What Went Wrong With EDI And How Leaders Can Fix It

The report: Introduction | Executive Summary | Download report

1. Introduction

The work on ever-acronymised EDI was largely delegated by executive teams to more junior staff, without sufficient policy guidance linked to company goals. Unmoored from accountability to the aims of the organisation, EDI consequently turned into a monster – one that leaders never intended and that many of them felt unable to control.

Was this widespread? Was I just seeing part of the picture? Could we test whether this was what was really going on?

So we did.

The Investigation

With the generous support of the Ben Delo Foundation and the expertise of social researcher, Matilda Gosling, a wide range of people were interviewed at length and in depth. These individuals ranged from the Chair of BT to the convenor of the Ethnicity Advisory Group at a utilities company. The 45 represent a broad sweep of seniority and sectors. They consist of those who are familiar and to us and those that were previously unknown. We chose them for their diversity and their ability to challenge our preconceptions. They all gave their time and contributed their views with great openness, for which we thank them very much.

— Simon Fanshawe, June 2024

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The Framework

When EDI works well, talented people with myriad backgrounds and experiences are recruited and retained. They are also able to progress within their organisations in line with their abilities. Staff feel engaged by and happy in their work. The successful recruitment and retention of talented individuals enables workplaces to benefit from diversity of thought, which brings better workplace conversations, new ideas and innovation, all of which contribute to decisions that benefit the organisation. It also avoids the time and financial costs inherent in high staff turnover. Staff who are treated well are less likely to bring claims of discrimination or victimisation against their employers, affording a layer of protection to both parties. When diverse staff reflect organisations’ communities and customers, they have a better understanding of what is needed.

Figure 1. Perceptions of Current Outcomes and Impact

Organisations that pursue EDI are seen to be doing the right thing by their various stakeholders, including investors and regulators, which bolsters their reputation and allows them access to the resources they need to sustain or grow their work. These facets lead to better products and services, affecting organisations’ bottom line in terms of performance and results. Well-managed EDI also improves fairness and equality which, for many people interviewed for this research, are worthy objectives in their own right.

That is the theory, at least. While we can see from much of what follows that EDI does not always function this perfectly, a common thread of this research is that it has the potential to do so. Achieving this accomplishment of downstream impact from EDI activities is not always at the heart of organisations’ decisions to pursue or invest in it, however. Some of the impetus is fear-based, according to interviewees – anxieties about reputational damage, say, or threats of litigation. Others are following what they believe staff, customers, investors or wider society expect of them in the wake of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Those stakeholders and external pressures who shape or otherwise influence EDI are, in fact, a key part of the story.

Figure 2. What Influences Organisational EDI?

The Results

The results that you’ll read in the report are both encouraging and disheartening. We hadn’t veered completely up a slip road and misread the situation. Our hunch proved broadly right. But that was dispiriting, because it means that too much of the work on EDI is divorced from organisations’ goals. It’s stymying discussion and the expression of views, rather than truly valuing difference and the wide-ranging conversations that lead to innovation, and staff networks are too often turning their passion and commitment into activities more activist than work-related, causing division in place of unity of purpose among staff. Is there a crisis in EDI?

Gestures rather than Purpose

At the front end of the work, too much activity is focused on the superficial. There has been some silly noise about lanyards recently. But the real problem is that, instead of working on root causes of potential disadvantage and finding effective solutions, those employed in diversity have whizzed down the aisle of the EDI supermarket filling their trolley with, yes, the lanyards, and also the religious festival calendar, the float at Pride, the BLM stickers, the #MeToo badges, the application forms for every Charter going, staff networks (with no agreed objectives), guides to do-and-don’t-use words and language and all-in-all putting together the partisan pantheon of what they think is the basic EDI kit.

This merely virtue signals. It can start conversations in organisations, which is a good thing, but achieves practically nothing to stop discrimination, widen opportunities, give voice to difference, enhance innovation or drive meaningful outcomes for organisations. As one interviewee rather mordantly commented, his Board moved from saying it was essential to join the Stonewall Index to saying the organisation had to get out of the Stonewall Index – but that ‘Neither of those things actually changed the experience of lesbian, gay and bisexual employees within my organisation.’

