Are Your DEI & Talent Management Approaches Integrated?
For HR professionals, trying to solve the many issues facing a typical organization often ends up creating a large number of different initiatives. Your HR team uses one resource for a specific problem, another for a different problem, and so forth. While this can be helpful in chipping away at the problems, it risks creating an array of siloed approaches.
And while siloed solutions aren’t necessarily a bad thing, they do limit the potential of a lighter, more budget-friendly approach and may cause you to miss out on efficiencies such as utilizing one solution for multiple programs.
In particular, this is common issue with DEI and Talent Management. Here, we address the common obstacles of syncing DEI and Talent Management and provide strategies to kickstart this integration.
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Talent Management & DEI Leaders Must Align to Dig Deeper
Talent reviews have the reputation of being expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective, very similar to that of leadership development programs and career development training.
This is because talent reviews and DEI goals are often approached separately. The irony is that this means talent management strategies are often expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective.
But talent management doesn’t need to be viewed as a heavy lift. Instead, it can be done through career development conversations and other programs. This shift will be transformative for understanding your diverse and high potential employees’ opportunities for growth.
What Talent Management Leaders Can Do: Act Beyond the C-Suite
By going beyond the ‘norm’ of DEI and Talent Management, HR leaders can truly cultivate a more diverse and inclusive workforce by thinking beyond the trappings of a classic organizational structure. Challenge yourself to look down the pyramid. Or stop thinking of a pyramid at all!
This helps you identify and nurture talent in early-career employees. It is very common for companies to focus their diversity efforts on employees who are early in their careers, to fail to develop or retain those diverse hires, and to then complain that there are not enough diverse (external) candidates available to achieve diversity in the upper levels of the organization. This failure of internal talent pipelines means that it is highly unlikely for your company to overcome this structural inequality by battling it out for one of the handful of people who have managed to make it into consideration for a C-Suite position.
Remember, this is not a relic of the past–this failure to treat your diverse hires equitably and to make them feel included in the organization is a common and ongoing problem. More than a third of Black employees plan to leave their jobs soon, which is much higher than their white colleagues.
This requires action! If you’re only focusing on talent management in the upper echelons of your organization, you risk losing diverse talent where it actually exists.
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Are Your Talent Management Criteria Biased?
Biases are often subtle and unintentional, but they can significantly skew the perception of who is deemed a high potential employee (HIPO). That undermines the principles of DEI while limiting an organization’s ability to harness a full range of talents and perspectives.
One practical action step is to analyze and assess your HIPO lists. It’s not uncommon to find that, despite best intentions, the lists are not diverse at all. If you are looking at your list and there’s little diversity amongst the individuals on that list, you are clearly missing out on talent, either by failing to recognize it in the hires you have made or failing to hire it in in the first place.
Ask your team, what are the real requirements for our roles and what can we drop? For example, does your company routinely require a college degree for roles that simply don’t require one? If so, you are probably cutting your diversity and talent management efforts short. 64% of working-age adults do not hold a bachelor’s degree.
Kim Jones, vice president of HR at Toshiba America Business Solutions, which employs more than 2,000 workers, in a recent SHRM report.
What DEI Leaders Can Do: Partner with Talent Management
Employees want to work and stay at companies that prioritize DEI. 53% of U.S. workers say DEI is a key factor when considering a company.
Take that energy and put it into your company. Encourage talent to take part in these initiatives through employee coaching training programs. This will help DEI leaders see more success. With only 30% of HR leaders strongly agreeing that their company's leadership recognizes DEI as a core pillar of their talent strategy that can't be sacrificed, this is an area that can easily become a competitive advantage for your organization.
Foster Internal Partnerships Between Talent Management and DEI
Actively creating partnerships between DEI leaders and leaders in Talent Management will build a stronger culture of development. This partnership could be something as simple as a meeting. Discuss these questions as a group:
How often are reviews done?
What are our criteria and feedback processes for these reviews?
How can we assess our biases?
How can we ensure that all employees feel equitably treated and feel like they are actively being included?
In these reviews, are there diverse reviewers? For example, are there reviewers of different generations?
Audit Your Talent List
Auditing your talent list gives you the benefit of ensuring there is a representative cross-section of your company. If there’s not, you can ask the hard questions, especially if it looks like groups of people are being left out.
This proactive approach will complement Talent Management’s efforts by spotlighting individuals who might otherwise be overlooked. This is why Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are a good way to take the best diverse talent and give them opportunities to shine.
People willing to raise their hand in the name of improving diversity at an organization are often poised for greater roles. Give them an opportunity to shine!
DEI Leaders: Do You Have a Development Strategy?
Talent management is all about assessment. Do you have a clear strategy for the development of your identified diverse talent? The reality is that ERG leaders often crave professional development opportunities beyond basic assessments.
Without a clear strategy, you might unknowingly be setting yourself up to lose your diverse talent. 63% of employees say that they’ve left a job due to a lack of career advancement opportunities. Here’s how you can fix this:
Set up a clear path for employee development plans.
Make sure your talent understands and knows about these opportunities.
Further, DEI leaders must advocate for and sponsor these development initiatives. DEI tends to have more access to budgets from executives, and you can use leftover discretionary budgets to develop diverse talent.
You Can’t Hire Your Way to Demographic Diversity: Build It Instead
If you’re thinking, “This isn’t my department,” you may want to rethink that stance. Only 40% of all professionals say that their organization’s DEI efforts are adequate. This is a major problem for the future of your organization, and it’s not going to fix itself. You can’t just hire diverse talent and check the boxes to fix the problem.
By fusing DEI and talent management, leaders from both sides can work together to develop diverse employees from all levels.
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