diversity working group isn’t just ‘women and people of colour’ but actually includes a broad range of participants, ages, family status, educational background, ability/disability etc.). Try to make sure there’s at least one member of senior leadership in the group, and a senior member of the people/HR team.

For this, an email/slack/carrier pigeon with a call-to-arms (and in my case, a few emojis to break the wall of text) is enough to get people interested.

Needed equipment:

• In person workshop: Post-its, sharpies, whiteboard or a large wall to arrange post-it notes on, and two colours of dot stickers (for voting)

OR:

• Online workshop: Miro, Lucidchart or any other collaboration tool for running multi-participant workshops, and of course your choice of Google Meet, Zoom or anything your company uses.
• A timer
• Other: set up a channel to communicate what’s happening- both for the group itself and for the wider company to have an idea of what is happening. The more transparent you are, and more support from the wider business, the more successful you’re likely to be. A Slack channel works well, if that’s something you use. Have a central space to store outcomes, actions and links/resources.

Notion.so works well for a shared space to store actions, resources, and outc

Session 1: Kick-off: setting the stage

1. Opening: establish a shared vision- start with an opening exercise, making sure everyone in the room speaks. Have everyone complete the sentence ‘if this were a more diverse workplace, then…’. Give people 1 minute to think, then share in a circle. This will share a feeling of a shared mission.
2. Defining diversity and inclusion: using post it notes, all participants list out as many characteristics as possible. Make sure the discussion of diversity doesn’t just cover race and gender, but also looks at life experience, ability and disability, personality and other factors. 3–4 minutes to write down, 7 min for each person to stand up and stick their post-its up explaining what they’re adding.
3. Recruitment/retention: split a board into two sections, one about getting more diverse people in, and the other around inclusion and accommodating different needs. Each person should write out what processes and touchpoints/dimensions are included in each category. [e.g. recruitment: language used in job ads, types of events the company participates in; inclusion — WFH policy, benefits, leadership etc.]. 5 minutes for people to write their post its, then each person presents and puts them up on the wall/board. If things are covered multiple times- cluster them when putting them up.
4. Ranking by urgency/importance: each participant gets 5 red stickers, and uses them as they wish to vote for the areas they think are most important. Then- same thing with ranking of urgency. Put the post its up on a wall/board in a matrix of urgency/importance, with the top right quadrant being most urgent & important. Discuss to see whether the team agrees with the priorities.
5. Homework/next steps: assuming you’ve mapped out the top 10 topics for the company to focus on, each person picks a post-it with the area they’ll be looking into. You now need to establish a baseline metric, set realistic goals, and have examples of actions to take. So, each participant takes away an area and does the following:
   — Establish metrics; how do you measure this; where do we currently sit
   — Bring a few examples of best practice or actions: e.g. a person looking at language used in job ads can look at software that scans for bias, and run current ads through it to establish where the starting point is.
6. Next up: close by explaining that the group will meet to review the above tasks, define goals, and take actions.
7. Check-out/close the workshop: Describe how you feel about the task ahead in one word.

Following the workshop: have a central repository for tracking what’s happening. notion.so is great for this, but use whatever the company uses- trello, google drive, intranet… Make sure you summarise the key points: what we did, what the actions are, and what each person in the group is going to look into.

Session 2: baseline metrics, goals, actions

Make sure not to lose momentum- have this booked in about two weeks after the kickoff, and make sure there’s a reminder for the ‘homework’- so everyone comes to the session prepared with metrics to propose, best practice examples, and where the baseline is.

1. Opener: ‘Tell us about one cool thing you learned about diversity over the past two weeks’. As everyone should have been reading up on best practice, this is a good way to warm up.
2. Share: each person has 3 minutes to explain how their chosen area can be measured, what the current state is, and share any cool best practice examples they’ve come across. Divide a board into a few sections — the top row should list out the different areas people were looking at (at Bud, we organised these in a more or less consecutive order- from recruitment to retention and culture). Have a section for metrics, one for current state, and one for goal.
3. Close: ‘Where do you think we will improve the most?’
4. Next steps: send out a summary of where things stand, and actions for the team. Then, separately, send out an update to the company to show them what’s been going on, where people can get involved, and what the working group has been up to.

Session 3: milestones and timelines — checking in on progress

In this session, we follow up by looking at milestones, progress, and remaining actions+ timelines. This doesn’t actually require a workshop format, as each person in the group will know what they’re responsible for. Make sure you send out a reminder on Slack/email/however you communicate so everyone can bring an update of where they stand.

…And then what?

Well, hopefully, by now, a few weeks have passed since you started, and the group has already identified some main issues to tackle, ways to measure them, and steps to take.

Keep going. Check in. Set ambitious goals, communicate within the company and outside of it, be accountable and try to make tech a better, more inclusive place that represents more than the 1%.

Resources and links for best practice and places to get started:

• Buffer do some pretty admirable and very accessible work around this, including their Diversity dashboard and this incredible list of resources
• Awesome diversity on Github — they define it perfectly as ‘A curated list of amazingly awesome articles, websites and resources about diversity in technology.’
• Ustwo London also have some good resources around gender, especially around the gender pay gap
• Atomico’s guidebook on inclusion in tech
• Fast Company- actionable ways to increase diversity