Six steps to DEI talent in traditionally non-diverse industries

While much progress has been made in technology or emerging sectors such as renewable energy, there is still much work to be done. Women, people of color and those with disabilities are underrepresented in leadership positions in all industries and organizations. Some sectors, particularly those that are traditionally ‘male-dominated’, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and industrial, suffer from a serious lack of diversity amongst the executive leadership.

Some statistics make for challenging reading:

Globally, 30% of manufacturing employees are women, yet only 2.7% of manufacturing companies are led by women. They are an even greater rarity in heavy manufacturing, at only 1.3%

There are 1.3 billion people globally living with some form of disability, which is 17% of the population, the largest minority group worldwide. And while 90% of companies claim to prioritize diversity, only 4% of businesses consider disability in those initiatives

The proportion of women in leadership roles within financial services firms is only 24%, and 83% of financial advisors in the US are white.

Researchers such as Richard Florida and Katherine W. Phillips have established that diversity makes us smarter, more creative, and gives companies a competitive edge over their peers. Although individual companies are slowly moving the dial, many traditional industries have missed the mark on large-scale success due to a number of factors.

A lack of suitable mentors and training, unconscious bias and little to no expansion of recruiting channels have all contributed to the problem. Hiring managers in these industries often rely too heavily on their own networks to fill roles, which are typically limited in diversity. Concurrently, with little historical diversity, there are few role models available to provide guidance, advice and support.

Our focus is on providing strategic input to our CEO and Chief People Officer clients in tackling this issue.

Below are six strategies for finding and attracting diverse talent in non-diverse industries:

Step 1: Overtly Align Organizational Culture and Business Strategy with Search and Recruitment Practices
This is the necessary foundational step, particularly for organizations that struggle to identify diversity hires. The crucial early phase is about refining both the business and cultural need for a diverse workforce, and ensuring both executive and departmental alignment.

Setting an effective and measurable plan for attracting diverse talent is not ‘just a HR problem’. It is important to engage all staff in the conversation, and to canvas ideas and approaches from across the organization. Imperatives for shifting the dial in diversity talent include discussions around the nature of the workforce that will meet the company’s emerging needs, the steps that need to take place, timeframes, what success looks like, and how to evaluate that success.

Following discussion and consultation, the senior leadership team needs to be accountable for a formal diversity and inclusion policy, with clearly defined strategic diversity targets and measures, along with clarity around accountability for delivery.

Step 2: Re-Evaluate Your Search and Recruitment Processes
Once there is a degree of clarity and cohesion around diversity targets and metrics, it’s important for HR leaders to take a look at their current search and recruitment processes. This will include identifying any potential biases that may be preventing diverse candidates from applying or advancing. What are the proactive approaches in place that address the policies? How have these changed, in, say, the past five or six years to recognize different expectations?

An effective analysis could include reviewing and re-writing role descriptions to avoid poor practices. This includes avoiding masculine language, and using more inclusive images and language on your career website.

To what extent is it clear that you welcome a diverse range of candidates, and provide appropriate arrangements and support for candidates with disabilities? To what extent does each role description indicate your approach to diversity and inclusion? For example, one of our university clients has the following statement on all role descriptions used in recruitment at all levels:

Equal Employment Statement
We are committed to all aspects of equal opportunity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace and to providing all staff, students, contractors and visitors with a safe, respectful and rewarding and flexible environment free from all forms of unlawful discrimination, harassment, bullying, vilification and victimization. We make decisions on employment, promotion, and reward based on merit.

Step 3: Increase Your Outreach
There are many ways to increase outreach to source a greater range of diverse candidates, even in industries that sometimes have more narrowly based representations of different groups. For example, in the mining industry, the estimates are that only between 8 and 17% of the sector’s global workforce are women).

Ideas include:

Utilizing different talent pools: Look for candidates with transferable skills from other industries
If advertising a position, reach out to a wide variety of job sites to post positions
Ensuring you have deliberate and supportive return-to-work programs. It can be difficult for women or others who have taken a break from the workforce to re-enter it. Return-to-work programs can be an excellent resource both for attracting candidates and providing some extra support
Supporting a diversity networking group. Help out by backing initiatives and events, offering exposure to your senior organizational leaders
At the entry level to the organization, start a diverse internship program. Make sure your program exposes participants to senior executive talent, so they can connect with the firm’s leaders. Follow this up with mentoring programs
Make a point of being well-connected to leading business and advocacy groups that represent a range of diverse populations
Consider how you might benefit from collaborations with community refugee or recent migrant groups, whose professional qualifications might not be recognized in your country. We are aware of a major construction company who addressed a shortage of technical talent by attracting engineers whose qualifications were not recognized. They employed them in technical support roles, and then supported them through the process of having their qualifications recognized. It was a ‘win – win’ situation.

