DEI Trends To Watch In 2023

At Leaders for Good, we regularly analyse upcoming trends in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). By staying up to speed on the latest news and insights across the space, we can better help leaders understand emerging opportunities and challenges and make more informed decisions about where they should be focussing their time, attention and resources.

If you want to hear more about our methodology for choosing these trends, jump ahead to the end of this article. But if you’re keen to get into the real good stuff, read on for our top four DEI predictions for 2023.

Acceleration in employee activism

Over the past few years we’ve seen a dramatic increase in employee activism. Some estimate a 40% increase in employees asking their organisations to take a stance on a wide range of topics, including gender equity, racial justice and reproductive health (to name just a few).

On one side we’ve seen organisations (such as Coinbase and 37 Signals) taking a strict approach, stating that discussion of such topics should be conducted outside of work hours.

On the other side we have seen organisations (such as Ben & Jerry’s) leaning in to hearing their employees’ voices, actively encouraging these discussions and using the power of their business to drive societal change.

Our prediction is that we will continue to see a significant increase in individuals looking to their employers to take a stand on social issues.

Organisations will need to make an active choice about the culture they want to create and how to manage their response to these societal issues. They need to set clear expectations and consider which issues they want to comment on publically. Organisations will also need to equip leaders to deal with these challenging conversations. Lack of clear guidance can hang employees out to dry, leaving them feeling uncertain and frustrated.

Things to think about:

• Does your organisation have a clear perspective / policy on employee activism? Consider how this links to your organisational values.
• How are you encouraging your leaders to have challenging workplace conversations?
  
  

Rethinking ERGs and DEI committees

We are increasingly hearing from organisations that their DEI Committees / Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) aren’t making as much progress as they’d hoped.

We see a number of reasons for this. One key driver of this disappointment is unrealistic expectations. Organisations often expect these groups to be responsible for leading significant DEI efforts. We need to acknowledge that, despite being passionate and well-intentioned, overhauling DEI is a really hard task that involves organisation-wide buy-in.

Not only is DEI incredibly complex, but these groups often lack time, proper funding and subject expertise. We also often see they don’t have clear support in terms of clarity on roles and responsibilities, structure and accountability. All these factors often combine to stall progress on DEI initiatives.

We predict organisations will rethink the role of these groups, moving them from primary drivers of DEI strategy to have more realistic expectations around community building and advocacy. They’ll be specifically allocated resources to take action.

Additionally, organisations will recognise the power of these individuals and start to invest more time and resources in supporting them. This will include areas such as funding, training and remuneration.

Things to think about:

• Do you have clear and realistic expectations of your ERGs and DEI Committees?
• How are you measuring the effectiveness of these groups?
• What support are you providing your committees, and do you know what support they want?
  
  

Formalisation of flexible working

Flexible working can encompass many things – time in the office, working from home, numbers of days worked, job sharing, flexible hours, etc.

The events of the last few years forced nearly all organisations to grapple with the reality of more flexible working. And while some continue to cite the challenges and potential downsides of a more flexible model of working, it’s clear there are plenty of benefits. A big benefit that is less discussed is creating greater equity of opportunity for many including people with disabilities, people with caring responsibilities, people who cannot afford to live close to the office, etc.

We’ve also seen more large-scale, high-profile experiments validating the benefits of reduced working hours (e.g. a 4-day workweek), and subsequent adoption by more large organisations, such as Unilever in Australia.

We predict that 2023 will see more organisations who were on the fence about flexible working get onboard. Those who value the ability to attract, retain and support a more diverse talent pool will lean more heavily on the side of accommodating flexibility and supporting a sustainable work-life balance.

Things to think about:

• How does flexible working align to your cultural values?
• Do you have a clear policy on flexible working?
• How clear are you on who in your organisation is most impacted by flexible working policies (or lack thereof)?
• What systems, policies and processes are in place to ensure employees who choose to work remotely have access to the same opportunities as those in physical locations?
  
  

The AI and bias conversation gets real for more people

Starting towards the end of 2022 and continuing into this year, we’ve seen a rapid acceleration in the democratisation of powerful artificial intelligence tools (such as those provided by OpenAI). Large tech companies have of course been investing heavily in this area for years now, placing big bets on AI as the future of their organisations. For example, Microsoft invested $1bn in OpenAI back in 2019, and is reported to be investing another $9bn in the coming years while preparing to integrate a version of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and the Office suite. Expect things to escalate quickly with competitors such as Google, Apple, Meta, etc. ramping up their efforts..

The implications of these AI tools for DEI is something we’ll no doubt talk a lot about over the coming months. But the outcomes for job destruction, creation and augmentation in certain industries is profound. So is the potential for the algorithmic bias present in these AI systems to creep into creative outputs, decision making, etc. (For more on this topic, we’d recommend a listen to our recent podcast with Mevitae CEO Riham Satti).

We probably won’t feel the full effect of this trend in 2023, with the technology still maturing and use cases still emerging. But AI is something nearly every organisation should start thinking about and discussing now. How organisations handle decisions around this technology will impact employee engagement and equitable access to opportunities.

Things to think about:

• What opportunities and challenges does AI create for your people and organisation?
• Are you clear on which jobs in your organisation are at most risk from AI/automation? And how are you supporting individuals in those roles in any necessary transition?
• Have you vetted technology suppliers that utilise AI for algorithmic bias?

We’re really big on accountability here at Leaders for Good. So we’ll reflect on how we did here when we make  next year’s predictions. But for now we’d love to hear your thoughts on our list.  What do you agree with? What do you think we got wrong?

Our methodology

For those of you who are interested, what follows is a brief overview of our methodology for selecting the above trends.

To get a holistic picture here, we consider DEI in its broadest sense, taking into consideration all aspects of human difference, both cognitive and demographic diversity.

We also take into account the macro climate in which organisations are operating, considering factors such as:

• What cultural trends are emerging or accelerating?
• What is the broader macroeconomic and geopolitical outlook?
• What legal or regulatory changes are occurring?
• What new tools and technologies are becoming available/being adopted?
  
  

Daily conversations we have with people on the ground in organisations doing this work are also taken into consideration:

• What are they implementing?
• What are they seeing in their data, and what are they hearing from their people?
• What’s working well and affecting positive change in performance and culture?
• What are organisations struggling with?
  
  

These inputs give us a solid base to generate a large number of emerging and accelerating trends. But of course, we operate in resource-constrained organisations, and must allocate time, money, thought and energy where they will have the greatest impact. So on its own a long list of trends is not particularly helpful. We need to prioritise.

To do this, we plotted our predictions against the following two dimensions: impact (the degree to which this trend will impact people in the context of organisational life and the businesses themselves) and likelihood (the probability we will see this trend begin or accelerate in 2023). We then endeavoured to focus on those we believe sit in the top right quadrant.