Systems, such as organizational talent management systems, are upheld by people and people inherently have biases. In an effort to mitigate the disparities of recruiting, retaining, supporting and promoting staff, the IEDEIA team has conducted research with many organizations, to develop an effective approach to the employee lifecycle.

Ensuring that you have a diverse workforce is foundational to building a culture where everyone diverse voice and perspective can be included, which should be a high priority for all organizations.

While it’s important to focus on individual and organizational needs in talent management, remember that you’re not expected to be an expert on everything. BUT, in order to ensure that your organization delivers equitable practices, focuses on inclusion, including accessibility adjustments creating a toolkit to vital to ensure your talent management processes are inclusive and nurturing.

Create specific talent management STRATEGIES

Having a diverse workforce will be achieved when you incorporate a range of strategies (plural) for the various policies and practices within your HR organization. The strategies you develop will create a roadmap for ensuring your organization is centering equity and inclusion and will be embedded into your overall HR organizational strategy. Think of the entire talent management lifecycle and develop strategies for the following:

• Workforce planning strategy
• Recruitment and selection strategy
• Compensation strategy
• Mentoring and sponsorship strategy
• Training and development strategy
• Performance management strategy
• Promotion strategy
• Retention and succession planning strategy
• Corporate culture and well-being strategy

By taking multiple approaches to embedding equity into your talent management ecosystem, you’ll be sure to create equitable policies and practices that will be inclusive and lead to feelings of belonging. Let’s explore each further:

Workforce planning strategy:

Strategic Workforce Planning is the process of analyzing, forecasting and planning workforce supply and demand, assessing gaps, and determining targeted talent management interventions to ensure that an organization has the right people – with the right skills in the right places at the right time – to fulfill its mandate and strategic objectives.

Determining the strategic direction for your workforce plan involves understanding key mission goals and future objectives set by your organization’s leaders and then determining how to align your workforce needs to achieve the mission and objectives. Review the Workforce analysis section of the HR Strategy Development document to continue this process.

Recruitment and selection strategy:

Recruitment: To establish diverse teams, a well-defined recruitment policies and processes will mitigate organizational and interpersonal biases and ensure that explicit or implicit biases are filtered. This includes each phase of the recruitment cycle: recruitment planning, candidate sourcing, screening, interviews, reference checks, selection and salary/benefits negotiations.

It’s also important to ensure your recruitment process is accessible by getting the right people into your organization in the first place. Think about what you’re recruiting for, how your job advertisements look, the inclusive language you’re using, and where you’re recruiting. You might also define how you’re letting potential candidates know you’re committed to diversity , equity and inclusion, as well as accessibility. Are you providing potential clients opportunities to get the reasonable accommodations they need during the application and interviewing stage?

As you develop your recruitment strategy, to address potential obstacles to recruitment for a diverse workplace: biases in recruitment planning expectations, biases in sourcing, and biases in the interview process, review the Recruitment tab located within this section.

Compensation strategy:

This information is located on the pay equity tab in this category. You can view the content here.
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Mentoring and sponsorship strategies

Both mentoring and sponsorship plays an integral part of career development and are great tools for improving organizational culture even in organizations where people already feel connected and supported. Equity recognizes that everyone has had different opportunities and barriers, and then doing the work to provide people with what they need to be successful. To make systems more equitable through mentorship and sponsorship programs, your organization will seek those whose identities have been underserved or undervalued in the workplace.

What’s the difference between mentorship and sponsorship? Mentorship is usually a 1-1 relationship focused on personal and professional growth and is used to promote inclusion. When mentoring programs are effective, they can increase employee’s organizational commitment, decrease turnover rates, enhance recruitment, elevate company performance, create promotion opportunities, and facilitate sharing of knowledge.

Sponsorship is different than mentorship because it advocates for and highlights an employee with advancement potential to an audience they might not have easy access to such as senior decision makers. Sponsorship is often identified as a key differentiator in creating visibility, overcoming barriers to advancement and gaining opportunities to showcase an employee’s knowledge, skills and abilities.

To develop your mentor and sponsor strategy, review the components here.

Training and development strategy

This information is located on the Training tab in this category. You can view the content here.

