5 Ways for Leaders To Prioritize Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Efforts Amid Economic Uncertainty

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 16, 2023 / GoDaddy

Foto: Accesswire

By Kristy Lilas, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at GoDaddy

Let's face it-diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) efforts should be last to get cut in times of economic uncertainty, not first. DEIB retains the best talent, keeps people engaged and develops effective and innovative relationships. In fact, according to Deloitte, feelings of inclusion can lead to a 17% increase in high performance, a 20% increase in innovation and a 29% increase in team collaboration.

But in uncertain times we must plan for all scenarios. DEIB professionals in for-profit organizations will need to find creative ways to continue making progress if budgets shrink, hiring slows and all focus shifts toward "revenue-driving efforts."

Here are five ways to ensure priority of DEIB efforts amid economic uncertainty in 2023:

1. Focus leaders on the return on investment.

DEIB can be "revenue-driving," can lead to cost savings and can impact the bottom line. Your organization likely has all kinds of helpful data to prove this. For example, how many employees left comments in your annual survey about your inclusive culture being the key reason they stay at the organization?

It might be difficult to state, "We retained this many people because of our DEIB efforts," but you can certainly use those comments to point out, "If we retained even one to two employees this year because of DEIB programming, it helped us save this amount." Supplementing your internal data with external data will help make these connections, too. There is a lot of research available on how DEIB programming attracts and retains both employees and customers alike. Having foundations of DEIB rooted in resiliency and growth mindset concepts also prepares employees to better manage changes that may affect their jobs, teams or projects-a particularly important benefit during uncertain times.

2. Conduct a deep dive into processes.

The most effective way to mitigate bias is to design it out of your operations, including just about any major business process across employee and customer experience. It usually costs nothing outside of internal resources. Sometimes the smallest process changes can make the biggest impacts.

Leverage a slowdown in hiring, for example, to take a fresh look at your recruitment processes. Could you refresh your job description template to help attract more talent of different backgrounds? Can you enhance hiring manager training on how to run an inclusive hiring process? At GoDaddy, we use process maps to assess and prioritize opportunities to make our end-to-end operations more equitable. While we can't implement it all at once, it helps us create an effective checklist so that we can be flexible, agile and much faster to execute whenever able.