The first step is often the hardest, but, truthfully, the only wrong first step is standing still.

Across the board, people are looking for more: more diversity spend capture, more inclusive company cultures and hiring practices, more diverse workforces, etc. I’ve seen our own diverse-owned company try different DE&I strategies internally as well as strategies to support our customers and partners with theirs. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I can offer observations with the intent of removing some of the mystery from the DE&I world.

1. Authenticity is KEY. Nothing is more important than being true to yourself, especially with DE&I strategies. Review your company mission and vision statements from the DE&I lens; what does your brand represent? Brainstorm ideas and initiatives that are authentic to your brand vision and mission. It might help to determine different categories you want to impact; for example, you might have separate goals to further DE&I for your internal workforce, your community and/or your external partners/customers.

2. Set clear goals.. Once you have some ideas for DE&I initiatives, determine what a great result looks like. How will you know your program is trending in the right direction? How will you know when to adjust the strategy? Setting benchmarks and timelines helps keep you on track and evaluate what works and can be replicated. Set up an ongoing review rhythm to ensure your initiatives are continuing to meet the goals of your program.

PREMIUM CONTENT: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Contingent Workforce

3. Invest in your DE&I pr ogram. The best intentions fall flat without proper investment & dedication. At a minimum, a dedicated DE&I director or council are crucial to keep the momentum going and program on track. Investing in training for your employees and allocating budget and resources to programming also shows dedication to the program and increase your impact.

4. Start in your own backyard. Investing in DE&I starts at home, with your internal ecosystem and local community. An authentic and successful program addresses the needs of your people and community. Start by declaring your intentions to your workforce. Survey your employees; involve them in the process. Work with your ecosystem to develop employee resource groups to support diverse groups within your organization. Host forums to address the relevant topics within DE&I, even if they’re difficult, to help educate and encourage empathy among your employees.

5. Ask for help! We can’t do this alone. Share your experiences, and when you get stuck, reach out to others and ask for advice and share best practices and lessons learned. Seek out and leverage expert organizations in the DE&I space that can partner with you to help bring your impact and influence further. Ask your employees if they have any local contacts or organizations you could partner with.

6. Keep going! The most important aspect of a successful DE&I program strategy is to keep going and avoid complacency. Don’t get discouraged and give up if an initiative isn’t as successful as you wanted. DE&I is ever-evolving; keep looking for new and innovative strategies. What works now won’t necessarily work in the future and there will certainly be new challenges to address.

For DE&I efforts across this industry to be successful, we must all come together, share our best practices, our successes and failures, with the goal to improve together for the greater good. So, I’d love to hear what your programs are doing to help drive initiatives forward and how we can continue to share best practices to grow together to a more diverse, equitable and inclusive future.

MORE: How diversity in your marketing can pay dividends

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I want to congratulate these remarkable change-makers and salute SIA for honoring them. This recognition couldn’t be more timely. Events of the past year have made DE&I a major concern for virtually every business. While no one yet has all the answers, it’s time to recognize those individuals — and their organizations — for working to make a difference.

Well-designed DE&I programs tackle prejudices, increase employee satisfaction, diversify creativity and thought, and positively impact business culture. But they also strengthen employee and business performance. McKinsey’s latest diversity report describes how companies with increased gender, ethnic, and cultural diversity and inclusion outperform their less diverse, less inclusive competitors by 48%.

As companies increasingly recognize the value of workforce diversity, they are beginning to understand the impact that the extended workforce — the non-employee workforce comprising contingent staff and contractors — has on it. And considering the size of many companies’ extended workforce, the impact can be significant. According to a recent research, 20% of the average enterprise’s overall workforce was considered ‘contract,’ ‘contingent,’ or ‘non-employee’ a decade ago; “today, that percentage has more than doubled to 43%.”

Within just a few years, the extended workforce may represent more than half of the talent in most enterprises. This means that companies that are only tracking employees to measure diversity are missing about half of their actual workforce in their measurements.

PREMIUM CONTENT: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Contingent Workforce

Companies need to have a DE&I strategy for their entire workforce, not just full-time employees. This comprehensive strategy needs to look at both employee and non-employee workers together, not in silos. Organizations need to first benchmark the current state, set goals, and establish reporting to show improvement. Only by implementing a comprehensive strategy can companies take advantage of the superior performance a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce can provide. Your technology partners can help in this endeavor.

