How to Retain Employees Through a DEI Strategy

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in recruitment, hiring, and retention is increasingly important to implement in your organization. In fact, organizations that spend time and resources on removing barriers and promoting DEI initiatives are 2.6 times more likely to increase employee engagement and improve retention.¹

Finishing up our three-part series on DEI, this third installment will address key concepts about DEI and employee retention (see Part I and Part II), helping you become a better recruiter and HR professional. With the impacts of The Great Resignation challenging companies to reduce turnover and invest in retention strategies, your DEI approach plays a few key roles in retaining employees, the first being employee engagement.

DEI & Employee Engagement

To understand how DEI impacts retention, we first have to examine employee engagement. Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals. The level of commitment and purpose an employee feels has a direct impact on their performance and productivity. Organizations with high employee engagement outperform those with low employee engagement by 202%.² When employees are disengaged and discontent, turnover will increase and productivity plummets.

Employees are likely to feel disengaged if they are experiencing a workplace culture that doesn’t prioritize DEI. The Workforce Happiness Index, a rating derived from an employee survey that measures pay, advancement, value, autonomy, and meaningfulness, is 12 points lower among employees³ who believe their company is not doing enough relating to DEI, compared to those who do.

Many organizations resort to traditional tactics for employee retention: free snacks, fun and interesting office settings, trips, and on-the-job perks. Although these can help with employee retention, your DEI program has a deeper impact on employee engagement. If employees perceive low DEI efforts, which many times results in a toxic culture, unfair compensation, and lack of diversity in peers, they are likely to show their discontent by leaving your organization.

How Does Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Impact Employee Retention?

DEI and employee retention are highly related. Having a company culture riddled with microaggressions and stereotypes creates a hostile work environment, which forces people to leave.⁴ Nearly half of Black and Hispanic employees have quit a job after experiencing or witnessing discrimination and microaggressions.⁵

A comprehensive DEI strategy within your organization can reduce microaggressions in interactions between colleagues, improve talent development and access to leadership positions for underrepresented groups, and create higher levels of satisfaction and meaning between employees.

The Key Components of a DEI Retention Strategy

A DEI retention strategy to improve employee retention includes two parts. First, create key benchmarks to measure feelings of fairness, belonging, respect, and autonomy across colleagues. You can do this by creating anonymous culture surveys that measure feelings of fairness, belonging, respect, and autonomy in every area of the organization. Pay close attention to trends you discover across different demographic identities. A sample series of questions are below that use “I” statements, and strongly agree to disagree, as a measure for assessing culture:

• I’m empowered to speak up in meetings and feel heard and respected to share my ideas.
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Neutral
  • Agree
  • Strongly Agree
• My opinions are listened to and acted on.
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Neutral
  • Agree
  • Strongly Agree
• The expectations of how I can move up or be promoted within my job role is clear and communicated to me regularly from my manager or leaders.
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Neutral
  • Agree
  • Strongly Agree
• I feel accepted by my coworkers and can be myself at work.
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Neutral
  • Agree
  • Strongly Agree
• I feel fairly compensated for my work compared to my coworkers who are in a similar role.
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Neutral
  • Agree
  • Strongly Agree

Working with a DEI consultant or DEI expert to arrange the right questions in your survey can also help you with assessing culture for markers of DEI.

Once you’re able to collect this data, the second step is to create a plan to address trends discovered. For example, if a significant portion of individuals do not feel heard in meetings, creating new processes that can address bias in meetings, like creating agendas with assigned speaking times for every person in the meeting, can help to improve benchmarks and, ultimately, your culture.

As another example, if you see a trend of a particular demographic reporting dissatisfaction in compensation compared to their colleagues, do a compensation audit and correction for inconsistencies in pay between similar roles and positions.

Collecting data and then acting on that data are the small daily steps that are a critical part of retaining employees and showing them that you not only value their feedback and experiences within your organization, but you’ll also implement real solutions that can improve diversity, equity, and inclusion across the organization.

In Closing, DEI Is Key to Retention

Recent research shows companies with above-average diversity produce a greater proportion of revenue from innovation (45% of total) than from companies with below average diversity (26%).⁶ By seeing DEI not just as a punitive recourse of action but a proactive strategy to maintain a healthy culture and happy employees, your organization’s success and innovation will improve significantly.

References:

1. Bersin and Enderes.(2021, April) Elevating Equity: The Real Story of Diversity and Inclusion.joshbersin.com.
2. Gallup.com. (2017). State of the American Workplace.Gallup.com
3. SurveyMonkey.com.(2021, April) SurveyMonkey Workforce Survey. SurveyMonkey.com
4. Blacken. (2022, June). Why Bias and Microaggressions Matter For Your Relationships. TheNewQuo.com.
5. Glassdoor.com. (2020, September 30th). Diversity and Inclusion Workplace Survey. Glassdoor.com
6. Levine. (2020, January). Diversity Confirmed To Boost Innovation And Financial Results.Forbes.com.