Best practices for building effective diversity, equity & inclusion programs

Many organizational leaders want to do the right thing—they’re committed to creating more equitable, diverse and inclusive workplaces. In spite of that, many leaders are unsure where to begin. In this episode, co-hosts John Iino and Iveliz Crespo join Reed Smith counsel Liza Craig – our deputy director for diversity, equity & inclusion programs in the U.S. – to share strategies for achieving transformational change on issues of equity, inclusion and diversity.

For more information, please visit Reed Smith's Diversity & Inclusion page.

Transcript:

Intro: Hi, I'm John Iino and I'm Iveliz Crespo. Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Inclusivity Included: Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions and challenges, past and present, all with the goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, inclusivity included. 

John: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm John Iino and we're joined by our co-host Iveliz Crespo. Hey, Elise. 

Iveliz: Hi, John, how are you doing? 

John: Great. So today we have actually a special guest, what I'd call a podcast superstar, the host of Reed Smith, another one of Reed Smith's podcast, government contracts, coffee break. So we're joined by Liza Craig. Liza is a counsel in our Washington DC office for those of you in our audience who may not be familiar with Liza, but she also serves as the US Deputy for our DE&I program. Hey Liza. 

Liza: Hey, thanks so much John and Iveliz for having me. Great to be here. 

John: It's, it's great to put the trio together on, on the podcast. So Happy New Year, everyone. And really thanks for joining. Now, we thought we cover a different area here that's really been very active for us in the DE&I space. Many companies and clients have been approaching us recently to help them with their DE&I programs. Obviously, there's so much focus on racial equity and the need for meaningful and effective DE&I programs. And Reed Smith really are proud of the fact that we're taking a leadership role amongst law firms in this space. But I see so many companies that are just, you know, wanting to build out do more. And so we're really happy to, to support them. So as our global managing partner, Sandy Thomas, he recently said that one of the main lessons of 2020 for us at Reed Smith was that while we were successful and while every bit a part of the core of Reed Smith, we really need to put our DE&I program on jet fuel and stop rethink expand recommit to an even more diverse Reed Smith. So I just really love the words of, of Sandy there. So our clients see what we're doing and they're reaching out with us to partner with them as they recommit to DE&I, so let's talk a little bit about what we're seeing in responding to these inquiries. Liza has some examples? 

Liza: Yeah, thanks so much John. You're, you're absolutely right. You know, already 2021 is, is off with a bang and um you know, the last last few months of last year and certainly well into this year, we've really been called on quite often to assist clients with their own DE&I programs. And in some cases, we really have just, you know, started with the, the very fundamental basics, you know, asking ourselves and our clients to identify the critical elements necessary to build a successful DE&I program. So let's talk a little bit about what's come to the surface as, as we have engaged in this exercise. So really a a couple of foundational concepts, leadership buy in really important when building a program, having that program align with your business goals, assessment of an organization's culture. I mean, absolutely critical. Um when you're talking about a DE&I program and the structure of that program itself, what does that structure need to look like to be effective? So, Iveliz I know um you and I have talked quite a bit about the importance of leadership buy in. Uh Can you, can you tell our audience a little bit about what you have seen in this space? 

Iveliz: Yeah, absolutely Liza. And you know, we know uh at, at Reed Smith that leadership buy in and support from senior leadership on any DEI initiatives is critical to the success of any initiative that, that companies may be interested in engaging in. But a question that we use, we sometimes get asked is how do you begin to engage and enlist the support from leadership on these issues. And so I think for me, when I'm looking at that and I'm talking to organizations, my, my first step, my first advice is you want to get them involved early on. I think that's very critical and you want to engage them by educating them and providing some training around the value of DEI efforts. We also want to make sure that you align leaders on the current realities facing the business and build that compelling case for change that leaders can adopt. It's also important to assist leadership through creating big picture DEI goals, right? They need to be involved early on helping align those goals and helping set those goals so they can build an understanding of, of why, why these measures are important and that you have that buy in to help you progress towards achieving those goals. 