Our interviewees pointed out that it was of fundamental importance that diversity was umbilically linked to purpose, that data collected – quantitative and qualitative – was used intelligently to understand who their staff were in all their complexity, what they were feeling about work, and what would support them to perform at their best.

The Failure of Identity

Interviewees were often sceptical of the blanket application of identity groups. They recognised the prevalence of discrimination against certain groups, but seeing people only through this lens risks entrenching inequality and causing harm. Staff should be recognised and rewarded for the talent that they bring through their skills and their different backgrounds and identities. The protected characteristics have a significance in law through the Equality Act and in aspects of people’s lives. But while a group to which we belong may describe a facet of who we are, it does not define who we are.

The prevalent over-focus on identity is seen by many interviewees as divisive. When valuing subjective identity is promoted over a broader range of evidence, the consequent dividing lines keep some people out of the conversation. Other staff can dominate by asserting special insight and advantage through claims of identity. This is often characterised by a sentence that starts ‘As a…’ or through an emphasis on personal ‘lived experience’, rather than gathering evidence that leads to a deeper, more nuanced understanding.

Staff networks, built around broad identities, too often fail to represent the range of views in their constituencies. But they are often treated by the organisation as if they are the authentic voice of the whole of that group of staff. This is particularly evident in, say, the contested area of sex and gender, where LGBTQ+ groups with one perspective do not include the views of those who characterise themselves as LGB or same-sex attracted (what the case law categorises as ‘gender identity’ versus ‘gender critical’ beliefs). This also happens with issues around race, where individuals from ethnic minorities hold very different views about the significance of race at work and in their progression and development.

Interviewees increasingly want to achieve diversity of thinking and approach, and not just to tick the identity box. The primary outcome of greater diversity should come from disagreeing well and collaborating through difference to produce the outcomes the organisation has set itself.

Fear and Lack of Confidence

One golden thread through this is the lack of confidence – sometimes expressed as fear – that too many senior people feel in leading difficult conversations and ‘getting it wrong’, with all the risks to reputation and the needless investment of time to deal with the rumpus that can cause. Contentious issues invade work in ways that have been fundamentally changed by the pervasiveness of social media and the binary nature of so much online comment. This poses considerable problems for senior leaders.

Previously they have supported, perhaps without enough thought, #MeToo and BLM and taken the side of Ukraine in the war with Russia. There was an artificial veneer of simplicity in knowing ‘which side you were on’ with these issues. But, as several interviewees recognised, there are nuances within even the most seemingly straightforward issues – for instance, leaders who wanted to call out the invasion of Ukraine might have Russian staff or students.

Division

Taking clear stances on previous external issues has led to a more recent assumption that organisations will choose a side in the far more difficult terrain of the rows over sex and gender or the war between Israel and Palestine.

But these issues are, by definition, divisive. Many leaders are starting to ask: where is the win for their company in picking one side or the other? Is that appropriate to their organisation’s goals? Does it unite staff or divide them? Does it enable their staff to collaborate on their common company purpose, or does it make it more difficult for that to happen? Are activist staff making demands of organisations that they actually want to make of the world?

This divisiveness then flows into other areas of the business and its culture. It can negatively affect the potential for open discussions and exploration of difference between staff about work issues that will create better solutions, more innovation and deliver the business dividends of greater diversity.

The Way Forward – Our Recommendations

1. Link EDI to your organisation’s activities and goals.

• Design EDI-related strategies and approaches that are primarily focused on helping your organisation to deliver its activities and achieve its objectives. EDI is about talent, not politics.
• Deliver EDI in a way that is specific to, and makes the most of, your organisation’s context – your sector, the people who want to work for you and the breadth of talent available to you.
• Make EDI part of doing business well. It is is not an add-on to the day-to-day work; it is an integral part of it. If EDI is working well, it is creating an effective environment in which your teams can deliver for your customers through, for example, service design, talent management and customer relations. •Ensure leadership accountability. All staff have some responsibility for EDI – in, for example, avoiding language and behaviour that causes discrimination and harassment – but do not delegate the significant EDI-related decisions to HR or another department.
• Set the direction of travel on EDI and then engage leaders at all levels to discuss how it links to activities and goals in their area, ensuring that required change percolates through the organisation.
• Acknowledge the complexity of EDI. It is not a quick-fix solution. Avoid slogans.
• Model the behaviours you wish to see in your workforce. Be realistic and be brave – articulate the EDI priorities and how they drive the activities of the organisation, and be clear about your expectations.

