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Fostering Mutual Understanding: The Diversity Life Cycle – Striving for Growth, Change, and Rejuvenation Over Time with Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
Most companies think about the idea that diversity has a set of problems that we want to solve. And once that problem is solved then we don’t need to have diversity in terms of officers, elements, metrics anymore. That it’s a problem that if effective will go away or if a problem is effectively managed. I think the bottom line is if we think of diversity as an ongoing cycle that evolves as a key part of effective employee management and growth then I think it’ll be a much more effective way of thinking about diversity.
Moving from Elements to Intentions
A company can have multiple diversity elements. They can have a diversity officer. They can have affinity groups. They can have mentoring networks. They can have diversity metrics. It’s not just having these different things in place but sort of knowing what are the few key things that are actually affective and linking them to the psychology of bias. So for instance we know that affinity groups are not effective when they don’t actually have one, some kind of power within the company to make recommendations that are actually carried out. And two, they have to have a mission. They have to have something to do. So you can’t have a diversity affinity group and link that to a happy hour. You want to link that to some kind of effective change. So that’s just one example of how you can move away from an element to an intention. And the more that you have intentional smaller focused elements in your company, the more you’re going to move through this diversity lifecycle.
Key Metrics
Oftentimes companies are trying to manage multiple metrics. But they really need to focus on three. One, who are they getting in the door and where are they coming from. So at the hiring stage. Two is who is getting promoted throughout the company. And then the third thing they need to focus on is retention. When people are leaving where are they going.
First of all there are actually very, very simple interventions that can be done. For instance at the stage of hiring we know that if you just ask people to explain why you chose to not hire all of the people that you didn’t hire as opposed to champion the person that you did hire, just flipping the source of the explanation reduces bias by approximately 50 percent. This happens at the hiring stage and also at the promotion stage. So now you’re asked to justify why you excluded someone rather than explain why you are hiring someone. That reduces bias by 50 percent.
When they first start off in the workplace they’ll pretty much work anywhere. Well what happens over time is people want to feel respected. They want to feel that their work is valued. They want to feel like they’re being promoted fairly and at the same pace. And they want to feel like they belong. And after ten years in a company people are going to move. They know the word on the street. They’re going to move to the places where they are getting those things.
I think the last piece of this is to think of diversity as a normative cycle within a company where there’s growth, there’s change, there’s rejuvenation and it continues over time.