Three Key Ways to Create a More Equitable Company Culture

This article by Equity Commons Co-FOunder & CEO, Whitney A. White, originally appeared in Forbes

Every leader knows that company culture can be a make-or-break factor in your company’s success. A strong culture helps you retain top talent, maximize team productivity and ensure that all employees feel welcome and equipped to contribute.

One of the most critical pieces of a great company culture is equity. You might recognize the term as the “E” in DEI, which has been one of the most widely discussed management topics in recent years. But what does equity really mean?

Fundamentally, equity is about every team member having equal footing. At Gallup, equity is defined as “fair treatment, access and advancement for each person in an organization.”

On the surface, creating equity sounds simple. Just treat everyone the same, and we’ll have an equitable culture, right?

Unfortunately, achieving equity can be complex, and the path to true equity is often paved with invisible barriers. Implicit bias, or bias that operates at an unconscious level, is one of the most insidious roadblocks to equity. What’s more, creating an equitable culture becomes even harder without a common understanding of what equity is, why it’s important and what to do about it.

1. Build awareness.

As a leader, ensuring that you understand equity is critical. But it’s only the first step toward creating company-wide awareness.

How many times have you heard a term used in a business setting, only to realize later that you had a completely different understanding of the term than your colleagues did? Without a common definition of equity and a collective understanding of its importance to the company, you won’t have a strong foundation for change.

Talk to your leadership team about equity. Field questions. Lean on research, and build agreement. Then, communicate clearly to your employees. Include not only the definition of equity, but why it’s key to the success of your company and the well-being of your employees.

As CEO of a virtual reality startup specializing in implicit bias training, I bring up the topic regularly—both what it is and why it’s paramount—in team meetings to emphasize its importance both for our leadership and front-line staff.

2. Create intention.

Awareness is a necessary first step, but without intention, it’s meaningless. Intention centers on you and your team’s willingness and ability to improve equity. The cornerstone of intention is a clear and honest assessment of all of your company’s operations, practices and protocols to see where equity might be lacking.

Ask yourself: Are our hiring and promotion practices fair and equitable? Are we selecting vendors without bias? Do employees have equal opportunities for stretch assignments, exposure to leadership and advancement? Discuss questions like these with your leadership team and get input from staff.

You might also consider the help of outside experts to identify blind spots in your organization and provide recommendations. (Disclosure: My company helps with this, as do others.) External perspectives can be more objective than in-house analysis, and data from a survey conducted by the Sleeper Group indicate that 86% of employees would be more truthful with an outside consultant during a DEI assessment. Similarly, 91% of survey respondents indicated they would be more comfortable with an external consultant doing a DEI assessment as compared to an in-house team.

Identifying your equity gaps is the only way you can answer the most critical question: What are we going to do about it? This is where your intention starts to take shape.

3. Drive action.

Action is where the rubber meets the road. Through my work with clients, I’ve seen that once leaders are clear on the importance of equity and where they want to improve, they benefit from partnership with experts to drive action—but there are also steps companies can take on their own.

If you are seeking partnerships to help you build equity within your organization, it’s important to be discerning about what external partners can offer. Specifically, outside experts should be able to demonstrate a track record of measurable impact. Data is key—seek out partners who can quantify results empirically and convey them clearly.

A data-driven, longitudinal approach helps ensure robust outcomes measurement, a key ingredient of any equity-focused training. After a training, survey participants and ask whether they plan to do something differently based on their newfound understanding of implicit bias. Another important metric is the number of participants who reflect on implicit bias multiple times per week. This last piece is especially important—research shows that for experiential learning, carving out time for reflection on learnings is a key ingredient to sustained learning itself.

Avoid partners who communicate poorly or are unable to demonstrate value. These can be early indicators of an unsuccessful engagement that will waste your money and time. To begin your search, you can use LinkedIn, Google or your professional network.

While partnering with outside experts is helpful, you can still drive some change with in-house efforts. Focus on objectivity and creating psychological safety for employees, and lean on thought leadership to glean approaches from successful organizations. You’ll need to dedicate time to building equity and commit to it as a long-term strategy; otherwise, you risk spending time and money on efforts that don’t work.

Company cultures that don’t maximize equity leave a lot on the table. Employee attrition, unmotivated teams and bad press are very real consequences of inequity, and they take a toll on morale, productivity and, ultimately, results.

The good news is that as a leader, you have the power to make positive changes. Build awareness of equity and its importance at your company, create intention to do something about equity issues and drive action. With this strategy, you can create lasting change for your company.