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Performance management strategy

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Over the last couple of decades, performance management has gone through an overhaul to make the process more equitable. But despite improvements to the system and process, employees still complain that performance reviews are biased. One survey found that only 29% of employees strongly agree that the performance reviews they receive are fair, and only 26% strongly agree that they are accurate, which has been substantiated. According to SHRM, nearly 90% of HR professionals consider them inaccurate and, when done poorly, performance reviews are subject to cognitive biases. These can include:

• • Recency bias, which is placing too much emphasis on new experiences, whether positive or negative, and not evaluating the experience of the employee’s full year.
  • The halo and horn effect influences the impressions you have of people and can influence the way you feel about them
  • Like me/Similar to me/Affinity bias occurs when you place more positive attributes, or feel more comfortable with people who are more like you
  • Gender prejudices
  • Racial stereotyping

As much as we try to be objective, everybody is biased. (see video “If You have a Brain, you have a Bias), which is why having multiple feedback data points from different people (peers, managers, direct reports) can help provide multiple perspectives for once-a-year review programs. Incorporating frequent feedback conversations with the employee, which will give you more data points, and working to eliminate bias toward a person that reports to a manager, will provide a more equitable outcome.

To create your performance management strategy, visit the performance management tab in this category. You can view the content here.

Promotion strategy

A recent Harvard Business Review survey of over 400,000 U.S. workers uncovered that when employees believe promotions are managed effectively, they are more than twice as likely to give extra effort at work and to plan a long-term future with their company. They are also five times as likely to believe leaders act with integrity. Employees today expect their organization to promote their people in an equitable way. But when they fail to promote people in a fair and equitable way, the organization risks losing talent, lower morale and productivity, and legal actions.

This starts with viewing talent management as a way to identify high-performers from within your current pool of talent. When you minimize biases toward people in your workforce, at every level of your organization and give the equitable opportunities and support strategies to every single one of your employees, people will FEEL they have been given the opportunity to succeed. (See the mentoring and sponsorship strategy.)

A strong promotion strategy is built on understanding and nurturing each person’s potential. To create your promotion strategy, visit the promotion tab in this category. You can view the content here.

Retention and succession planning strategy

Don’t just recruit, retain! You can put all of your energy into attracting and employing diverse talent, but if your organizational culture is not inclusive and welcoming, and processes and programs aren’t equitable, then good talent won’t stay. So it’s important to think bilaterally to both attract and retain your employees. In order to do this you must consider the environment the organization has developed and the culture the people are upholding to determine if it’s actually inclusive.

Succession plans identify future staffing needs and the people with the skills and potential to perform in these future roles. Succession planning strengthens the overall capability of the organization by:

• Identifying critical positions and highlighting potential vacancies;
• Selecting key competencies and skills necessary for business continuity;
• Focusing development of individuals to meet future business needs.

To create your retention and succession planning strategy, visit the retention/succession planning tab in this category. You can view the content here.

Corporate culture and well-being strategy

When leaders operate from a mindset that talent management is not about getting your employees to fit into the mold of one ‘ideal worker’ but to see their role as being responsible for nurturing every employee and ensuring they have an individualized plan for success and that they know they belong. When leaders see the performance management ecosystem as a way to support each individual to achieve their potential in your organization, the outcome will be amazing because people will WANT to be a part of your organization and WANT the organization to succeed. They’ll have ownership of the culture and drive organizational and individual well-being.

Managing talent and supporting wellbeing go hand in hand. Employees who know that their wellbeing is your top priority will feel more confident in bringing their talents to their work. They’ll feel confident in raising concerns about processes, about opportunities and more. When you embed a focus on wellbeing in every stage of your strategy it will provide your employees with an opportunity for themto thrive!

To create your retention and succession planning strategy, visit the retention/succession planning tab in this category. You can view the content here.

How to identify diverse talent, a step by step guide

Workforce planning involves analyzing, forecasting and planning your workforce supply and demand, and ensuring you have the proper staffing to meet the goals and mission of your organization. It also includes understanding how the workforce needs to be aligned to achieve those goals and mission. The process of conducting a workforce analysis will help you:

• Analyze your current workforce and predict future needs
• Retrain critical talent
• Identify skills gaps
• Recruit for talent with future needed skills
• Know where to target recruitment efforts

Building equity into your workforce analysis

Representation analysis: To build equity or uncover inequities in your workforce, it’s important to identify employee demographic trends by job type, level, or department. Keeping in mind that diversity is about representation, your analysis is key to understanding what your starting point is and provides an opportunity to measure progress towards diversity goals. This analysis should include:

• Ratio of men to women in each role
• # of each ethnicity/race of people in all roles, including executive roles
• # of disabled people
• # of people that represent other social categories (information provided voluntarily)

Capturing this type of information will help your organization determine if there are any unintended disparities. When there are disparities that are uncovered, the question should be raised, why do these disparities exist? This could be because of your recruiting and hiring practices not having equitable practices built in. (Review information on the recruiting tab)

Diversity benchmarking: involves comparing your internal demographic data to external labor pool data and sources such as U.S. Census or EEO-1 data. This is done to help your organization understand if your current workforce reflects the demographics of the communities you serve or that you work in. Benchmarking helps you identify gaps for your workforce demographics compared to what’s achievable for your industry. This can also help you develop what your workforce could and should look like. Then you’ll be able to set realistic, data-backed representation targets for the organization and your departments.