Key questions for leaders:

• Why would EDI, and what kind of EDI, create the talent needed to achieve the organisation’s goals? What positive changes do you want to see in talent and innovation? What is preventing these?
• How does your EDI strategy link to your organisation’s activities and goals? How could these links be strengthened?

2. Create a culture of productive disagreement.

• Recognise explicitly that there are a variety of views among your staff.
• Actively encourage the expression of views that help to offer alternative perspectives on organisational challenges and that counter groupthink.
• Communicate clearly the behaviours that are acceptable in your workforce, including those that encourage genuine dialogue between staff, as well as those behaviours that are unacceptable.
• Avoid making organisational political statements (unless such statements are central to your activities and goals – as might be the case for a trade union, for example).
• If you experience pressure from staff to commit to a political or otherwise contentious position that falls outside your organisation’s immediate remit, make a statement of institutional neutrality. Communicate clearly that you have a duty to ensure no members of staff feel isolated by your organisation’s position statements on non-work matters.
• Share when you are curious, don’t know and are open to being convinced. Recognise that some conflicts are not resolvable. •Support managers to build their confidence and ability to hold the ring on difficult conversations, value difference in their teams and encourage productive disagreement, and to understand the law. Managers also need to understand how to avoid defensiveness in their teams when disagreement takes place, and how to encourage assertive disagreement (as opposed to aggressive, passive aggressive or silent disagreement).
• Consult and engage with staff in a way that treats everyone’s voice in the organisation as valid in thinking about EDI.

While some organisations may see healthy discussion about contentious, non-work issues taking place on formal professional platforms such as Slack, others experience entrenchment and division. In these latter cases, leaders may need to consider limiting discussion on formal platforms to those issues and topics that are directly relevant to work. Some organisations face a different problem: there is no culture of disagreement at all – in which case, leaders need to take ownership of creating a culture of challenge.

Key questions for leaders:

• Do you encourage or otherwise incentivise people to offer alternative perspectives on business-critical problems? Do you role model productive disagreement and change your mind in the face of persuasive challenge?
• If you make organisational position statements on issues that are not immediately relevant to your organisation’s activities and goals, do you consider the full range of your staff’s views – for example, those that might align with a particular faith or those with heterodox opinions on contested social issues?
• Do you communicate behavioural expectations, while avoiding imposing expectations around personal values and beliefs?
• Have you worked through with managers how to approach scenarios in which people are not able to resolve their disagreements on workplace-relevant issues?

3. Ensure inclusion is not exclusion.

• Ensure that inclusion means the inclusion of all voices, not the exclusion of some. Be careful about focusing on individual identity categories in ways that risk alienating those who do not fall within them.
• Recognise that language or behaviour that causes upset or conflict does not always result from maliciousness, and that formal action depends on whether the upset would be felt by a reasonable person in the same position – not all instances of upset are reasonably held, though they may well be genuinely felt. It is important to move away from an assumption of malice. Reasonableness sometimes relates to the number of times aggravating language has been used or an aggravating behaviour has been enacted – one-off instances (with obvious exceptions, such as groping) may be less problematic. Ground rules may be helpful here.
• Create a culture of Talk and Learn, not Point and Punish, by developing processes that are not formal disciplinaries, but seek resolution in the team. These can be facilitated by encouraging people to be genuinely curious about their colleagues’ intentions, to ask, ‘What did you mean by that?’, and by training and supporting managers to explore resolutions between members of their team.
• Encourage staff to bring their professional selves to work, avoiding the idea of bringing their whole selves to work. Recognise that work needs professional parameters of behaviour, dress and language because they help staff to work together on their agreed goals. Gain agreement if those parameters shift.

Key questions for leaders:

• Do your staff feel able to express professional opinion and disagreement freely?
• Is there competition or collaboration between groups in your organisation?
• Have you set clear expectations around curiosity and seeking informal resolutions, rather than immediate escalation of issues?

4. Make better use of data and evidence.

• With recommendation 1 in mind, think about what useful data looks like to your organisation. What you need to track depends on what you are trying to achieve. Don’t track what doesn’t matter. The key to useful data in EDI is detail and analysis – as it is in any other strategic discussions in your organisation. Don’t stop at the headlines.
• Consider developing a theory of change around EDI activities, then gather data to test cause-and-effect and to interrogate underlying assumptions.