Step 4: Practice Inclusive Hiring
Inclusive hiring means that you are actively looking for candidates who might be different from the existing workforce. It means you have mechanisms in place that prevent or minimize recruitment biases, both conscious and unconscious.

Ideas include:

Broadening your referral pool: ask for referrals from external networking associations and diversity groups
Reduce unconscious bias by anonymizing resumes. Eliminate unconscious bias by deleting an applicant’s name, gender, age and other personal characteristics
Use data-driven assessments: ensure an objective set of criteria is used to minimize personal biases. We suggest you check your ‘objective criteria’ with diversity and inclusion experts
Use behavioral event interview guides: check interview guides to ensure that they are seeking a range of examples that enable candidates to draw broadly on their experiences
Provide interview coaching: make sure all those involved in bringing new staff into the organization are well trained in how to interview and good decision-making practices.

Step 5: Build a Diverse Hiring Committee and Interview Panel
It’s crucial to have both a diverse hiring committee and interview panel, including people on the committee or panel that reflect a good level of diversity. This can also bring different perspectives and experiences to the table which can help to identify potential biases and ensure that the hiring process is fair and inclusive. This not only helps to ensure that diverse candidates are evaluated fairly, but also helps to create a more inclusive culture within the organization, and offers a holistic candidate experience. In many of our clients today, there is a requirement that all short lists reflect a 40:40:20 balance. That is, at least 40% male, 40% female, and 20% addressing other diversity factors.

Step 6: Measure and Report on Your Progress
Diversifying your workforce is an ongoing process, and it’s important to measure and report on your progress. This could include tracking the diversity of your applicant pool, the diversity of new hires, and the retention rates of diverse employees. This not only holds the organization to account but also helps to identify areas that need improvement. It will also serve as an important communication and reinforcement piece to both employees and the broader stakeholder group (investors, shareholders, suppliers, etc.) regarding your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Diversity and Inclusion
We also need to recognize that recruiting diverse talent is just the tip of the iceberg. The real challenge then is the ‘inclusion’ part of ‘diversity and inclusion’. Whilst diversity and inclusion are two different things, they are two sides of the same coin, by which long-term, measurable success in one won’t be achieved without the other.

The ongoing challenge, therefore, is the nature of a welcoming or supportive culture – or the absence of this – that is about the long-term sustainability of diversity and inclusion approaches.

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'Access to Work' scheme delays costing blind people jobs

Many blind and partially-sighted people are having job offers withdrawn because of delays in getting an assessment for the government’s Access to Work scheme, according to a sight loss charity.

The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) claimed that it takes on average five to six months from initial application to assessment under the Department for Work and Pensions’ scheme, and there are significant delays in receiving payment against existing awards. This is compromising the ability of blind and other disabled people to secure or maintain employment, it says.

RNIB’s Access to work report says there were 25,103 outstanding Access to Work applications in December 2022, up from 15,000 a year earlier, while many people with sight loss or visual impairments are having to subsidise their own support to start or stay in work.

It claims job offers are routinely being withdrawn because people cannot access the support they need to start work when their employer requires. One applicant was unable to take up a teaching role they had secured because they had been waiting 20 weeks for an assessment, while another person’s six-month contract ended before their Access to Work claim had been determined.

One person told the charity: “I require a support worker. Due to the delays, I am unable to perform elements of my role. I have had to have my duties reduced. This is having a significant effect on my mental health and has meant I have lost a lot
of confidence. I am worried that if a support worker isn’t in place, I may not pass my probationary period.”

RNIB chief operating officer David Clarke said six months is far too long for people with sight loss or visual impairments to be without support.

“We are calling on the Department of Work and Pensions, which runs Access to Work, to take decisive and comprehensive action to cut the backlog urgently. RNIB has repeatedly raised concerns about their ongoing inability to administer the scheme since December 2021,” he said.

“We have met with the DWP on numerous occasions to discuss the delays, but little progress has been made.

“The steps taken so far by the DWP to address the problem are clearly inadequate and RNIB believes that the ongoing delays in administration of the scheme are so significant as to risk being unlawful.”

The public sector equality duty requires the DWP to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination and to advance equality of opportunity. The RNIB says the DWP could be failing in this duty, as it believes it is placing disabled employees at risk of discrimination and potentially “pitting” disabled people against non-disabled candidates.

