Last month, Audeliss and INvolve held an If Not Now, When? roundtable with HR professionals and DEI leaders where we discussed the importance of driving accountability through middle management for Black inclusion in business.
These roundtable sessions aim to create a productive and honest space for DEI leaders from the campaign’s signatory organizations. These sessions also provide a platform for us to discuss the various initiatives as well as challenges and barriers to progress that we are all working to eradicate for our Black employees.
We know that when it comes to increasing diversity, the responsibility to foster success, recognition and nurture upcoming talent often falls to middle managers. In this session, we discussed how to ensure accountability for change is felt across all levels of management and shared guidance on the wide variety of initiatives, feedback, and data-driven solutions that businesses are implementing to enhance accountability.
Our key objective through this roundtable series is to ensure we are facilitating relevant discussions that support our signatory organizations and their key decision makers to drive meaningful, long-term change for their Black employees.
Key learnings
What was apparent in the session, is that attendees understood the importance of driving accountability and empowering employees to drive change. For some, accountability is currently focused on engaging senior leadership teams and middle management as leaders and key drivers in implementing change initiatives and talent development programs. For others, accountability and personal responsibility go hand in hand, with a focus on motivating employees across all levels of the business to engage with and drive action for change.
When engaging middle managers, participants reported that the formation of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) has been positive in increasing engagement. While this engagement is still new, the value of ERGs in being able to identify systemic issues and motivate middle managers has been key. For other companies who are in the early stages of network creation, first-line manager trainings and the creation of mandatory training modules have seen engagement increase across management levels, with the aim that education, as a first step, can create a level playing field for knowledge surrounding DEI issues, and Black inclusion more specifically.
For younger organizations, current conversations are taking place with senior and middle managers to begin work on implementing key DEI strategies within their business. Some stated that the opportunity to meaningfully diversify their teams currently sits within their recruitment processes and are keen to engage senior leaders and hiring managers on recruiting inclusively.
While there may be some barriers in data collection, especially where companies have global offices, participants are committed to progressing their data disclosure figures through internal engagement initiatives, and some stated ambitions and the early-stage work being done to start reporting on their Ethnicity Pay Gap.
Target-driven actions
We also discussed targets for representation and whether the plans and actions they are implementing are shared internally and across the employee population, and whether they have implemented specific actions to meet those targets.
Those who do share their targets reported that this only galvanized overall efforts to drive accountability and change and has resulted in concerted efforts to celebrate spotlight initiatives, and commit to further ambitious targets and commitments for driving change.
Others mentioned that setting targets will be done to reflect the communities and regions that they operate in and will use data from the census, to ensure representation across their business is fair.
Some pointed out that their specific targets came from further analyzing their diversity data and concluding that while there was largely fair and/or consistent representation across their businesses for other demographics, that this wasn’t the case for Black employees and leaders. In identifying that there are systemic barriers here, some companies have committed to more specific, data-driven targets that they are already on track to meet or have met already.
Overall, there was an even split between companies that had publicly shared targets with their employee base and those who have not, with a discussion around whether it’s publishing targets or publishing the data that will drive the most accountability, and therefore change, taking place.
Empowering Middle Managers
We wanted to find out from the discussion who the group thought is responsible for empowering middle managers. Most agreed that senior leaders are accountable for this.
Some have included DEI and inclusion objectives as a priority within senior leadership and ESG meetings and ensure that the actions agreed upon are followed up. The global nature of many organizations does pose some challenges, with the need to get middle managers together and on the same page a key priority for driving DEI overall.
A top-down approach to forming the vision for change is therefore necessary. However, you should ensure that the voices of lower levels of management do not become muffled or silenced during the process. Instead, think about designing more linear models of communication, and empower your managers to become facilitators of change to influence team engagement and mitigate any negative effects of resilience. Enforcing the vision of everyone being responsible for inclusion is key here, as it will ensure that the right behaviors are injected into the DNA of the organization. Your middle managers cultivate how teams see, hear, and feel the culture. They also drive how teams embrace the change effort and execute on your agenda.
If Not Now, When? is one of the largest CEO-driven commitments to taking key long-term sustainable actions on Black inclusion in UK businesses. Audeliss and INvolve have created a unique community of more than 80 CEOs stepping up to the call to action to drive a culture that is fully representative and inclusive of Black individuals.
If you like to become a part in changing business for Black employees, sign up to be a signatory here.