• Use this framework to make it clear you have a learning environment, so your staff know they can try things and fail. It is beneficial to have evidence of what doesn’t work, as well as what does.
• Use feedback and other survey tools that allow staff to be confident that their contribution will be anonymous. If you are collecting data on categories (such as sex, race or disability), use definitions developed by national research organisations, rather than trying to create your own. Consider using qualitative data, too – for example, asking staff what barriers they perceive to progression.
• Look beyond headline data to try to understand what is really happening within organisations in areas such as pay gaps, progression and grievances. Consider the likely reasons behind certain patterns – for example, if black members of staff are subject to more complaints about performance than other staff, are their line managers failing to deal with issues at a stage when these might still be resolvable? Are they held to different performance standards? What can be done to address these issues?
• Accept complexity and that it will take time to see genuine change. Don’t extrapolate from the data what it cannot support.
• Ensure that any findings from data are used to inform greater organisational understanding and, where necessary, effect change. Be transparent about your findings.
• Evaluate EDI initiatives and apply any lessons learned to future schemes.
• Share information about what works with other organisations in order to increase the collective knowledge base and prompt widespread good practice.

Where data focuses on group identities, there is a risk of compounding some of the issues that this report highlights. Group data can be used effectively to identify genuine barriers to recruitment and progression in a way that helps the organisation work out the blockers and to tackle them, instead of informing spurious quotas that often have unintended consequences. These data should be complemented by information that helps organisations to track progress achieving diversity of thought – staff surveys might contain a question, for example, that asks: ‘Do you feel comfortable (a) to share an opinion and (b) to disagree with colleagues?’.

Key questions for leaders:

• Do all your staff have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve through EDI and what progress looks like?
• Do you track only what matters, and use it to effect positive change?
• Do you look for the stories behind the data and embrace complexity?

5. Move towards a more constructive model of staff networks.

Staff networks are not working in many organisations – where they focus on interests of particular groups, they often reinforce divisions. Are they outliving their usefulness and creating division rather than giving voice? Leaders have a number of options, the choice of which is likely to depend on the maturity (or otherwise) of its existing networks and the quality of its relationships with staff. It also depends on what leaders want to get out of such a network.

1. Avoid staff networks all together and focus on other ways of engaging employees – through, for example, direct consultations, staff coffee mornings and trades union representation.
2. Replace existing networks with a single cross-issue staff forum from which working groups can be drawn to gather employees’ thoughts on key issues that require consultation.
3. Refresh the mandate of existing staff networks to ensure they are responsible for gathering and reflecting the whole range of views of their constituency – for example, that LGBT groups must represent the views of those lesbians, gays and bisexuals who believe that sexual orientation is based on sex, not gender identity, as well as those who believe otherwise. It may be useful to build a model of staff networks that are focused internally, with no external-facing presence (which risks entrenching divisions with other groups).
4. Change the role of staff networks so they are limited to community, signposting and mutual support instead of advocacy, creating different mechanisms for employee voice.

Key questions for leaders:

• What is the purpose of staff networks, and how are they contributing to your organisation’s activities and goals?
• If you have existing networks, are there better ways of getting your employees to tell you what they need? If there are, how do the pros balance out against the cons of possible opposition to change from network chairs?

6. Check the quality of training.

• Ensure that those with responsibility for contracting external training make certain that its content is properly evidenced and reflects the law, and that its delivery is evaluated in terms of relevance, quality and impact.
• Only contract external trainers and speakers who explicitly recognise a diversity of views on the more challenging areas of EDI and have the ability to facilitate the conversations about them. They should commit to engaging all participants – and their views – in training sessions and to dealing openly with difficult conversations.
• Ensure external trainers properly understand the legal framework of the Equality Act – especially with regard to recent case law on questions of belief, discrimination and harassment (for example, Meade v Westminster City Council and Social Work England, and Forstater v CGD Europe).
• Consider whether EDI-focused training is necessary, or whether it can be covered by training on good HR and business practice more generally. In the words of a roundtable participant, ‘Avoid sheep-dip equality training.’
• Develop processes to ensure that training is embedded, and that any learning from external trainers cascaded through the organisation is reliable and lawful.
• Measure training outcomes (such as behaviour change) – not just inputs and outputs (for example, the number of people trained).