John: Absolutely, Iveliz. Because I agree 100%. And when our clients have approached us to talk about their DEI programs, all three of us, when we've been approached, we typically have the same initial questions for the clients because the clients might come to us and say we want you to help us do some training or something like that. Or we want to help us advise on our DEI programs and we always start with, you know, the questions we're talking about right now. So before we talk about that, let's talk about the buying of leadership. Do you have buy in from your senior leadership? Similarly, we typically ask them. Ok, so how is DE&I aligned with your company’s business goals? the most successful DEI programs are ones that align with the company's business. And we're right now going through our DEI strategic planning process with all of our BIGs which we call business inclusion groups. And we've asked them in terms of their strategic plans to make sure that they align with the key drivers of our overall firm strategic plan. So making sure that the efforts you're making on on behalf of your DEI program are in sync with and aligned with and support the company's business goals really are critical to making sure that you're going to have a successful DEI program. So example that I I like to give is a couple of years ago, we were working with Disney and what they had done in terms of aligning some of their DEI programs with their business was they engaged their black employee ERG to assist with the development of the the characters for the Black Panther movie. So the merchandizing and the like and you know what the the figurines would look like and, and and the, the costuming and the hair and the, and the and the coloring, all things like that really involve the, the ERG with the company's core business and that's it was really critical as opposed to, to have a stand alone program that's not aligned with the business. So as you think about your company's overall goals, what are the revenue increase your customer base expanding, diversifying your customer base? And so that if you could be an employer of choice, if you have your DEI programs aligned with broadening your company, your customer base, this really can propel your DEI program to as opposed to a nice to have. It's good that we have that it's now critical in core to the company's business. 

Liza: So very true, John, just really great points. And I, I love the story about, you know, getting the employees involved in, in something that would be so important to the company, like the branding of the, the characters. In addition to, you know, aligning it with the business goals and other area that uh we often focus on with our clients is really looking at the organization's culture and really assessing it before you get into building that DEI program. You know, every organization is different and understanding the culture of an organization really is critical to building and implementing a successful DEI program. And when clients come to us and they ask, OK, we get it, we know it's important but how do we assess our organization's culture? What do you recommend? We've got a couple of points that we tend to, to go over with them that we find are really great ways to start in this area. First of all, you know, looking at the onboarding process for new employees, um a great way to test the barometer of your organization's culture is to really see how new employees are introduced to the company. What kind of training are they given? What types of insights or new employees um provided about what type of place it is where they're coming to work? And it's a great way to, to take the temperature of a culture of a company to really see what its culture is about. Another way that you can um assess your organization's culture is really to gauge the openness, responsiveness and the flexibility of leadership. You know, is your leadership agile, is your leadership willing to change? Is your leadership self reflective? I mean, all of these questions that um you know, you sort of ask of your leadership pose to your leadership and the resulting answers really give you an idea of the culture because of course, as you know, a lot of the culture is driven from the top. So looking at your leadership is a really great way to assess the organization's culture. Also evaluating your corporate incentive programs or the absence of those incentive programs can be another way to look at culture. You can that way you can sort of determine and ascertain what behavior, what employee conduct, you know, what are, what are the things that are being valued by your company and, and how is your company rewarding what it sees as employee conduct that is valuable and beneficial. So that that's another way to look at culture. And finally, you know, just generally observing team interactions to really determine how well employees work together. Are your employees generally collaborative, are Taskings and are projects approached from a team perspective? Or do you, you have a culture that is more individualistic where people tend to work in smaller silos. Now, of course, sometimes uh that's what the business drives towards. But, but certainly taking a look at the ways that your employees interact with one another and the way that they approach the work that they're doing on behalf of the company is a really great way to assess culture in preparation for building out your DEI program, 

John: Liza I can't stress enough the importance of culture. Typically, when we um engaged by cupping and clients to assist on their DEI programs, you know, that's always a fundamental question. What is your culture? And I think the famous saying by Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy for breakfast or maybe for lunch. Um But you know, it's so important to have the right culture. And if you're in, in designing your, your program, if you don't, you know, address culture first, it's just it can be like, you know, banging your head on the wall and it's really important to make sure that you, you're addressing culture. I was just on with a colleague, I guess you say a counterpart at another company, not a law firm and she uh is expanded her title from Chief Diversity Officer to I think title is now Director of Cultural Relations or something like that. And I really was inspired by that because one of the things that I had been thinking in the back of my mind is that that the role of the diversity officer is really culture. So maybe instead you should work in the title Chief culture Officer or something along those lines because that's really the organizational culture is what we're ultimately trying to change. 

