We all recognise that recruiting and maintaining a diverse workforce is challenging, and the problem is heightened at executive team level where, being kind, you might say many firms have historically struggled with their ethnic and gender diversity. This is particularly visible in more traditional industries, like financial services, where women account for just 17.4% of senior leadership roles in the UK.
The pandemic shone a light on the levels of discrepancies and brought issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace to light. It also further amplified inequalities.
We won’t rehash the benefits of delivering diversity at the senior levels of your organisation. A range of studies have shown that having companies that embrace a range of ethnicities backgrounds, genders - and ultimately a diverse talent strategy featuring socioeconomic background, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, religion and age - outperform their less diverse peers, innovate faster and better reflect the customers and wider society that they serve.
Achieving diversity targets in the workplace has been a core theme of our work over the past two decades. Our team has carried out successful diversity enhancement projects for some of the world’s most recognisable companies and organisations. Our expertise and wide-ranging research suggests that, globally, there is clearly positive forward momentum behind the take up of DE&I concepts and programmes, but what do the most recent reports suggest?
DE&I Reports 2022
On the whole, there are a number of clearly positive trends. One major global development highlighted is the increase in, and engagement with, the wider concept of DE&I. This trend was seemingly kickstarted by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 but has been sustained over the past two years. In France, for example, a McKinsey report found that 1-in-5 executives rank improving diversity as one of their top three priorities. There is also clearly improved sentiment towards initiatives and efforts made by employers to diversify their workforces, with 85% of respondents to one major global survey revealing a favourable response to diversity, equality and inclusion programmes. The same survey also revealed a 3% increase year-on-year in the number of people that agree with the idea that their company values diversity.
Across the board DE&I reports reveal that senior level career prospects for women are also improving steadily. In the UK, nearly 40% of board level positions are held by females, up from 12.5% just a decade ago. However, as Voltaire (and Spiderman) once said, ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’, as the improvement in prospects for women in leadership roles has also seemingly led to a decrease in overall happiness with work/life balances amongst the same group.
Progress has also been made in terms of other types of diversity with nearly all FTSE 100 companies meeting the Parker Review’s ‘One Before 2021’ target last year to improve the ethnic composition of major company boards. FTSE 250 firms are also making strong progress towards the 2024 deadline to appoint at least one ethnic minority director. In addition, there have also been clear improvements made when it comes to social mobility and senior board level positions. While this is harder to measure in purely quantitative terms, there are more clear and visible examples of ‘rags-to-riches’ tales highlighting people who have broken the class divide to secure success in the business world, like Dragon’s Den’s Steven Bartlett, for example. However, there is still some way to go; currently only 12% of FTSE 100 firms include class and social mobility within their organisational diversity strategies, a figure that’s broadly similar to most other major countries.
So, while almost all of the latest DE&I reports seemingly agree that the dial is indeed broadly shifting, and that the levels of executive diversity are improving, how is long term, sustainable change actually delivered at ground level?
Delivering on executive diversity targets
Delivering diversity – particularly at senior level – is a core theme of our work. We recognise that diversity means different things, in different places, to different people, and that diversity is one step in the longer walk towards having a productive and healthy working environment. But delivering on a diverse talent strategy, particularly within leadership roles, certainly makes achieving it at other levels much easier.
In order to make the diversity dream a reality, your organisation needs to be utilising tools like benchmarking programmes that help you identify, engage and help you hire groups of talent in line with your strategy. This may be focused on a specific position or a pipeline of candidates for future need, but knowing how you are performing against your industry peers can either provide a positive showcase of what you are achieving, or help you to understand what needs to change.
Auditing can also help to identify where challenges lie, including the invisible ones, particularly through the use of anonymous interviews and focus groups, giving a platform for voices to be heard and creates the opportunity for targeted action.
However, perhaps the most effective way you can boost your organisation’s diversity is to lead from the top. Our inclusive leadership programme is aimed at senior managers within a business. The programme embeds a DE&I mindset within an organisation's leadership ethos. It consists of two half-day group workshops and one-to-one DE&I coaching that helps leaders understand and recognise the value that diverse talents bring to the workforce enabling them to better leverage these advantages.
While the dial is certainly shifting and businesses around the world are adopting more inclusive talent strategies to deliver on their executive diversity goals and targets, there’s still a long way to go yet.