7. Find common purpose.

• Create and communicate a shared sense of purpose and organisational identity to which staff can contribute through what they each differently bring. Everyone should understand that they have a value to the organisation in pursuit of this common goal.
• Recognise that staff contribute to common purpose and endeavours both through the story of their identity and also the skills, expertise, talent and type of personality they bring to work. Celebrate a rich diversity of individual stories.
• At the same time, be clear to staff that the fundamental contract between employers and employees is that they get a salary to perform a role – there are important boundaries between personal and professional lives. The shared purpose is a professional one.
• Build a culture that respects and embraces difference, and that encourages constructive disagreement, in order to unite diverse people and achieve positive organisational outcomes.

Key questions for leaders:

• What sort of training do your employees need and why?
• What will it change?
• How do you know when training has been successful?

2. Executive Summary

▶ Workforce: in one view, younger staff find it increasingly difficult to integrate other people’s perspectives and to engage in healthy debate; in another, they are more open to new ideas than older generations. Leaders may feel a pressure from some quarters to commit to a position on contested issues, which creates problems elsewhere in the organisation. They also have to manage underlying prejudices among some members of staff.

▶ Implementation: EDI-related changes are slow to take effect, which can frustrate and disillusion some people. Solutions do not exist to all challenges. Visible diversity is more straightforward to implement than other types of diversity, leading a dearth in diversity of thought within many organisations. And organisations are not necessarily well-equipped to take on board the new perspectives arising from such diversity.

Division through a Dominant Ideology

▶ How we lost what we used to share: the dominant EDI philosophy is underpinned by fixed ideas about social justice. There is often a belief at the heart of this worldview that a single approach works for everybody, and that there is only one morally correct way to see the world. Separating communities into identity categories can mean common bonds are lost. Further negative impacts of divisive cultures include escalation of issues, weaponisation of actions that were not intended to harm and workplace dissatisfaction. They also lead people to turn away from EDI.

▶ #NoDebate: the prevalent philosophy is closed for discussion in many organisations. Fears about internal or external cancellation contribute to a belief among some staff that offering alternative perspectives would be too risky. The belief system is further embedded when organisations centre people’s so-called lived experiences. Dissenters feeling unable to speak causes personal and organisational detriment – including toxicity, impoverished culture and an impaired ability to make effective decisions.

The Wrong Ingredients

▶ Uncoupling from purpose: EDI has frequently become separated from the business reasons for doing it, risking linked initiatives becoming meaningless. This can be compounded by a deeper lack of understanding within organisations about what EDI can achieve. It is often viewed separately from other organisational activities and structures, rather than as something to be embedded within a workplace culture.

▶ Skewed voices: approaches to EDI are often influenced by those who speak the loudest and not, necessarily, by those whose needs are greatest. Very junior members of staff – who may have a particular lens on contentious issues – are sometimes driving policies. EDI thinking can be outsourced to external organisations, which reinforce the mainstream orthodoxy, and internal strategy is often lacking. Focusing on visible diversity means that other aspects of it, including social class, can go unnoticed and unaddressed. EDI practitioners may be inexperienced, unknowledgeable and unskilled, especially around equality law.

▶ The problem with data: data is not currently used effectively in EDI, in part because meaningful change is hard to quantify, but also because clear links between inputs, outputs and outcomes are assumed but not demonstrated. When something is assumed to be correct, it removes the pressure to measure links, to provide evidence of impact and to assess what works for a particular organisation. Headline data on targets obscures a more nuanced understanding of what is really happening. Data is often not used to inform actions.

Negative Outcomes

▶ Box-ticking and virtue-signalling: celebrating days of action and flying flags may have replaced genuine progress in some organisations. Poor service, when it combined with performative EDI, can cause customers and staff to disengage. Debates over insignificant issues and time-intensive performative EDI can undermine organisational performance.

▶ Failure to balance needs and rights: focusing on limited identity categories places organisations at legal and reputational risk, as they may fail to consider fully the needs and rights of other individuals and groups. Common approaches to EDI can clash, in the higher education sector, with academic freedom. Failing to balance employees’ needs and rights sufficiently often leads to poorer business decisions, and opens organisations up to considerable legal and reputational risk.

