Tailor the Next Stage of DEI to Your Company’s Unique Workforce

Business efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion have undergone a few iterations. Early initiatives amounted to little more than HR-led trainings and a list of dos and don’ts, with focus on gender and racial discrimination. Over time, the scope has widened, just as demographics of the workforce have evolved.

The definition of diversity has expanded beyond race and gender to include sexual orientation, disability, religious and cultural heritage, veteran status, and more. Businesses recognize that cultivating workforce diversity builds intellectual capital and trust. Commitment to DEI policy is necessary to remain competitive and meet demands of shareholders and stakeholders.

Today, many business leaders are pausing to consider what’s next. Ideas persist among skeptics that DEI efforts are potentially irrelevant. This mindset is detrimental for many reasons. Primarily, it prevents real, lasting change.

DEI is entering a new chapter. Business leaders must understand how to integrate what DEI represents into the fabric of organizations—by purposefully fostering a culture of respect and fairness. Here are three areas where this approach is especially important.

Define DEI Vision

The first step is to identify what DEI really means for a particular organization. This exercise starts by envisioning how it looks in practice for that company’s culture, workforce demographics, and industry, then developing a structure to support this vision. To be effective, DEI policy isn’t necessarily an identical framework for every company or sector.

Once a business establishes its own DEI vision and mission, it must ensure efforts are integrated across departments with clear expectations and results. To accomplish these goals, cultivating a culture that’s grounded in openness, trust, and accountability will encourage people to feel psychologically safe to share their perspectives, experiences, and feedback.

As an example, KPMG has integrated an inclusive mindset through our Accelerate 2025 initiative, which focuses on attracting, developing, and retaining diverse, high-performing talent. This project relies on close partnerships with numerous parts of the firm, including human resources, recruiting, talent management, and corporate affairs to drive efforts from the bottom-up.

However, everyone at the firm is responsible for advancing our mission, including our most senior leaders.

Measure Impact

Every organization has weak spots and opportunities. To align DEI strategies with broader goals, businesses must conduct a comprehensive assessment of their operations to identify gaps and areas to improve.

After we discovered gaps in our succession planning efforts, our executive leadership team assigned time on each meeting agenda for “talent talks”—discussions on ways to enhance and refine processes to drive more equitable opportunities for our employees. These conversations inspire mentorship and sponsorship from most senior members of our firm—by helping them understand who our firm’s future leaders are, and what experiences, exposure, and support they may need to reach and achieve in the next level of their careers.

In addition to leading purposeful conversations about specific employees, we inform this process more broadly by collecting and analyzing data on demographic representation as it relates to employee retention, engagement, satisfaction, and performance, using these results to inform strategies and actions.

Our DEI team sits within our broader talent and culture organization. That way, we can directly collaborate on data that’s gathered through our “continuous listening” approach. This includes more frequent surveys and other feedback channels, such as our employee resource groups and coffee chats with leaders around the firm.

That way, we are able to better and more frequently gauge people’s experiences, the challenges they’re facing, the support they need, and overall employee sentiment and engagement. This information helps inform the development and evolution of our programs, policies, and procedures.

Empower Team Changes

Businesses must equip teams with the mindset and skills to drive and sustain change. This includes offering regular learning and development opportunities that enhance awareness and knowledge of how to drive change.

Planning intended outcomes should be consistent with experiences of an organization’s entire talent community. This can take the form of establishing leadership competencies that drive behaviors aligned with company values and improved professional performance. Another example is encouraging understanding of why and how workforces can benefit from cross-generational and cross-cultural collaboration.

It also can be helpful to establish a specific framework that guides planning and decision-making, enabling everyone to effectively design and implement programs with DEI principles at the center. Rollout of this framework can take many forms. It is important to cultivate a tone at the top approach by empowering leaders to understand the approach and implement purposeful conversations on their own teams.

For us, this has looked like creating “micro-learnings” that our leaders can quickly digest and put into practice—for example, a 3-minute video on equitable decision making that can be viewed at the start of calibration meetings to reinforce the importance of fair and unbiased assessments. Equally important is to create spaces and platforms for dialogue, collaboration, and innovation, where people can exchange ideas, learn from each other, and co-create solutions around challenges and opportunities.

There may never be a time when we have ‘achieved’ a perfectly diverse, inclusive, and equitable world. We can only drive toward progress—not expect perfection.

DEI strategy isn’t a one-time initiative but rather a continuous process that requires commitment, collaboration, and courage from everyone in an organization. By recognizing this, we can ensure the principles of DEI stay front and center—instead of disappearing into the rearview mirror.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Elena Richards is chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at KPMG US.

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