Diversity Nudges

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, November 21, 2023

by Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio

Roy Scott/Ikon Images

Despite their commitments to diversifying their workforces, many companies continue to struggle with attracting, hiring, and retaining employees from underrepresented groups.

Achieving workplace diversity is not easy, but leaders can target, address, and nudge specific data points and thoughtfully incentivize behaviors that support it. These interventions are often small, easy to implement, and inexpensive, but when they are applied to choices, processes, and organizational levers in the attraction, recruitment, onboarding of people and along the employee path cycle, they can help make a workplace more diverse and inclusive.

Nudges That Attract Diverse Talent

The conversion rates (CRs) at one e-commerce giant were below target within certain segments of shoppers, including lower-income people of color and middle-income LGBTQIA+ people. Meanwhile, the company’s primary competitor had successfully hired more women, Black and Latine people, Pacific Islanders, and LGBTQIA+ persons in marketing, behavioral analysis, and other roles, and their diverse perspectives were translating into higher CRs.

The company launched a major campaign to attract diverse talent. It engaged a search firm that cast a national net and ran print and digital ads that highlighted the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Then leadership sat back and waited for those diverse candidates to appear. Views of the online job posting peaked around three and a half weeks after the advertising blitz but flatlined by the seventh week. Fewer than 11% of site visitors applied for a position. Only three applicants were interviewed; two received offers, one of which was declined. In other words, if you build it — with impressive resources and at great expense — they still might not come.

As this company discovered, it is not enough to simply gain the attention of the potential candidates you seek to attract. Converting appropriate talent to applicants and candidates requires additional outreach and cultivation. Individuals from underrepresented demographics — including people of color, those who identify as LGBTQIA+, and people with disabilities — often have fewer contacts at competitive employers and know fewer people who can help them navigate the application process. Organizations that want to increase diversity can attract more candidates from underrepresented groups by using nudges — modifications in the language and content presented in the talent acquisition process — in ways that help generate a diverse candidate pool, maintain the pool throughout the process, encourage top candidates to accept job offers, and help keep them onboard.

Nudges can help build trust and reduce information asymmetries early on. In one such intervention, a company displayed the numbers of women and underrepresented individuals among its leadership, as well as its diversity and inclusion goals and a timeline, beside an online job posting. A video at the bottom right of the screen featured the CEO speaking about his commitment to inclusion and diversity. This intervention increased the percentage of women and underrepresented groups that applied by 22% in the short term and 18% over the long term. Candidates from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds rose by 17% overall. And, importantly, the conversion rate from applying for a job to accepting a position rose by 8 percentage points. Read the rest here.

Employee resource groups are more than “food, fun, and flags”

strategy+business, December 13, 2022

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by MoMo Productions

In 1964, in the aftermath of race riots in Rochester, New York, Joseph Wilson, the CEO who transformed the Haloid Photographic Company into Xerox, invited Black employees to come together to address and remedy racial discrimination within the company. This group evolved into the National Black Employees Caucus, the first employee resource group (ERG). A half-century later, ERGs are a ubiquitous feature of the corporate landscape.

“ERGs have formed within the workplace to support and represent people with identities and demographics related to gender, race, sexual orientation, ability/disability, caregiver roles, military status, religious affiliation, generation, geographic area, job function, and more,” writes diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant and coach Farzana Nayani in The Power of Employee Resource Groups. In this handbook, Nayani offers practical advice to leaders of companies and ERGs who want to ensure that the time and resources they invest in their own groups are well spent.

“There is much debate as to whether affinity groups and ERGs are simply there to celebrate ‘food, fun, and flags,’” writes Nayani. But that’s a reductionist view, she says, one that ignores a host of potential benefits ERGs can provide to employees, companies, and communities. Nayani ticks them off: support, opportunities, and a voice for marginalized employees; enhanced leadership development and innovation pipelines; better employee engagement; increased reputational capital for the company; and more inclusive and socially responsible corporate behaviors that can deliver dividends to the communities in which businesses operate.