▶ The problem with targets and putting people on pedestals: targets and quotas may backfire through perceptions, either real or imagined, that people are not up to the job, which has further downstream impacts on both bias and the potential of other talented people to be promoted. Often, one person can become – in the eyes of leaders or colleagues – the unwilling poster child for a particular identity category.

▶ Discrimination and attrition: black members of staff still face discrimination. Organisations are better at recruiting diverse staff than they are at retaining them. A major current risk is the disenfranchisement, and potential loss, of EDI dissenters and the skills they bring. The dominant EDI philosophy risks staff performing less effectively and, in the longer term, organisations losing skilled, experienced members of staff.

▶ Persistent ineffectiveness: the problems EDI was established to solve still exist. Money is wasted when activities are not linked to intended output, outcomes and impact through a theory of change (or similar tool), and when changes are not embedded. Effectiveness is also challenged when EDI is bolted on to activities, not integrated within them.

The Grey Areas

EDI for Some or for All?

▶ Identity versus individual diversity: some organisations see diversity through the lens of identity categories; others centre individual skills and experience. Employers may feel pressure from younger staff to adopt an identity-focused approach, which can be used to diversify teams and access talent. An exclusive focus on identity categories, though, can be divisive. It risks one-dimensional solutions that omit consideration of swathes of the workforce, unhealthy competition between groups and loss of institutional nuance.

▶ Feeling wrong, bad or left out: the other major risk of identity-focused approaches is the disengagement and isolation of staff with differing views or from excluded groups, which affect organisational cohesion and performance. Identity-enabled alienation is rooted in wider society. Sex, race and age are all areas in which organisations may inadvertently exclude a category of people through a focus on another category in a way that divides, rather than unites. This is particular issue when the largest groups within an organisation are excluded from diversity-related conversations.

▶ But identity cannot be erased completely: some women experience misogyny; some black people experience racism; talented people from particular groups may be overlooked for promotions or subjected to harassment. A partial solution may be found, for recruitment and promotions, in removing barriers for those who face them, while being clear that appointments are made on merit. Socioeconomic diversity has potential as a concept that can include everyone, while removing barriers faced by other groups.

▶ Staff networks: these have a powerful influence on EDI. While some benefits were mentioned by interviewees, there are many problems. Their focus on identity groupings has the potential to divide, not unite; they often campaign for causes that are not supported by all the staff they represent; they can distract from bigger issues; and they can give leaders a false impression that they are accessing diversity of thought.

Activism and Contentious Areas

▶ Social activism: there are multiple pressures on leaders to take an activist line on given social issues. EDI itself, in one perspective, is an activist function at heart – something that is self-perpetuating, as those who do not sign up to its values leave the profession. Activism is a good thing, for some leaders, shifting society progressively and facilitating greater staff engagement. For others, it is something for organisations to do only if it works in the interests of clients or customers – influencing policy, rather than public campaigns, may be a useful mechanism for this. Sometimes, activism can make situations worse and undermine the objectives that those involved are setting out to attain. Even as it engages some staff, it alienates others. Some leaders believe it is never appropriate for organisations to engage in activism. Reasons include perceived authoritarianism, workforce divisions, external criticism, hypocrisy and resource costs. Political issues, for some, are always to be avoided.

▶ Managing contentious issues: like activism – and, often, on common topics – contentious issues can percolate into organisations from wider society. There are sometimes actual or perceived competing rights between groups on a given issue. Healthy disagreement is the ambition; bullying, hectoring and discrimination can be the reality. Leaders can help to offset these negative outcomes by encouraging tolerance of other perspectives and respect for difference. Some believe such issues have to be aired and discussed; others have shut down discussion of them in the workplace when they have become damaging. The ability to deal with complexity is missing in some organisations.

When EDI Becomes Personal

▶ Confidence and fear: there is reasonably high stated confidence among the people interviewed for this research that they can manage differences of opinion among their staff and that they can articulate their organisations’ EDI values and purpose without fear of criticism. Deeper analysis of their responses, however, suggests that this overt confidence may be slightly shakier in reality. There is fear, too, to be found in grievances and litigation, in conversations about race and ethnicity, and in reputational risk. Junior managers may need particular help to build their confidence in these areas. Deep-seated organisational fear may prevent actions being taken that effect positive change.

