Having a clear diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy is really important for organisations. Firstly, helps us to prioritise our time, energy, resources, and then secondly, it helps to make sense of the work that we’re doing for people within the organisation. So what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and when they can expect to see that work.
The starting point for any DEI strategy should really be to understand our current state. So how are we currently performing? And we wanna share a way for you to think about that. And this is our maturity spectrum. So at the first stage here is organisations that are focused really on compliance. So they’re following the letter of the law.
So this might look like a modern slavery act policy, for example. It might look like WGA or GIA reporting around gender pays. Level two then is siloed initiatives. So this is where organisations are doing some things, but they’re not necessarily strategically connected. An example of that might be celebrations around International Women’s Day or Harmony Day, for example.
Level three then is when organisations recognise how important this is and start to get a bit more strategic. And they focus really on the people side of things at first. So that’s things like how we recruit and how we promote, but also other broader people strategies might embed it into onboarding as an example.
Level four is when we then start to recognise that not just people are influenced by this, but actually it can benefit our broader business strategy. So how can DEI be a driver or a detractor for our marketing and how we position our business? How can we think about things like inclusive product development?
And how can we build it into all of the different levers that we pull for business success? The final level then is innovation and disruption. So we’re thinking about how this can benefit beyond our organisation. So Hester and their, their 40, 40 20 project is a great example here of advocacy and their focus there was about, the ASX and ensuring that on boards we had a minimum, 40% women, 40% men, and then 20% that could fall into either camp or gender diverse individuals. So really benefiting beyond the organisation themselves. And when we’re thinking about this maturity assessment, the way that we approach it really is to understand the organisation.
So we wanna ask people in the business how you’re feeling, and that can be things like surveys, that can be focus groups. We also look at things like leadership interviews, policy reviews, understand existing documentation. So take that as a starting point. But if you’re not gonna go that deep, even a really useful first step is just to introduce this maturity spectrum to your leadership team, and you can have a really good discussion about where you feel you currently sit and where you wanna be.
And that conversation alone, to get the alignment on that is a really productive first step in developing your DEI strategy.