The key to achieving these benefits, says Nayani, is forging an explicit connection between a company’s ERGs and its organizational goals in five areas: workforce, workplace, marketplace, community, and suppliers. “Each of these five pillars is an area of focus where employee resource groups can offer contributions and also receive the benefits of efforts focused on the key themes,” she adds. Read the rest here.

When Employees Speak Up, Companies Win

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, November 17, 2020

by Ethan Burris, Elizabeth McCune, and Dawn Klinghoffer





Business headlines suggest that employees are speaking up more than ever. Activist employees are calling out their companies over where and with whom they do business, burned-out employees are asking for more and more unique work-life accommodations, and concerned employees are raising questions about hiring practices and promotion decisions in light of institutional biases. Often, these instances of speaking up — called employee voice behaviors — result in an embarrassingly public airing of organizational issues.

Yet our research reveals that the headlines are not an accurate reflection of the current state of employee voice. We asked 6,000 employees of a Microsoft business unit to tell us how often they spoke up to their managers. In addition, we asked how many of 15 topics they spoke up about, such as their immediate job assignments, the culture of their teams, how employees are treated across the organization, the strategy of the company, and the work-life balance alternatives available to them. We found that relatively few employees consistently share their thoughts and opinions about a multitude of work issues with their managers: Just 13.6% of the surveyed employees said that they speak up on more than 10 of the topics. Slightly more are silent: In fact, 17.5% said they do not speak up at all. The largest group of employees — 47.1% — said they speak up on five or fewer topics, typically on issues related to their jobs.

If we assume that these findings reflect similar tendencies in other organizations, leaders should be concerned, because employee voice is not a voice of complaint or protest per se. It encompasses the willingness of employees to speak up about opportunities for improvement. These efforts are not a prescribed part of employees’ jobs; they are a voluntary communication of constructive ideas to leaders that enable learning and effective change in work groups of all sizes, from teams to entire organizations. Yet these efforts to tell the truth can involve confronting leaders, who can feel challenged or even threatened, especially when the proposed changes involve things that leaders have helped create or for which they are responsible.

More and more, companies are seeking to expand efforts to listen to their employees by inviting them to share their opinions and ideas in areas that are outside of their day-to-day tasks. For instance, in 2014, in the aftermath of a recall of 6 million vehicles for an ignition flaw linked to at least 13 deaths, General Motors launched its Speak Up for Safety program, which asked employees across the company to speak up about anything that might impact customer safety. The growing use of innovation platforms and ecosystems is another example. In addition, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen companies frequently survey employees on topics such as physical and mental health and their working conditions.

The effectiveness of all these efforts depends on employees’ willingness to use their voices. In this study, we sought to examine the benefits of a more expansive employee voice, the factors that determine voice behaviors, and the ways in which companies can encourage those behaviors. Read the rest here.

A disappointing progress report on diversity and inclusion

strategy+business, December 12, 2019

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Boris SV


Racial and ethnic minorities make up 38.8 percent of the population of the U.S. and a nearly equivalent share of its workforce. But minorities represent only 17 percent of full-time university professors and 16.6 percent of newsroom journalists. They are only 4.5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 16 percent of Fortune 500 boardroom directors. They are 9 percent of law firm partners; 16 percent of museum curators, conservators, educators, and leaders; 13 percent of film directors; and 6 percent of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

These discrepancies haven’t gone unnoticed, but they also haven’t been effectively addressed. “During more than three decades of my professional life, diversity has been a national preoccupation,” writes journalist and New York University professor Pamela Newkirk in the second paragraph of the preface to her book Diversity, Inc. “Yet despite decades of handwringing, costly initiatives, and uncomfortable conversations, progress in most elite American institutions has been negligible.”

Newkirk devotes most of Diversity, Inc., which is heavily focused on racial inequality, and particularly, discrimination against African-Americans, to demonstrating this dismaying reality through a sometimes tangled mix of factoids and anecdotes drawn from the arenas of academia, media, and business. The bigger stories that emerge are all variations on the same theme: The lack of progress by minorities in America’s elite institutions is a function of a political and societal arc that has stretched across a half a century. Read the rest here.