How effective are global DEI initiatives?

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Companies are all talking about DEI, but has this translated into meaningful change? A new report examines the experiences of employees worldwide and assesses the effectiveness of global DEI initiatives and policies

Culture Amp revolutionises how over 25 million employees across 5,000 companies create a better world of work. As the global platform leader for employee experience, Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, develop high-performing teams and retain talent via cutting-edge research, powerful technology and the largest employee data set in the world. The most innovative companies across the globe, such as Salesforce, Unilever, PwC, KIND, SoulCycle and BigCommerce, depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by 10 years of innovation, leading capital venture funds, and offices in the US, UK and Australia. Culture Amp is recognised as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and one of the most innovative workplace companies by Fast Company. Learn more about how Culture Amp can help you create a better world of work at cultureamp.com.

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“Building a strategic plan and hiring for DEI roles are really effective ways to drive change, but we haven’t seen the majority of companies truly commit to creating that change yet”

Aubrey Blanche, Culture Amp

“We put this research together to help organisations that might be well intentioned but just aren’t investing correctly. We want to help them deploy those resources to maximise the quality of the employee experience”

Aubrey Blanche, Culture Amp

Companies are talking the DEI talk – but are they walking the walk? Diversity, equity and inclusion has become a hot topic for organisations across the globe, with social movements, employee demand and public pressure all sparking the need for greater efforts in this space. But although the conversation is flowing, new research shows that it isn’t necessarily achieving meaningful results. Employee experience platform Culture Amp has released its 2022 Workplace Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Report, in which it studied the experiences of over a million employees worldwide. The report showed that companies saw a significant increase in DEI-related questions following calls for racial justice in the summer of 2020; however, when it came to actual DEI initiatives, the gap between intentions and results was alarmingly wide.

Data showed that while 95% of organisations had an anti-harassment policy, only 42% had a process for enforcing it. Only around 40% of companies had dedicated DEI roles at management level, and even those were often not senior enough to drive real structural change.

When it comes to pay equity, 83% of organisations performed a pay equity analysis; however, only 41% conducted a performance equity analysis, which is a key input to pay and a significant potential source of bias. Commenting on the report, Culture Amp global head of equitable design and impact Aubrey Blanche says the results clearly demonstrate the need for companies to start ‘walking the walk’, and that the most common issue is a lack of investment and resources. “One of the most significant shifts we saw was the gap between people who believe that DEI is valuable and the actual resourcing that’s being put behind it,” Blanche says.

“Our research showed that over 80% of surveyed HR professionals believe that DEI is valuable to their organisation, and that’s a huge shift even from five years ago. But only 35% of them believe that they’re properly resourced to meet their mandate, and only 31% are actually measuring the effectiveness of their DEI initiatives. “That tells us that there’s a pretty big gap between talking the talk and walking the walk. “We saw that after the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral in 2020. There was a significant uptick in inclusion questions being asked in engagement surveys across North America, APAC and EMEA,” Blanche says. “But after the one-year mark those numbers started going down, and APAC actually returned back to its baseline. That tells me that a lot of that focus was pretty performative, and it wasn’t actually leading to structural change.” Transforming talk into meaningful action When it comes to the effectiveness of DEI initiatives, Blanche notes that one major issue has been the ongoing reliance on volunteers, with the majority of companies having no senior-level executives – and often no staff members at all – who focus exclusively on DEI. She says companies that cannot show a solid commitment to DEI will ultimately lose out on talent, particularly as millennials and Gen Z start to take over the workforce – and already companies are starting to feel the stakeholder pressure. “We also saw that a lot of companies are putting their DEI work entirely on volunteers, which in itself is an entirely unequitable, unethical and unjust thing to do,” Blanche says.

“Building a strategic plan and hiring for those roles are really effective ways to drive change, but we haven’t seen the majority of companies truly commit to creating that change yet. “The workplace is fundamentally changing, and research shows that millennials and Gen Z are more likely to want to work at companies that align with their values and are having a positive social impact,” Blanche explains. “So companies that aren’t walking the walk – which, honestly, is most of them – are ultimately going to suffer from a talent perspective. The ethical and human dignity argument has never changed, but I think there is now more economic, employee and other stakeholder pressure for companies to do this. But while companies are recognising that this is a valuable focus, they’re still not being allocated the resources they need to actually create structural change.” It's not all bad news, as the report found that DEI initiatives can have a strong positive impact when implemented in the right way. When they're not, Blanche says this indicates “a lack of corporate will rather than a lack of ability”. The report's findings showed that companies with dedicated DEI roles were 17% more successful in building diverse teams than those without, and those that assessed the effectiveness of their DEI initiatives also scored more favourably. Having a DEI policy also positively impacted the diversity of organisations, and companies with employee recognition programs scored 10% higher for employees of different backgrounds having equal opportunities to succeed.

“The report showed us what actually works to drive change, and it’s exciting to see that increased resources do actually lead to improvements in diversity, equity and inclusion,” Blanche says. “There are three things that are the most predictive of successfully building a more diverse organisation, and the first is undoubtedly having a DEI policy. Then there’s having a strategic plan in place to implement it, and the third is collecting data on those initiatives. So essentially, those are the exact same things you would need to do for literally any other business priority! “I think that’s great news, because where companies are failing to make progress, we can help them to reassess and make the right investments,” she adds.

To read the full report from Culture Amp, click here.

Yes

Code of conduct

Anti-discrimination policy

Anti-harassment policy

Policies in place at organisations across the globe

93%

92%

95%

25%

50%

75%

100%

INTEREST IN DEI

Q1 2021

Q4 2020

Q3 2020

Q2 2020

Q1 2020

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

George Floyd's death

DEI questions asked

Oceania

Europe

North America

Yes

Code of conduct

Anti-discrimination policy

Anti- harassment policy

Policies in place at organisations across the globe

93%

92%

95%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Yes

Code of conduct

ANTI-DISCRIMINATION POLICY

ANTI-HARRASSMENT POLICY

ORGANIZATIONAL POLICIES

93%

92%

95%

25%

50%

75%

100%

ASIA

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