▶ Managing mistakes: intent is vital – are people causing offence deliberately or through misjudgement? While interviewees made it clear that the people who feel offence must seek to understand the intent of those who caused it, nobody wondered if the error might be in the interpretation rather than the original action. Early, light-touch interventions may be more useful than fixing problems later, though some organisations move quickly towards escalation. Institutional responses must be balanced with the importance of creating a culture that allows people to make mistakes without the paralysis of fear.

Training and Development

The quality and impact of EDI training is variable. It is hard to ascertain which training options are likely to be helpful to organisations due to an absence of evaluation and impact assessment. There is a scarcity, too, of training that ties EDI into business purpose and organisational performance. Training also suffers from a lack of people applying, in a structured format, what they have learned to their day-to-day work, and a wider organisational failure to embed training and development. There are some controversial elements of training, too. Unconscious bias training, for example, risks division through the negative way in which it is framed.

Where Now?

The Direction of Travel

Views on EDI’s trajectory are equivocal – it has the potential to move towards openness and opportunity or towards rules and prohibitions. Openness and opportunity can enable diversity through light-touch frameworks and, in one view, the extent of an organisation’s openness is a signifier of its maturity level. There is recognition, though, that rules are needed, too – in their absence, well-intended dialogue does not convert into meaningful change. Rules become problematic when approaches are tipped too heavily towards them. Downsides include a loss of flexibility, creativity and trust; lower self-efficacy among

employees; and greater workforce division. Organisations that have moved too far along a rules-based continuum may be influenced by perceptions among proponents of the prevalent EDI philosophy that it is the morally correct stance to take; by underpinning fears relating to increasing polarisation of views; and by EDI structures that position EDI leads as advisors on process rather than instigators of deeper change. Organisations in future will need to strike a sensible middle ground between openness and rules.

Strengths and Opportunities

Concept

EDI can be distilled into a core concept that expresses its essential purpose in terms of what organisations want to achieve for their employees, their

customers or in pursuit of other business-focused objectives. Some EDI-related risks can be converted into opportunities. Other high-level opportunities include expanding the focus of EDI to encompass freedom of speech – or, conversely, to strip it back and keep things simple; reframing the narrative around enhancement; taking a more nuanced approach to complex issues; enabling open discussion of problems attached to the mainstream EDI philosophy; and moving towards a more mature understanding of EDI.

Calculation

Opportunities relating to data and evidence include calculating cause-and- effect to realise benefits; data collection overseen by representative bodies; greater use of evaluation and impact assessment to assess what works; making wider organisational changes when approaches are trialled, measured and shown to be successful; and use of evidence to inform decisions about EDI maturity.

Culture

Culture is critical to the effectiveness of organisational EDI. It is built on dialogue and richly diverse perspectives, and it is enhanced by effective policies, practices and data. Leaders need to model the attitudes and behaviours they want to see elsewhere; this can promote widespread positive change.

Captaincy

Leaders – the captains of their organisations – can capitalise on having clarity over purpose and strategy. Other related opportunities include linking EDI into corporate goals, rather than as an adjunct; a focus on values; careful planning ahead of training or other activities to ensure there are no clashes of needs or rights; and understanding personal biases.

Competence

This is found both in staff teams, enabled through EDI, and in the rigour in which the right EDI policies are developed. EDI has real potential to widen the available talent pool of organisations, with positive knock-on effects on business performance. Talent-related opportunities include developing knowledge-informed policies; and bringing community considerations into workforce planning.

Community

An important dividend of diversity is found through unifying an organisation into a single community in pursuit of its objectives. Leaders have the potential to move staff networks from single-issue groups to shared discussion groups reflecting individual difference. They can also be given a more limited remit, with clear expectations.

Contention

Organisations thrive when they have a culture that enables healthy disagreement and the expression of views that challenge mainstream thinking. Some interviewees see opportunity in setting clear lines around the areas that are out of scope for discussion at work, while others think everything beyond hate speech is open for debate. There is an opportunity for training to support healthy disagreement. Other opportunities include having curiosity about nuance and running facilitated conversations that help people to disagree well.

Cohesion

The key opportunity is to unify diverse people, the realisation of which is supported by moving away from the idea of discrete groups. Unity can be built through open conversations and acceptance of other views, and by creating a shared sense of identity.