Iveliz: Yeah, absolutely. So you have buy in, right? So say if a company, you now have leadership buy-in, you've assessed your company culture, you've conducted this inclusivity assessment, you've met with leadership, core members and you have an idea of where some of the areas that you want to focus on. How do you then take that all of that information and structure your DEI program? What does that look like? There are many different ways to structure a DEI program and the ideal structure may depend on your leadership, as we said earlier, culture and goals. But beyond that, there are some basic elements that should be considered to create a successful DEI program. You want to look at recruiting and retention efforts. Now, you've looked at the demographics of your organization at this point. You've conducted an assessment, you have an idea, some of those barriers are. So it's critical that you look at the barriers specifically around recruitment and retention that may be impacting the demographics at your company. And so you want to remove the barriers that's that prevent you from creating a diverse company. So making sure that you're assessing how you're doing recruitment, where you're recruiting from. Uh If you're using recruitment firms, what do those recruitment firms look like? You want to make sure you're looking at your hiring committees and making sure those hiring committees are diverse. Uh You also want to put your attention to developing your diverse staff members, right? So looking at how our staff members succeeding there is, is there a likelihood that you're seeing folks leaving? You also want to assess that. And if you're seeing any trends in terms of specific demographics that are leaving more frequently than others, you want to make sure you're addressing those issues to make sure that you are doing everything that you can to aid in the diversity of the folks in your organization. Another area that I think is really important and we talked a lot about this is culture, right? You want to make sure that you are creating a culture in which diverse folks and everyone really can come and thrive and you start developing that culture, right? By being really intentional about the training that you're providing to the folks in your organization and also the programming that you're putting on. You want to make sure that the training reinforces the importance of inclusion in your company culture. And you also want to make sure that training empowers everyone on staff to identify and respond to discriminatory behavior. So you want to teach people how to be up standards. And then you also want to make sure when you're looking at programming that you're putting sufficient funding to help develop programming that's supporting your DEI effort, who will coordinate and execute this programming, maybe consider creating a position where this is someone's job full time. And then lastly, I think you want to make sure that you have opportunities to regularly assess the success of your program. It's great to do the assessment in the beginning, but it's also really imperative to set benchmarks so that you can continuously assess how you're doing. 

John: Absolutely. And especially as you think about, you know, like you say that, that the structure of who's supporting your DEI efforts, I often talk to our counterparts at other organizations and we compare notes in terms of how your DEI program is, is structured or, or organizationally and how it, you know, fits in the org chart of the organization. And not that what we do at Reed Smith is Standard or the, the um the bellwether or the best way to do it. But just one of the ways that I think that's been very successful for us is that yes, we have our DEI I department, so to speak that the folks that are dedicated to do this 100% but we have people in pretty much every one of our departments across the organization that are dedicated to supporting DEI. So that includes recruiting communications, PR, business development and marketing, HR, information technology, knowledge management. So it's so critical that we really realize that it's so critical of people that have a different skill set, have the different expertise to support a mission and be dedicated to that. So I know talking to some other folks in, in terms of their DEI program structure that they said, oh, you know, we have three or four folks that are, you know, working on our DEI program full time, which is great. But at the same time, you know, I'd like to say at Reed Smith, we probably have 50 or 60 folks that are supporting the DEI program in various departments and this is part of their job description. And so it's really great in terms if you look at the aggregate amount of resources that we're able to dedicate towards our our mission. 

Iveliz: Yeah, absolutely John. And I guess one thing that I do want to add that, I think I see a lot of a lot of organizations make this mistake is that they let the ownership of making these changes and creating this culture falls on folks that are not necessarily in leadership but are people who are invested in the success of these initiatives? Right? So the minorities, the the diverse folks on your teams and we want to make sure that, that, that, that's not the case, right? A successful program really needs leadership by and it needs to be spearheaded by folks in leadership, folks that are serving as allies. I think that's critical, but it is a mistake that I think that I see occur quite often. 

John: I just want to shift gears a little bit and, and look kind of at the best practices and what some of the really vanguards in, in, in the industry or in, in the corporate world are doing with respect to their DEI programs. I neglected to mention earlier, we're talking about aligning with company goals is that when we have our ERGs developing the strategic plans that they would, they would align with the company's business goals. And I just thought I'd throw it out there in terms of what our strategic drivers are going forward. It's one evolving culture, two growing client relationships, three, the attraction and development and retention of talent, four, driving innovation and technology, and five elevating our brand and reputation. So because these are the key drivers to our or the success of the, of the law firm, we want to make sure that all the things we are doing for our ERGs or our business inclusion groups are really aligned with that. So that's why we want to make sure that their strategic plans are aligned with the company goals. Maybe let's go around the horn and talk about what we're seeing some of the some other best practices that other organizations that we we're seeing. I'll just lead off and Liza and Iveliz, you can jump in. I I recently was on a panel with, with another Chief Diversity Officer and we were talking about assessing culture and setting targets and goals with respect to culture. We at Reed Smith had done it firm wide all personnel inclusivity survey that was run by Russell Reynolds and Associates that tried to determine the inclusiveness of our culture by asking, I can't remember 100 or so questions and then we get the results. But the organization that I was talking to the Chief Diversity Officer I was talking to is that she is, is, is taking those surveys, those internal surveys, which many companies will do, but then tried to boil down to three or four or five key KPIs, key indicators that they really want to focus on. And so seeing how year over year or a period over a period, how was that needle being moved? So for example, it was, do you have a sense of belonging and engagement with, with this company and you know, broken down by the different demographics? And then saying in a year in two years we want to move the needle on this specific KPI and how are we going to do that? And I thought that was really great because not only are you taking the data and assessing your, your company organization, but you're setting hard goals in terms of where you want to see that, that move forward. So Liza and Iveliz I know you're seeing a lot as well if you want to throw out some of the best practices or other innovative things that you're seeing? 

