On this week’s episode of the podcast Elaine dela Cruz, co-founder of DE&I consultancy firm Project 23, tells us about what is creating positive change for diversity and inclusion in the industry. We’re also joined by guest co-host Joanna Cummings, Editorial Director of The Grub Street Journal and author of the DE&I chapter of this year’s Media Moments report.
Elaine takes us through why she co-founded the organisation, how the DE&I landscape has changed over the past five years, and why ‘resilience’ is such a dangerous word. We also discuss how the best media companies are measuring the success of their DE&I efforts.
A round-up of publishers’ DE&I initiatives and developments will be part of our upcoming Media Moments 2023 report. Find out more and pre-register for the report here.
Here are some highlights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
How DE&I has changed over the past five years
The fact that DE&I is now genuinely workplace vernacular, it means it’s out there. When we started five years ago, we knew that there was so much room for change, not just in media, but across society, across so many industries, of course, dominated often – I mean, the media industry is dominated by often male, middle class, middle aged cisgender men – and that’s the systems and processes that we all then operate within.
As people who didn’t fit into that mould, we knew that there was so much talent that industries are missing out on. We knew that success, productivity, efficiency, creativity, could be so much better. But I felt like back then we were really selling that idea more than we are today.
I think people today have a better understanding of why DE&I is crucial to their organisations or their business success. Whether they’re doing something about it or not, is a whole other ballgame. But I think most organisations know that this is going to help us and is going to drive our organisation further. So that’s one big change, we’re selling it less as a concept.
In the middle though, I think what has happened, in 2020, George Floyd was murdered and people who do what I do, have done what I do for a much longer period of time than I have, we all experienced a rush of clients, individuals, businesses approaching us wanting to do this work for the first time. So globally we see a huge movement driven by Black Lives Matter to put DE&I – and for the first time actually specifically racism and anti-racism – within the workplace. So this is now becoming a real conversation, and a real want to change.
So you see a rush to do more work, a rush of investment, hirings of Chief Diversity Officers, Chief Diversity Managers, etc., set ups of impact employee resource groups and networks. However, the news cycle has changed, unfortunately. And in 2022 and this year, particularly, we’ve started to see that investment slowdown or even be cut all together as other macroeconomic factors and challenges have come into play for businesses.
There’s been a real shift, I think, in the fact that this is something that organisations really know they need to deliver on. But there is still there is still a huge challenge and a huge barrier to sticking with this work and committing to this work, when you know, “other bigger priorities” come along. So I think that really challenges the whole piece.
The importance of measuring impact
First and foremost, it’s about actually tracking the change, measuring the change. You’d be surprised – or perhaps not – how many organisations don’t try to measure the impact of this work. Whether that is in sentiment work, and how employees feel about the organisation that they operate within and what their experience is like, or whether that’s in more composition, like diversity, workforce composition data, who works here? Is that changing? How does that look as you go further up the organisation or in different departments that inevitably have more power than others?
So there is a lot of data that we already have within a lot of organisations, there’s already data that exists that can measure the impact of this work, particularly over the longer term piece. So how long does it take to hire people? What is our churn rate, who works here currently? What does the data say? What do the insights say in the exit interviews? So there’s data that we already tend to collect as businesses that we should look to and dig into deeper with a DE&I lens.
So as what I mean by that is, if we’re already collecting some kind of employee engagement data, are we able to disaggregate that data and see beyond perhaps 74% of employees feel like it’s a positive, great place to work? Are we looking at the 26% who haven’t said it’s a great place to work, who are they? Who are the people that are are advocates for this organisation, does identity play a part here?
You always have to dig deeper into the nuance, because surveys, numbers can tell us something. But we really do have to have a good understanding of the nuance and the experiences that people express beyond it. It’s why you run focus groups, and listening sessions and try to create safe spaces for people to share what’s going on for them.
First of all, there is a misnomer that you just can’t measure this stuff. That’s just not true. Secondly, we have various amounts of HR data already that we can look to, to look at the improvements of our success as a business and the people side of things.
Making everyone accountable for DE&I
I remember when, when I was at Dennis publishing, we went from Microsoft to G Suite – I’m hoping this analogy is going to work – and that’s a massive thing for an organisation to do. Bright idea, Google’s going to be better for us. Great, let’s give it to this person to do. No, this person might be able to strategize and work out how we do it, work out all the different strands and elements, but you need champions, you need early adopters, you need educators, you need project managers, you need to be able to ask people to do things and then they don’t do it and ask them again, you need to manage people and support people through this.
If we can offer them spaces to just talk about their experiences, we offer group coaching, and a one-to-one coaching for DE&I practitioners including ERG chairs, because you need a restorative space often, to acknowledge your experiences and perhaps working and talking with other people.
If you as an organisation, if you have DE&I leads, if you can connect them with other people in that space outside of your organisation, the value of that is huge. Because we need to be able to connect to each other and work out what best practices or ethical practices or to know that, ‘Oh, I’m not alone in that.’ So that building of community is definitely something that organisations can help and empower people to do invest in them in the round as well.
For Project 23, we co opted a change adoption curve that we saw when we did actually start to move from Microsoft to Google, like that was presented to us as this bell-shaped curve. And that’s the same within DE&I. You get early adopters, you get a group of naysayers at the back end who we could spend loads of time energy on and he’ll create a lot of noise about this, the anti woke brigade in the DE&I context, perhaps. And often they steal the oxygen for the work.
But actually, if we focus on the middle majority, most people in organisations that we speak to want there to be greater diversity and inclusion, but aren’t sure how to go about it. And I think once you get that tipping point within an organisation on that adoption curve, it becomes more of a cultural norm, it becomes something that we can support each other on, it becomes easier to deal with the discomfort, and the solutions become clearer.
