Why your EDI work gets stuck and how to move forward
Keeping progress moving in the right direction can be a challenge.
Organisations will sometimes reach out to us when they get stuck. This can be a very difficult step for people as they will often come to an initial conversation feeling some very deep and complex emotions: shame, guilt, inadequacy, frustration, anger, resentment etc.
Sometimes, they are getting pressure from colleagues to explain why progress has stopped, why actions haven’t been actioned, why some people feel the same now as they did when the work started. The will to keep moving will be there, the commitment will be evident in the deep emotions listed above, but for whatever reason, they just can’t seem to get moving again. Why is that?
Here, we share with you 5 of the most common reasons organisations get stuck when trying to implement their EDI strategy:
#1 They had training, but didn’t know what to do with it.
They invested in antiracism training, unconscious bias training, LGBTQ+ awareness training, you name it. The training was on the strategy, someone had told them that having the training was important. Maybe it was a committee, working group or steering group that insisted that staff and leaders had training on important topics. Maybe a consultant came and did an audit and said, ‘you need training on ‘these’ topics. The training was delivered and maybe the training was excellent.
But no one told you what to do with it. You thought the training would solve the issues. You didn’t know what to do with it. You didn’t know how to sit with what the training brought up for you as an individual and as an organisation. You didn’t turn that into actions to make change.
As a result, progress on those important topics came to a halt.
#2 Your action plan or strategic document did not contain accountability and measurability.
Maybe you produced a document which had some aims in it. Aims such as:
Increase ethnic representation across all levels of the organisation
People feel they belong
Implement inclusive recruitment strategies
The problem was you didn’t include how you were going to do this. How will you increase representation? How will you measure belonging? What recruitment strategies?
You didn’t add a person who would be responsible for making sure it happened. You didn’t have a deadline. You didn’t state who would support. You didn’t state how you would know when you were successful or how you would measure success.
In these situations, where there is no accountability, you get drift. No deadline, so the action gets kicked down the road. No one named as the person responsible, no one picks it up and it gets left to hang in the air.
#3 You did what you were told, but weren’t supported on how you would keep your own strategy going
This is the thing about consultants. We are businesses and we want you to come back to us. Therefore, we might not give you all of the answers because we need your repeat business. That’s understandable, but what it means is some consultancies don’t tell you how to establish progress and keep it going.
They may have created a really robust and effective action plan for you. It contained the accountability and the measurability. It had deadlines, people were assigned. It was brilliant. So brilliant that it was clear what you had to do, you did it, but now what.
You didn’t embed a loop of gaining awareness, implementation, measuring impact and starting again because they didn’t advise you on how to do that. Therefore, when you can to the end, you ran out of actions and now there is a cliff edge.
#4 Resistance
This one is all too common.
You might be absolutely committed to this work and fully understand why it is essential to the longevity and success of your organisation, but you soon notice that other senior leaders and staff members do not.
You may even notice things that are said or done are contrary to the inclusive environment you are trying to create. They may be ableist, misogynist, racist, homophobic etc. You may find that troubling but do not know how to challenge it and how to move forward with people who are blocking your journey.
#5 Capacity
Everyone is committed. Everyone fully believes in the journey you have created towards an equitable, diverse and inclusive environment, but you don’t have the resources to move forward quickly enough or effectively enough.
Maybe you’ve had to make cuts to your people and to finances recently. Maybe you have a very small staff but work with lots of stakeholders, so whilst your organisation may be quite large, the number of people who can make change is very small.
So how can we get unstuck?
Much of the work we do with clients is very unique to their situation, their organisation, their previous work, their capacity. So, these tips here are not as refined and specific as they would be for clients, but here are a few tips that can help to get you moving.
#1 Revisit your previous work
If your training provider shared slides and follow up materials with you, go back to them. Maybe there are some suggestions in there that you have not implemented? Maybe there is something in there that you forgot about which you can now revisit and implement.
If you generated some data through listening or a survey, go back to that and see if there is anything there that still needs to be actioned or could be actioned in more depth now.
If you have struggled to move forward with an existing action plan, go back to it and make sure it is measurable, includes deadlines, includes people who are going to be responsible for making sure something happens (they don’t have to do it themselves, they are responsible for making it happen). Begin to act upon it making sure you schedule reviews.
#2 Move beyond surface level
If you are in a position where you feel you’ve done a good deal of work and now need to move to the next level, now might be the time to move beyond introductory work.
That might mean adding some depth to introductory training you may have had. For example, if you covered antiracism in an hour for example, that was very surface level. Antiracism work should be 9-12 hours long over a series of workshops and have periods of reflection for attendees because it is tough. That might be your next step. If you have had a general introduction to EDI, maybe you need to delve more into the experiences of people with identities which experience exclusion. You can’t cover the way historical and societal exclusion manifests for huge groups of people in 60 minutes. Yes, this is about protected characteristics, but have you considered care leavers, prison leavers, class, accent and how identities intersect?
#3 Reach out
Do some listening again. This period of being stuck might be a time to repeat a survey or invite people to a focus group to ask questions about what you have done which is making a positive impact, and what is still to improve. There are some challenges here for another blog, but it is very much worth taking the risk of asking questions, and hearing the answers. When you have identified the themes which come up for people working with you, turn those into new actions which includes clarity on how, when, who, what etc. and how you will know you are successful.
Collaboration is an important part of EDI work. Who can you collaborate with? Which other organisations are on a journey that you can connect with, share resources with and share thoughts with?
If you don’t already have an employee resource group, can you create one so you can work with the people in your organisation to keep things going? For more information about ERGs, you can read this blog
Knowing when to get external support is important. There is a huge amount of EDI work you can do which costs nothing and has huge impact, but sometimes you do need some external support. This might be because you lack knowledge about something and need someone with that knowledge to come and support. Getting the knowledge is an important part of getting unstuck.
Sometimes, you are not the right person to do something, and no one else in your organisation is either. Examples might be facilitating focus group conversations – sometimes and external partner will be able to get answers your colleagues wouldn’t want to share with you directly for a range of reasons.
Sometimes you need someone to come and evaluate the impact of your work so far to give you a steer on what has been impactful, and what hasn’t.
Sometimes you need someone else to convey difficult messages because you delivering those messages can put you in an impossible or risky situation, or you simply know that someone else will be able to do it better and respond better to unpredictable questions. Examples might be conversations with your Board or conversations with your SLT about resistance and fragility.
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