Recently one of our clients wanted to go further than simply tracking supplier diversity. They wanted insight into the diversity of their contingent workforce that would match what they knew about their employee workforce. To give them the transparency they needed, we created fields within Beeline that allowed them to collect voluntarily disclosed diversity data at the onboarding stage, after hires had been finalized. This allows them to see clearly whether diverse candidates are being hired, and if diversity goals are not being met, the client is able to act quickly to remedy the situation.

With companies placing increased emphasis on DE&I, we’re delighted to see so many of our clients and partners honored as DE&I Influencers; we are grateful for the opportunity to work with these individuals and companies. We applaud all of the DE&I Influencers because we believe diversity, equity and inclusion belong at the forefront of today’s corporate agendas. By developing new programs to help their organizations become more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive, these individuals will not only move their own companies forward, but also influence their industries and our society to progress in the right direction.

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While many companies have focused their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on their full-time employees, they may be missing mark if they don’t also extend inclusion initiatives to their contingent workforce. That’s because, for many companies, temp workers, contractors and consultants make up as much as 50% of their workforce.

It’s time to meet the moment: If your DE&I initiatives focus only on full-time employees, this is an amazing opportunity for you to bring your employees together to advance inclusion across your entire workforce, including contingent workers.

When I began this journey two years ago, launching Consciously Unbiased at CWS Summit and highlighting the need to go beyond diversity spend to diversity hiring, I was humbled by the response. It’s time to collectively make that a reality.

As enterprise leaders, especially those in HR and procurement, you have the power to lead the change for creating diversity and inclusion roadmaps that will materially have a big impact on your organization – and, in turn, on our society.

This is not one-size-fits-all; each company has a unique culture and set of needs. Here are some ideas for getting started.

Start from the top down. Your leadership needs to get behind the mission to make it successful, so focus on the competitive advantage for greater buy in. The U.S. will be a “minority” white by 2045, according to Census projections. If you’re not prioritizing DE&I across your entire workforce, your company will be less competitive than those that make it a big focus.

Stories matter. It’s important to connect the heart and mind in order to build the empathy needed to create change. An important step is highlighting the stories of employees and allies in your organization who are building belonging to help inspire others to do the same. You might encourage your marketing and HR departments to collaborate on ways to amplify the stories of your employees through internal communications, social media and in town halls.

Tie DE&I goals to compensation. If diversity is a goal, then treat it just like any other business goal and tie it to managers’ and leaders’ compensation and bonus structure. Track the metrics that matter, such as hiring and retention of diverse talent, pathways to advancement and closing pay gaps.

Change doesn’t happen overnight, but with a commitment to making steps, both big and small, you can help build belonging for your entire workforce. Doing so can have an impact on your company, and on our society. I believe there is a place for both profit and purpose in the business world.

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While hiring activity was flat for most of last year, a new Reuters survey of 500 economists says times are changing. According to them, “The global economy will recover this year from its coronavirus slump at a pace not seen since the 1970s.”

That’s good news, and as job growth picks up, hiring managers have an opportunity – and an obligation – to build back their workforces better than before, with diversity, equity, and inclusion as a cornerstone.

One essential step for organizational leaders to take in this moment is to thoughtfully review hiring policies, practices, and objectives. Start by embracing the fact that times have changed, and the way you’ve always done things likely needs to evolve. Your employees, prospective employees, customers, and shareholders have new expectations regarding how you do business.

Outline what you’re trying to achieve. Are you looking to increase the diversity of your talent pipeline? Do you want your workforce to look as diverse as the communities your serve? Is there a specific diversity imbalance you want to address?

Then, look under the hood and determine the changes required to ground your hiring and retention in DEI best practices. For example, does your organization have an unjust bias against – or an outright ban on – hiring people with a non-violent criminal history? Does your organization require four-year college degrees for all jobs even when a short-term credential or industry certification should suffice? Could your company be doing more to hire neurodiverse talent?

PREMIUM CONTENT: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Contingent Workforce

As you ponder these questions, it’s also wise to consider how updates to your hiring practices might affect your reputation. New findings from Kelly’s recent Equity@Work survey provide some guidance here, including:

• 81% of Americans say companies should do more to remove discriminatory hiring policies or practices that keep people from being hired or promoted.
• 76% are more likely to support businesses committed to breaking down discriminatory barriers that prevent Americans from finding employment.
• 71% of Americans believe employers should eliminate bans that automatically reject job seekers with minor, non-violent criminal offenses.
• 64% agree it is wrong for employers to require applicants to have four-year/bachelor’s degrees at a time when short-term credentials and industry certifications offer increasing and/or equal value in the workforce.
• Nearly three in four (74%) of respondents are more likely to support a business or company that makes employment opportunities available to individuals on the autism spectrum.

