5 Barriers to IDE Progress

What’s keeping diverse talent from advancing in your organization—and how can you fix it?

By Alyxandra Smith and Karla Torres

Without a doubt, people are the most valuable resource in an organization. They represent your brand, product, and culture. You need teams that are diverse and inclusive to keep your products and services appealing, relevant, and connected with your consumers.

Finding, retaining, and advancing diverse talent is an element of your inclusion, diversity, and equity (IDE) strategy that can inform the long-term and sustained success of your brand, company, and clients. Some organizations struggle to turn their ambitions to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce into actions that deliver results. Let’s take a look at five barriers that might be preventing diverse talent advancement in organizations and some practical steps that you can take to overcome those challenges.

Barrier #1: Your job listings affect your recruiting pipeline

A job listing outlines the responsibilities of a position and the desired skills, experience, and abilities to complete a job effectively. Being one of the first things a new applicant may see when it comes to your organization, a job listing is an opportunity to communicate your values. Many organizations, however, use biased wording in job listings. Although this may seem like a minor issue, biased wording can change candidates’ perceptions about the diversity of the workplace. This may cause diverse candidates to avoid applying for the position altogether. This is a loss for talent acquisition teams working to support IDE initiatives and a loss for companies since diverse teams are positively correlated with better financial performance.

Some language biases in job listings can manifest as both gender and racial biases. For example, a job listing that heavily focuses on masculine wording such as “aggressive,” “assertive,” or “competitive” may deter women from applying. Another example is a job listing for a database-related job that includes terminology such as “master/slave.” This isn’t as common today, but there are still companies that use this type of language (e.g., “master data”).

If you want to make your company more diverse and inclusive, start by looking at a few of your recent listings. What diction are you using? How does your use of masculine wording compare to the feminine? Do your listings reflect any other implicit biases? What changes can you make in your job listings and hiring process to be more inclusive? Avoiding biased language in job listings is an easy step to take to improve the chances of diverse talent entering your recruiting pipeline.

Barrier #2: Your performance review process undercuts your diverse workforce

Performance reviews are intended to be objective, but unfortunately it is common to let biased thinking slip into this process. More often than not, employees strongly disagree that their performance reviews are fair. When you start splicing and dicing the data, that line of fairness only gets worse for underrepresented groups. For example, one study found that African Americans and women were less likely to get good ratings, and that ratings were more favorable for people who shared the same race as the rater. If there’s already so much distrust in the performance review process, can there be any benefit to pushing your organization’s IDE strategy? Yes, and if done intentionally, it can be an essential tool to help create the kind of company culture that embraces diversity in a practical and performance-driven way.

At its foundation, performance reviews can be unfair due to biases, whether conscious or not. A first step to ensuring your performance review system is equitable is to simply be aware of what common types of preconceptions there are and how they can manifest in the workplace. From there, ensure that your organization understands what these biases are and where they may be manifesting themselves in the performance management process and beyond. This is a good opportunity to bring in outside help to educate employees how to spot their own predispositions and take steps to overcome them. Beyond this, your organization needs to make sure that your goal is to remove prejudices from all processes as much as possible, and in doing so help support your organization’s IDE strategy. Eliminating biases is a continuous process that requires everyone in the organization to reconsider a number of their own views and actions and recommit to creating a more equitable work environment. But in doing so, you are supporting IDE for the business, for your people, and for your customers.

Barrier #3: Lack of allyship

Whether it be through corporate emails, social media, or company-wide meetings, countless organizations have denounced racism over the past year. It is very important to show that solidarity with underrepresented groups in your organization. Beyond these statements, has the organization attempted to change processes that support structural racism and other barriers holding certain groups back from advancement? Most white employees see themselves as allies to people of color at work. However, many Black and Latinx women do not feel they have those strong allies at work. This can be attributed to not understanding what true allyship is or how consistent commitment and thoughtfulness are required to truly show up as an ally. So, how can you and your organization show up as a strong ally?

Becoming an ally puts solidarity into action. This should not be confused with performative allyship, which can be defined roughly as professing solidarity with a cause without taking any actionable steps to support that cause beyond the proclamation. Instead, people within an organization can become true allies through self-education on the history of racism and how it affects underrepresented groups in the workplace. Acknowledge your privilege, and use it to advocate for underrepresented groups. Mentorship (which will be discussed later on) is one way you can be an ally by taking actions to support the career advancement and visibility of underrepresented employees. Finally, be vocal in the support for others’ ideas and work by acknowledging the contributions of people who hold less privilege than yourself. Although these steps may seem small in a larger IDE strategy, micro interactions build the momentum necessary to break down barriers for career advancement of underrepresented groups and change the culture of your organization.

Barrier #4: Your teams are homogenous in thought and people (team dynamics)

Employees from similar regions or backgrounds and with common physical traits are often most comfortable interacting with one another. Yet those shared traits often lead to thought processes that are too similar in nature. When a team is composed of people from the same background, diversity is limited.

When looking to hire or form new teams in your organization, making sure the team comprises people of different ages, genders, races, cultural backgrounds, and other factors is a first step in creating diversity. By cultivating diverse teams in your organization, your employees will be forced to step out of their comfort zones, engage in new thought processes, and begin thinking beyond “It’s always been done that way.” Most importantly, once these diverse teams are formed, leaders must establish a culture of open dialogue to encourage feedback among members, be active listeners, and empower employees to make decisions. Building diverse groups and teams in the workplace will be futile if they aren’t supported by leadership.

Barrier #5: Underrepresented groups are not reflected in executive leadership

Despite equal employment opportunity goals, federal laws, and IDE programs, underrepresented groups can still encounter significant challenges to reaching executive leadership ranks at their organizations. A recent study showed that from 2014 to 2020, the representation of women and women of color in senior management has seen only modest signs of progress in the corporate pipeline. In 2020, this data showed that when looking at diversity across gender and race at the C-suite level, women of color made up 3%, men of color represented 12%, and white women represented 19% of C-suite positions. This stagnation cannot solely by attributed to attrition. As discussed in barriers 2 through 4, there are inherent biases that can bar underrepresented groups from reaching executive leadership positions. However, by recognizing these biases, you can take actionable steps to remove barriers.

To increase the representation and visibility of underrepresented groups in executive leadership, organizations can:

1. Provide career guidance and resources uniquely tailored to the development needs of underrepresented groups.
2. Create opportunities for groups to gain visibility through networking in order to make impactful connections and long-lasting professional relationships outside their regular interactions.
3. Establish a formal mentoring and sponsorship program.

If you wonder how to address the equity portion of your IDE strategy, this is one way of doing it. Providing these tools and relationships to underrepresented groups can increase the diversity of your C-suite, demonstrate your genuine desire for inclusion and equity at your organization, and increase the overall satisfaction your employees have at work.

To become an organization that fully encompasses inclusion, diversity, and equity while removing all barriers is challenging. Things will go wrong. The workplace is full of biases, assumptions, and misunderstandings. However, if you continue to address those challenges, monitor what is working and not working for your organization, and above all else, continue to use feedback to make actionable changes, you will continue to break barriers impeding your organization’s IDE strategy.

Want to learn more?

We’re always interested in sharing our experience. If you’d like to discuss further, please reach out to Slalom Orange County Business Advisory Services to find out more at slalomocbas@slalom.com—or visit slalom.com.

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