While all organisations at least claim to strive to free their workplace of racism, progress is often slow and racist behaviours can persist, hidden from view. Remi Baker examines how many initiatives to improve race diversity can falter and poses four questions to help HR leaders get serious about anti-racism in the workplace.
Everyone is serious about anti-racism at work. Of course we are. We defy you to find a board member at a UK business, FTSE 100 or otherwise, who won’t proclaim their abiding intolerance for any discrimination whatsoever. It has a brutal effect on employees’ mental health, it adversely affects performance, and it limits businesses’ access to a huge and growing pool of talent. It’s also illegal, but you knew that one already.
In 2023, it’s rare to find an organisation which doesn’t operate policies to increase diversity, promote inclusion and strive for equity amongst its people. Yet racism in the workplace remains a systemic problem.
The government’s own McGregor-Smith review, published in 2017, only received responses from 74 out of the FTSE 100, and only half of those shared meaningful data.
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The Parker Review, compiled annually by the Department for Business since 2017, shows that many (if not most) FTSE 100 businesses still show slow progress in their efforts to appoint ethnic minority members to their boards. If things are changing, the pace is on the glacial side.
The whole business should be involved in creating an anti-racist environment, but it’s the people in power who are responsible for choosing, overseeing, and delivering its strategic goals. So if you’re serious about creating a working environment where racial identity is no longer a factor in determining whether people succeed and thrive, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does our team take collective responsibility?
We’ve seen many examples of anti-racism initiatives that have started strongly and tailed off once the scale of the challenge becomes apparent. Workers, managers, and HR professionals can immerse themselves in reading and learning, in educating themselves at the expense of actually doing something.
After all, putting clear measures in place can feel overwhelming and disruptive: it’s far easier to buy another book with your training budget. So ask yourself: what are you actually achieving? Is responsibility being passed down the line? Does it feel as if no one is really taking ownership of the issue?
2. Are we collecting the right data?
We live in a metrics age and, to any sensibly-led organisation, measurement is intrinsic to success. But metrics must serve a purpose: only once you’ve locked down your strategy and prepared a roadmap can you decide how you’re going to measure success.
Can you define and articulate your values with clarity? Do you have a clear message for your stakeholders? Do your strategic goals feed down into practical actions? Once you’ve done that, you have a roadmap for change: then you can identify your key metrics and give yourself a timeline to achieve them.
All of which is to say: data is vital, but it must serve a clearly defined purpose. Once that’s done though, apply the same rigour to measurement that you would with sales or product delivery. What gets measured gets cared about. A CEO can and should ask: what does my team look like? My non-execs? What kind of example am I setting?
CEOs should expect to set the tone for every aspect of their business: diversity is no different to any other metric. Don’t judge your findings: compile and evaluate them like any other measurement.
3. What do we expect from a more inclusive workplace?
We know that diversity is good for business, both in the sense of unlocking people’s potential and in prompting wider societal change. But we don’t want to make people feel resentful about the journey, leaving some behind at the expense of others. This is a journey.
Measure as you go, keep striving to improve, but don’t expect everything to be solved by the end of the fiscal year. If you and your people are discussing the issues, that’s a good start. Keep talking. Keep listening, and listening actively. The more we talk, the more we understand each other. The more we understand, the more we can build candour and empathy.
4. How do we ensure line managers are on board?
If the responsibility for culture rests with the board, then line managers are the gatekeepers for inclusivity in the workplace. Line managers have the power to push people for promotion and award projects which give people the opportunity to grow. They see day-to-day, the microaggressions which can have such a negative effect on wellbeing.
Line managers have their key goals and priorities, as we all do, so showing them that this is a priority will have real resonance. We need to accept that this is as important and productive to their careers as their next quarterly goal and that it requires an investment of time and energy.
Keeping up to date with the right language, understanding that we all hold bias and striving to put that knowledge into practice are all crucial strings to their management bow, and every bit as important as reviewing goals and managing performance. They will make mistakes, and that’s ok. Positive intention and the desire to change will show through.
The challenge of delivering a truly anti-racist culture can seem daunting. We’ve talked about collective responsibility, but this is a societal problem as well as a business one. A messy, human problem without the reassuring certainty of revenue numbers, units sold and year-on-year growth.
Yet it is both possible and necessary to take a quantitative view of this: to judge success on clear metrics; to ask what example is being set by senior leaders; to encourage managers to incorporate these conversations into the regular performance discussions they should be having with their people. And the solution, and concomitant rewards, are also messy and human, and in the best way possible.
More talent, drawn from a broader cross-section of people with more ideas, bringing their best selves to work to benefit your business every single day. If Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace review consistently shows that people are less and less engaged with the work they do, this is a golden opportunity to claw some of that engagement back. And that’s good news for everyone.
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