RNIB has put forward six recommendations for the DWP to cut Access to Work scheme delays:

ensuring Access to Work is adequately resourced, so that support is put in place within four weeks of an application. This should be a ministerial target, it says
removing the need for people to apply for their Access to Work support to be renewed, if their support needs will stay the same
automatically extending Access to Work support until renewals can be processed so individuals can keep support in place
Providing automatic software upgrades to software previously approved as part of an Access to Work grant
Providing a ‘cost of living’ update to the value of Access to Work grants
Fast-tracking applicants who know what support they need.

The report adds that once delays are addressed, the DWP should ensure that Access to Work advisers undertake training around sight loss and improve their understanding of the reasonable adjustments available.

The charity would also like to see an independent review of the Access to Work scheme, to consider whether processes can be streamlined.

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said it has seen an improvement in the length of time people have been waiting for an Access to Work decision, and applications from those who are due to start a job within the next four weeks are prioritised.

The spokesperson said: “Our priority is to ensure everyone entitled to support through Access to Work has their claim progressed as soon as possible.

“We have recruited additional staff to meet customer demand, which has already improved processing times, and a new digital claims process is being tested to help customers better track progress of their claims going forward.”

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Why businesses must stop disregarding people with disabilities

After having been cast aside for years, equality of gender, race, and sexuality have risen up the ranks of importance to become issues that are addressed in the boardroom. Yet one category is strikingly absent: disability inclusion. Perhaps this is because disability comes in many forms, and as a result necessitates a multi-layered, thorough approach. One could also argue that there is an unconscious bias and fear within business leadership of “getting it wrong” and being called out for doing so. Whatever the reasoning, one thing is clear—people with disabilities are being neglected.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 15% of the approximately 8 billion people on the planet experience disability—a figure that might surprise many, and which is only expected to grow, because of factors including an aging population.

And yet this community remains largely side-lined by business, with only 4% of the 90% of companies that claim to prioritize diversity and inclusion considering disability in their initiatives, according to a report from the Return on Disability Group. In contrast to equality pillars to which it is often compared—such as gender, racial, and ethnic representation—there are intricacies that make it harder to retrieve clear and standardized data. A fundamental issue lies in the fact that 4 in 5 disabilities are invisible, such as heart disease, lung disease, hearing loss, and multiple chemical sensitivities. Employees are also hesitant to disclose whether they identify as disabled for fear of discrimination, prejudice, and bias within their working environments. The quality of disability data is, therefore, incumbent on the presence of an organizational culture in which employees feel comfortable to self-disclose.

There are many obstacles in the way of progress, but one of the most significant is the reluctance of senior leaders to disclose. Research from the Valuable 500 shows that only 3% of leaders would speak openly about their disability or caregiving role. Furthermore, disability matters are largely excluded from the board agenda. And the laws in place, like the Americans With Disabilities Act, mandate that businesses do just the bare minimum to achieve equality in the workplace, so the responsibility falls to businesses to take action.

Ensuring business-led inclusivity of disabled consumers and employees alike is no longer an invitation. In addition to being a moral imperative, failing to account for the disabled population poses a risk to a company’s brand. Together, the disability market controls over $13 trillion. By ignoring the diverse wants and needs of consumers, businesses risk losing out on the immense spending power of disabled households. New legislation, such as the European Accessibility Act and the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act in the U.S., increases the risk of businesses incurring reputational and financial damage if they fail to treat disabled employees fairly.

In recent years, we have seen some exceptional examples of leadership and commitment to disability inclusion, including the October launch by the German retailer Zalando of its first adaptive fashion collection, Telefonica’s recent pledge to double the number of employees with disabilities in its workforce by 2024, and Channel 4’s launch of an extensive examination of access and inclusion for disabled talent in the British TV industry.

Despite this progress, there is still huge variability in these efforts. Without standardized, publicly disclosed data, it is nearly impossible to create meaningful change, as there is no benchmark to measure against. Business leaders have the power to rectify this glaring inequality themselves—and they must take on the responsibility with urgency.

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US web accessibility lawsuits grows by 15% in 2021

The number of US web accessibility lawsuits has grown 15% in 2021, with more than 10 such cases now filed everyday.

New research by UsableNet shows the ways lazy, often nonexistent, accessibility features on websites continue to make retailers vulnerable to a growing wave of web accessibility lawsuits. And so far, the courts are not offering much guidance to retailers.

'Retailers face the bulk of web accessibility lawsuits for several reasons,' says Jason Taylor, CIO at UsableNet. 'Among the causes are the complexity of retail sites and the enormous number of changes they undergo daily, the complexity and rate of change increase the chances for merchants to make mistakes updating their sites or adding third-party technology.' he says.

William Goren an attorney who specializes in ADA-related issues, says the best defense is for retailers to design their websites with accessibility in mind. As a guide, he says merchants and their web designers follow the World Wide Web Consortium’s widely used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.1 (WCAG 2.1)

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