How to ensure your DE&I programmes provide impact and value for money

In-house DE&I programmes can seem like a failsafe money saver - but these expensive experiments can sometimes underdeliver on their promise. Rebecca Davies unpicks the research

“Attempts to reduce discrimination and harassment in the workplace are laudable and make good business sense. But only if they work.”

This sentence from a recent article in The Economist the other week caught my eye and got me thinking. Many clients who join Moving Ahead’s mentoring programmes do so because they have tried to do the coaching in house but, often for a reason they can’t put their finger on, the impact hasn’t been nearly as positive as they had hoped. Sometimes it’s even taken the company culture backwards. But why would in-house DE&I strategies often fail? This article may give us some clues.

“The consensus now emerging among academics is that many anti-discrimination policies have no effect,” the article continues. “Some suspect the reason many interventions nevertheless remain popular is a hidden motive: that they are used not to reduce discrimination, but to shield against litigation.”

It's true that ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ is on the lips of every progressive CEO. The phrase chimes through HR departments like a deep bell. Meanwhile, diversity and anti-harassment training is booming: surveys indicate the number of people hired for jobs with “diversity” or “inclusion” in the title has quadrupled since 2010.

Moving Ahead’s growth is testament to this but we also know how to make a DEI programmes a success – and one of the main ingredients is mentoring. We run bespoke mentoring programmes for businesses and our cross-company mentoring programme for the 30% Club is the world’s biggest. Over the past decade, it has supported over 35,000 individuals and 300 organisations, across 30 countries, from 30 sectors, from the armed forces to the London Stock Exchange, aiming to build a diverse talent pipeline  through the magic of mentoring.

And yet…The Economist article suggests that internal workplace diversity programmes to reduce discrimination have little to no effect. Worse, they can actively backfire. Why the difference?

Economic pressures

The Economist article focuses on the work of sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev who have spent years studying why workplace diversity programmes collapse. In their 2016 report for the Harvard Business Review, ‘Why Diversity Programmes Fail’, they spell out how organisations have been using the same old anti-discrimination training programmes from the 1960s, and explore whether it’s actually helped representation.

Contrast that to Moving Ahead’s contemporary approach. We believe mentoring’s a catalyst for equality and inclusion – and transformative for mentors, as well as our mentees. Our Mission Gender Equity programme, for instance, helps men and women to walk in one another’s shoes. Our mentoring really works: published figures show almost half (47%) of participants from a 2018-19 programme were visibly promoted since taking part.

The programmes that Dobson and Kalev refer to were originally designed to pre-empt lawsuits, such as the raft of high-profile sex and racial discrimination claims against Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who repeatedly had to shell out millions between the late-1990s and the early 2000s.

And having analysed data from 829 US firms over three decades, Dobbin and Kalev found that 20 years after workplace diversity programmes were introduced, the group that benefited most from them were… (spoiler) white men.

“The usual tools—diversity training, hiring tests, performance ratings, grievance systems—tend to make things worse, not better.” In fact, they even decreased the proportion of women and minorities in management. And at worst, they “encouraged rebellion.” As the authors wrote, “You won’t get managers on board by blaming and shaming them with rules and re-education.”

Five years after mandatory in-house discrimination training commenced, “companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%... many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.” Clearly, taking diversity initiatives in-house to cut costs can be a false economy.

In their new data-driven book, Getting to Diversity, Dobbin and Kalev not only flag up the damning evidence but suggest lasting, systemic solutions via recruiting initiatives, diversity task forces, voluntary training (which leads to better results) – and mentoring programs.