Improving DEI is not only the right thing to do – it can also have a significant impact on your bottom line. McKinsey’s most recent report on diversity and business performance found diverse executive teams are 36% more likely to demonstrate financial outperformance.

To dismantle systemic barriers, I encourage everyone to look within your organization and ask yourself: what assumptions are getting in the way, and where can improvements be made? What are some steps you can take to update your policies and procedures? Then, commit to change and make it happen.

We are taking these actions within Kelly and making opportunities available to a wider talent pool. Won’t you join us?

As the job market recovers from the pandemic, and a new wave of hiring rolls in, how will your organization respond? I contend that it’s time to take the training wheels off your DEI hiring plans. You may fall down along the way, but you’ll never hit your fall stride until you put diversity, equity and inclusion at the center of your workplace.

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Some recent examples of impactful ways to foster inclusivity include hiring neurodivergent talent, adding nursing room for mothers, having gender-neutral restrooms and acknowledging religious diversity. That aside, here is what an organization can do to be more inclusive.

Purposeful leadership. A diverse organization may not always be inclusive. To build an inclusive workplace, it is important that company leaders are purposeful about including staff members who think differently. This helps leaders in identifying the biases that they have been following unknowingly. According to Marcos Roberto da Costa, executive sponsor of the capAbility Network EBRG at Merck, “Nothing can be more rewarding for a leader when they get the opportunity to experience the outcome of a diverse and inclusive environment.”

PREMIUM CONTENT: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Contingent Workforce

Sensitivity training and beyond. Many organizations consider sensitivity training as a one-time exercise for removing all conscious and unconscious biases. Sensitivity training can end up being time-stamped if the human resource leaders consider it as a routine exercise. Being sensitive is what matters. To that end, company leaders must be good listeners. Sensitivity training helps in addressing a lack of skills or knowledge that may seem obvious to others. It is not designed to ‘fix’ employees who demonstrate certain biases.

Shared recognition or team recognition. Companies that have shared recognition eliminate hierarchy from performance feedback. Recognition should not only be top-down, given by a single manage or an HR leader. Openness to sharing recognition empowers each person in the company from C-level executives to client service representatives. Involvement in giving and receiving recognitions helps actively engage with peers. Organizations that embrace a more equal approach, even if that involves sending a simple email of gratitude, can harness positivity and empower its workers to celebrate the success of their colleagues and have a truly inclusive workplace culture.

Measuring ‘thanks’ in real time. A gratitude program which is widely accepted across an organization and aligned with the company values can be a great tool to mitigate unconscious bias and promote inclusion. Such programs give HR leaders hard data of individuals who are more frequently recognized versus those who are not. According to Ram Rahul, associate director at Accenture, “Onboarding a professional is a journey. It doesn’t matter if the person is neuro typical or neurodiverse, it’s all about making sure they feel included and a sense of belonging.”

To summarize, creating an inclusive mindset at the workplace is no linear process. It takes time and involves constantly moving targets. It takes teamwork and collaboration to build a path towards achieving an inclusive culture.

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When the SIA editorial team reviewed nominations for our inaugural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Influencers list recently, I found myself with mixed feelings as I contemplated the upcoming list.

In the more than 100 nominations we received, we saw much work being done within the industry to make both their companies more equitable and inclusive as well as the ecosystem as a whole. We saw many initiatives that have been running for several years. That was promising, And of course, there were many others that only got their start last year. But still efforts were underway.

So many initiatives. So much goodwill and promise. The optimism slowly started creeping in.

However, there is the current state of things within our ecosystem.

The Reality

We have a long road ahead in terms of DE&I. And yes, it’s daunting.

Consider this. We started our Global Power 150 — Women in Staffing list in 2015 because we have yet to see equity at the leadership level for women, as evidenced by our Staffing 100 list. Year after year, women comprise 20% to 25% of the list. Six years on, the needle hasn’t moved much— though we do field questions periodically on how long we think the women’s list will be necessary (the answer: That’s really up to you. We’ll consider it unneeded when women comprise about half of the Staffing 100 and leadership positions within the industry overall).