As organizations begin to understand and place importance on building and sustaining diverse teams, diversity recruitment has become a high priority. But, many organizations place emphasis only on achieving diversity hiring goals so they have representation of all social identities. But we caution you that this practice is not the goal of having an equitable process that results in a diverse and inclusive workforce. That methodology is only performative at best and does nothing to retain the underrepresented talent you may hire. As you look at your overall talent management strategy, retention, performance monitoring, management and employee engagement are also part of the strategies you will employ.

Recruitment best practices

Keep in mind that your recruitment strategy is not just about the numbers of diverse people, but also about creating equity in the process to ensure you’re identifying and selecting the right talent. Implement changes in your hiring process to inclusive approaches to building your workforce can include the following best practices:

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EQUAL PAY ANALYSIS CHECKLIST

The Equal Pay Act requires men and women in the same workplace to be compensated with equal pay for equal or substantially similar work. However, the analysis is more complicated than comparing job titles. Instead, employers must look at job duties and determine if employees are tasked with “substantially equal” duties.

Employers must also keep in mind that equal pay encompasses far more than an employee’s base salary. Total compensation is examined for pay equality, including overtime pay, bonuses, stock options, profit sharing and bonus plans, life insurance, vacation and holiday pay, cleaning or gasoline allowances, hotel accommodations, reimbursement for travel expenses, and medical benefits.

The purpose of this checklist is to provide employers with a roadmap for planning and conducting an equal pay analysis. Keep in mind that conducting an equal pay analysis under state laws can involve different criteria than the federal standards.

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Performance management can be defined as the overall communication process between managers and employees that is centered on planning, observing, and reviewing the employee’s system of carrying out job duties. Your performance management strategy should include:

• Goal setting
• Performance monitoring
• Feedback loops
• Employee performance evaluation and appraisals
• Compensation

Below are steps to help you build an equitable performance management plan:

One way to create more welcoming workplaces that respect differences and give a voice to people who are often underrepresented is to implement company DEI training (DEI) programs.

DEI training has the potential to positively address biases and prejudice within organizations. These benefits can lead to some real financial gains for companies as well, according to a 40 year research project conducted by McKinsey & Co. The study found that organizations with diverse workforces are 35% more likely to have above-average profit margins than companies with more homogenous employee bases.

A DEI training program will encourage increased collaboration, enhance interpersonal skills and empower underrepresented groups to feel more valued and respected in the workplace. However, to arrive at these successful outcomes, you must carry out the training responsibly.

While diversity training has been touted as a strong solution to many race- and diversity-related issues in the workplace, there is some speculation as to whether diversity training actually works as intended. Most companies with diversity training programs have not officially measured their efficacy, and there is evidence that diversity training can backfire by putting people on the defensive. Here are some reasons a diversity training program might fail:

• There is an expectation that participants will shed their biases – which is often not possible or realistic.
• Companies use negative messaging, like implied threats, or negative consequences, such as legal action against the company.
• Making the training mandatory can instill animosity and resentment.
• Trainings are used as remedial actions or perceived as punishments for failing to meet expectations.

To investigate the effectiveness of diversity training, writers at the Harvard Business Review conducted their own study, in which they created a diversity training program and tested the results. Here are some of their findings:

1. The training positively affected employees who were unsupportive of women in the workplace by making them more likely to acknowledge discrimination against women, show support for policies designed to help women and acknowledge their own biases.
2. There was no backlash from employees who were already supportive of women.
3. Diversity training has little effect on the behavior of men or white employees in general.
4. The training prompted women to be more proactive about their own advancement by seeking out mentorships.
5. Employees who participated in the training were more likely to acknowledge their own racial biases and recognize the work of their peers who were racial minorities.

The results of the study suggest that there is no one-size-fits-all diversity training and that it takes a lot of careful thought and design to make the program work. Focus on tailoring the training to your own company by addressing your company’s unique problems, and think about how your employees might respond to the different variables of a training (such as making it mandatory versus voluntary, or online versus in person). Taking the time to customize the training could go a long way in making the program successful.

Diversity training can work, but only if the program is tailored to your team, your organization AND addresses individual beliefs and behaviors. We take a different approach to DEI training by DECONSTRUCTING the ideologies and barriers to inclusion that people have. To learn more, visit Deconstructing Diversity.

• Reducing bias in performance management worksheet
• DEI Core competencies
• Talent retention and advancement plan template
• Resource: Reducing hiring manager bias – most common biases in recruitment – pdf
• TOOL: Recruitment Preplanning Checklist – pdf
• TOOL: Interview Scoring Rubric -pdf