Getting Started With Diversity and Inclusion Work: A Case Study
Trina Burke, UW-HR Diversity Committee
This summer marks a momentous anniversary: The University of Washington’s 2017–2021 UW Diversity Blueprint was released one year ago with an overarching goal of making the UW a truly inclusive and equitable environment for learning, research, service, and outreach. As the University gears up for another academic year, there’s no better time for leaders to assess where their units are in terms of diversity and inclusion, where they’re going, and how they might get there. To that end, I’d like to share some of the work that UW-HR’s own Diversity Committee has been doing that may help inform your unit’s or department’s response to the Diversity Blueprint.
The Rationale for a Diversity Task Force
Diversity refers to the variety of similarities and differences among people, including but not limited to: gender, gender identity, ethnicity, race, native or indigenous origin, age, generation, sexual orientation, culture, religion, belief system, marital status, parental status, socio-economic difference, appearance, language and accent, disability, mental health, education, geography, nationality, work style, work experience, job role and function, thinking style, and personality type. Inclusion of various diversity dimensions may vary by geography or organization.
Inclusion is a dynamic state of operating in which diversity is leveraged to create a fair, healthy, and high-performing organization or community. An inclusive environment ensures equitable access to resources and opportunities for all. It also enables individuals and groups to feel safe, respected, engaged, motivated, and valued, for who they are and for their contributions toward organizational and societal goals.
—Global Diversity & Inclusion Benchmarks 2017
In late summer 2017, an all-volunteer diversity committee with representatives from units across UW-HR formed with Assistant Vice President of Total Talent Management Ujima Donalson acting as the committee’s advisor.
According to Ujima, “On the UW-HR management team, we’d been talking about the need to form our own diversity committee for about a year before the Diversity Blueprint came out, and I was pleased by the organizational push and strategic direction it provided.”
At Ujima’s suggestion, the committee chose to focus on implementing two key goals from the Diversity Blueprint:
#4: Attract and Retain a Diverse Staff
#6: Improve Accountability and Transparency
Both goals are particularly relevant to UW-HR’s mission to recruit, develop, and retain individuals whose work advances the vision and mission of the UW. The latter also resonated with the committee because we recognize the central role accountability and transparency play in successful diversity and inclusion (D & I) work.
According to Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in their article, “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” encouraging social accountability is a highly effective and positive tactic for getting staff on board with D & I efforts. Dobbin and Kalev write, “Accountability theory suggests that having a task force member in a department will cause managers in it to ask themselves, ‘Will this look right?’ when making hiring and promotion decisions.” When employees know they might have to explain their decisions, they are less likely to act on bias.
One method for increasing social accountability is creating a diversity task force to ask questions, investigate what needs attention, and report out on its findings. Task forces are made up of existing employees and serve to engage members of the organizational community who, in turn, take their work back to their individual departments as influencers.
Aligning With Leadership
It’s essential that leaders model how they value D & I and that they’re committed to doing this work alongside their team. The UW-HR Diversity Committee is tasked both with assisting UW-HR leadership and helping leadership keep this work on track. One resource that has helped inform our thinking is The Center for Global Inclusion’s 2017 Global Diversity & Inclusion Benchmarks.
The Center identifies three foundational actions for building a D & I initiative:
- Develop a strong rationale for D & I vision and strategy and align it to organizational goals.
- Hold leaders accountable for implementing the organization’s D & I vision, setting goals, achieving results, and being role models.
- Provide dedicated support and structure with authority and budget to effectively implement D & I.
So far, the relationship between our committee and UW-HR leadership has been organic and iterative. Although the management team hoped for representation from each HR unit, those who currently don’t have a member on the committee are consulted with and given a voice as needed. Ujima, with input from the management team, helped set the initial focus and direction of the committee, and in turn the committee is giving UW-HR leadership focus and direction to achieve our identified goals.
Asking Questions
With a focus on being a resource for UW-HR leadership, the committee of 10 began information gathering within our organization. In March of this year, we hosted a Recruiting Panel discussion with representatives from the Upper Campus and Medical Centers recruiting teams to learn about our department’s current hiring processes and practices and inform our recommendations to leadership. In addition, we distributed a pulse survey to all UW-HR employees via Catalyst to assess the awareness of our HR leaders and staff. In order to allow respondents to answer questions freely and honestly, the survey was set up so that no identifying information would be collected. The survey had a 41% response rate, and the data collected serves as a baseline to guide the committee’s recommendations to UW-HR leadership.
While the survey questions were specific to UW-HR, what we learned may be useful to leaders throughout the UW. For instance, when asked “How do you define a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace?,” UW-HR staff called out key ways that leaders support this work:
- Leadership welcomes, encourages, and supports diversity
- Fairness in rewarding performance
- Leadership reflects/is representative of the wider community
Further, when asked, “Where do you see the greatest need for more inclusion, equity and/or diversity within UW-HR?” one of the more common responses was “more diverse staff in senior leadership.”
Getting to Work
Once you’ve asked the questions, what do you do with the information you’ve gathered? You get to work! Our pulse survey found that the overwhelming majority of respondents were not only willing to engage in conversations and activities about D & I, but that they had strong ideas about what that would look like. Staff members expressed interest in a range of topics, including information about protected classes, implicit bias, microaggressions, social justice, appropriate terminology, and how diversity topics show up in HR work practices. Favored activities include trainings/workshops, “Schwartz” style rounds, conferences, different types of group discussions, webinars, lunch-and-learns, speakers/lectures, books, films, surveys, community outreach, field trips, informational interviews, and social events during the work day.
While this level of interest is encouraging, it begs the question: What’s holding us back from actually engaging in these activities? As we learned from survey responses, they are elements of the workplace that leaders have the power and the responsibility to address: Fear, lack of time and opportunity, distrust, and lack of knowledge.
These issues aren’t easy to tackle, but instead of taking on everything, leaders can start small. A beginning might be including time for “diversity discussions” in check-in meetings to discuss issues of inclusion that come up in the course of your team’s work, for team members to ask questions of each other in a mutually agreed upon atmosphere of learning and respect, or to agree on topics that the team needs to research and set action items.
The UW has a plethora of resources to help get you started once you’ve assessed your team’s needs. Here are just a few:
- Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMAD) Faculty & Staff Resources and Affinity Groups
- Q Center Gender Discussion Group
- UWTV Psychology and Humanities Lectures and Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series
- UWIT Accessible Technology Services Events & Collaboration
