Читать книгу UNBIAS - Stacey A. Gordon - Страница 10

The Awareness phase is the starting point for any organization's journey into diversity, equity, and inclusion. The goal is to become aware of the current state of your organization. It sounds much simpler than it is because this phase informs your strategy. It provides guidance and direction by surfacing the challenges to increasing diversity and creating inclusion while simultaneously offering evidence of what is working and what you should do more of.

Obtaining the data and the artifacts that will drive your pursuit of greater awareness can be done through several means. Surveys, focus groups, townhall meetings, feedback/suggestion boxes, and interviews can be used independently or in concert with one another to create a robust vehicle for listening to your employees.

This phase is not all about data and metrics. In each phase, there is an overarching need for education and communication. When working to “wake up” your organization leaders and employees as a whole, transparency of decisions being made is just as important as requesting feedback, while foundational diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts help stakeholders begin to see how their participation, or lack thereof, impacts the overall strategy.

As a way of illustration, let's take a look at Lisa, a figurative CEO of a made‐up tech company with 100 employees. Lisa and her counterparts in other departments have been given direction by their superiors to look into how diverse and inclusive their departments are. Lisa's first instinct is to reach out to Human Resources (HR) to get the demographic breakdown of her staff, assuming that boosting the number of underrepresented minorities should suffice to appease all parties. However, after a few minutes on the phone with the HR manager, she discovers that a handful of complaints regarding a hostile work environment have been filed anonymously and never addressed. Lisa realizes that she's going to have to dig a lot deeper to truly get a picture of how her department is doing and how to approach the damage that's already been done.

To completely move through the phases and reach Advocacy, this initial phase of Awareness makes it clear that diversity and inclusion within organizations does not only begin by increasing the number of represented identities across gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and age. An organization must undergo a process to become diverse and inclusive, one that starts with assessing how they are practicing the key elements in those core concepts. These elements are found in the experiences of your employees and it is imperative they are captured through metrics, data, and other investigative tools, which I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6.

Learning the state of your workplace culture provides you with a starting point to begin to answer the question of “How do we do this right?” Assessment of trust, communication, and other key elements that are the roots of diversity and inclusion will provide you and your organization with a place your leadership team can begin to align on future action.