Iveliz: So I think one of the most exciting things or trends that I'm seeing in terms of DEI are the companies that are applying their executive compensation to DEI metrics, right? I I think that that shows that companies are, you know, taking this seriously and, and I can't think of a better signal to the entire organization that this is a priority, right, than making it something that is tied to compensation for some of the folks in leadership to make sure that, you know, they are invested in meeting these metrics and in driving these initiatives. 

Liza: These are all great and you know, there's such a long list, there's so much out there that these real trailblazers in the DEI space are doing. There's just a wealth of, of really great practice tips. One of the ones that I that really struck me was one particular company established, an advisory board that was called an inclusion advisory board. And I thought this was really neat because it brought together internal corporate stakeholders really with external leaders, customer based leaders, community based leaders, folks that were external to the company that really brought a very fresh perspective to the discussion, to really talk about specifically systemic barriers that hinder exclusivity and to really help ident identify ways that the company would really remove those barriers and also contribute to the removal of barriers within the greater community. So that, you know, they were looking at whether the company could fund certain activities, whether the company could really with partner with different community, stakeholders, different folks to really make a broader impact. So, so this idea that DEI from a company perspective is important to the company itself, but that they are actually bringing in the larger community and folks outside of the company to really make a greater impact in this space. Uh just was really powerful to me and a really great example of how a company can go beyond itself to really make changes in this area. 

John: I I love that those are great examples as we think about expanding DEI programs. I guess it's also important to make sure that we're aware of the, you know, the legal landscape in, in terms of what we shouldn't or can, can't do. I know you've been focused a lot on this Liza recently. You want to talk a little bit about that. 

Liza: Yeah. so I guess we've got all lawyers here on the podcast. So there's no way that, that we would have a great discussion like this without talking about the risks associated with these types of programs. So, so, so, right, that's been part of our conversation with clients and, and it will have to continue to be because, you know, while we, we cover a variety of great ideas for our clients and for anyone, you know, actually listening to this podcast ’ho's interested in really growing their company's DEI program. But we got to point out that these efforts should be undertaken with the advice and Council of Labor and employment attorneys and human resource professionals that really can assist in navigating some of the challenges that arrive with making meaningful and impactful changes in this space title seven of the Civil Rights Act and other laws that outlaw discrimination forbid companies from making employment decisions based on identifiers like age race, gender, national origin, some of the very categories that these DEI programs are looking to remove barriers for uh these individuals to have access equality and opportunity. And in some cases, federal law however, does permit the consideration of protected identifiers in areas of recruitment, development and promotion of employees. So, so you know, how do you sort of reconcile the nuances with the laws that prevent discrimination and prevent entities for really looking at these protective categories to the exclusion of others but then also the permissive nature of, of trying to remove barriers and trying to, to open up an organization in terms of equality, really to avoid the legal challenges of promoting diversity in the workplace. As I said, employers need to work with their hr professionals in their council really to ensure that they are providing equal opportunities to all employees. And they need to ensure that any policies that are implemented and any practices that are really adopted by leadership and flow down throughout the organization will result in inclusion for all. And that can be dicey. It can raise challenges amongst employees. Perhaps feel that if there's a focus on a certain ethnic group or racial group or gender group, it may be to their detriment. There's a lot of moving parts with implementing these very important programs. And so certainly, if you're gonna go forward, you want to make sure that you understand the risks, you anticipate the risk and you want to make sure that the program you put in place is ultimately going to be not only impactful and effective but also a defensible one and a legally supportable one. 

Iveliz: That's a great point. And if I may make a plug for my colleagues here at Reed Smith, we have a team of labor and employment practitioners that are able to help companies navigate the legal challenges associated with establishing a robust DEI program and implementing it fully. That's another area where we ourselves as DEI core members of Reed Smith have been assisting clients recently and collaborating with these attorneys. 

John: Absolutely. So I know this is really just the tip of the iceberg, right? When we engage with with clients or we have these discussions, we could talk about this for hours or get into a lot of more of the details, the the specifics of various companies. But for our audience, hopefully, today was insightful in terms of some of the things that you may be thinking of or, or new directions that you may take your, your program to. This was a lot of fun Liza and Iveliz. Liza, thanks for joining us, as I say our, our crossover um superstar podcast host. Really pleasure to have you uh part of our, our team this time. 

Liza: Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here with you all. 

Outro: Inclusivity Included is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, PodBean, and reedsmith.com. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. 

All rights reserved

Transcript is auto-generated.