Anecdotally speaking, attendance at our industry events, which is geared toward staffing business leaders, is just not very diverse. And we see that across our other editorial lists. On our 2020 40 Under 40 list, there was just one person of color. The Staffing 100 fared better, with 10. Still, representation of 10% when the BIPOC population of the US stood at roughly 40% in 2020 indicates there’s much work staffing needs to do within its own ranks even as the industry tries to help their clients meet DE&I goals of their own.

PREMIUM CONTENT: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Trends in Staffing

Of course, the staffing industry is not alone in having poor representation. Over the Fortune 500’s 65-year history that has seen roughly 1,800 chief executives, only 19 have been Black. Currently, there are just four. One could argue numbers at the top don’t necessarily mean overall numbers are low. However, experts point out that true equity hasn’t been reached if leadership isn’t also representative of your communities.

The good thing is that the industry is not blind to the issues. By the sheer number of nominations we received and the plans and programs shared in them, there are many companies out there committed to changing the status quo both within their own companies and within their communities and clients.

Hope Renewed

And as I’ve read the profiles of the Influencers who comprise our inaugural list, I’m even more hopeful. Some are starting at elementary schools to provide support to BIPOC student populations. Still others are providing second chances to people with nonviolent records. Helping moms get back to work after taking time off to care for their children, which can be a career-busting move. And that’s just a small hint at the work being done.

And for all the people we are profiling, there are more working alongside them and being influenced by them as we speak. They are educating others, challenging others, and encouraging others not to be afraid to have the tough conversations that are necessary to make change happen.

There is reason to hope.

The DE&I Influencers list goes live on May 18. May you be as inspired as I am when you read the profiles.

As you come across people in our ecosystem — doing things with DE&I — that grab your attention, take a minute to write their names down and send us an email. We can file it away for possible consideration to the 2022 DE&I Influencers list.

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The pay-off of having an inclusive culture is significant. Organizations with inclusive cultures are, on average, three times higher-performing compared to less inclusive competitors, six times more innovative, and eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes. Their employer brand also gets a boost with 64% of candidates stating that a potential employer’s diversity is an important influence on their decision to work with them.

How to Improve DE&I

The business case for better DE&I is clear. But how can you achieve it?

Inclusivity starts at the core of any business — its people. Building a diverse workforce means everyone is represented and offered the same opportunities, without biases influencing their career journeys. Advances in artificial intelligence are making it easier for organizations to build diverse workforces, offer equal opportunities, and reduce biases (conscious and unconscious) from the decision-making process.

PREMIUM CONTENT: North America Internal Staff Survey 2021: What should be automated?

Here are three ways AI is improving diversity:

1. Blind hiring based on skills. Blind hiring removes certain characteristics like names and locations from a résumé to help recruiters see them more objectively. Usually, only a candidate’s skills and career potential is displayed. AI can speed this process up by quickly anonymizing profiles and résumés, as well as focusing solely on skills. More advanced AI tools can even match candidates to roles and projects based on their skills data.
2. Automated résumé screening. Automated résumé screening is replacing manual shortlisting and any biases that may come from human recruiters early-on in the process. These systems can consistently apply the same shortlisting criteria across all candidates. It also takes on the most manual and time-consuming part of a recruiter’s job, giving them more time to focus on value-added tasks like relationship-building.Résumé screening software integrates within an existing applicant tracking system to automate candidate shortlisting without disrupting existing workflows and processes.

3. Two in the pool. The two in the pool effect is a further way to overcome unconscious biases. Having just one female or minority candidate in a shortlists makes them more likely to be unsuccessful as their differences are more obvious. However, having two or more increases their success rate. AI tools can be programmed to consider this as they make their candidate shortlist selections.

Extra considerations. Your efforts to increase DE&I through AI technology can be undermined if the AI itself is biased. To avoid this, diverse data sets are needed when training the computer to make decisions. As Aleksandra Mojsilovic, research fellow in A.I. at IBM explains, “Any A.I. tool can only be as good—and as impartial—as the data we put in. It’s not about replacing human intelligence, but rather about complementing it.”

Furthermore, AI should only be used to complement a human staffing team’s efforts, not replace them. Human oversight will always be required and it should be obvious how an AI came to a specific recommendation.

Further advances ahead. This is but a snapshot of the benefits that AI can bring to your DE&I activities. As AI advances, expect to see more applications developed across the staffing cycle, to make recruitment, internal mobility, pay, and promotions, a more level playing field.

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