How to be confident in your EDI plan
In the second part of this series, culture specialist Katie Wynn-Jones shares her experiences of interpreting EDI findings and prioritising and planning for what’s next.
EDI and culture change interventions can be expensive and measuring their success can be difficult. Substantial investment has been made across the market in new solutions and training, yet the desired impact isn’t always evident. It’s often said that true culture change takes several years to accomplish. This is even more challenging when faced with an ever changing and evolving horizon. So how can leaders be confident in their investment in EDI interventions?
Where to start?
Independent audits or culture reviews often provide lists of recommendations as part of the output – and this can be overwhelming. The recommendations are not all equal, and many may need to work together in a reinforcing system to be effective. The question is, which should rise to the top?
When we work with clients at this stage of their inclusion journey, we prioritise what should happen next, methodically. First, we group the actions into three types of intervention:
Structural
Process
Behaviour
Typically, all three will be required. So, then we assess which recommendations are lead actions and which are supporting. This provides clients with information that’s easier to digest.
Working out the practicalities
We apply one further filter to prioritise actions, based on meaningful and bespoke criteria. We deploy this framework methodically, engaging with different groups of stakeholders and local teams. At this stage we are considering:
Capacity
Capability
Budget
Time
Through carefully facilitated conversation it’s possible to identify synergies between groups and collective agreement around the right interventions to take forward.
The power of simple
The aim is to arrive at a simple, achievable plan which must answer the following questions:
What’s the ambition? What’s the scale? What’s the pace?
What would need to be true to achieve that? Think structure, leadership, people, finance.
Which of these interventions get us there? Is there a sensible sequence?
What are we doing already / plan to do? What is the impact?
What capabilities do we need to deliver the plan?
This final planning stage is a fast-paced process that aligns leaders, key stakeholders, and managers. The scope of the plan may include stress testing policy or process or assessing the effectiveness of the framework in place to call out misconduct. It may include management of hybrid teams, fair allocation of work or tackling poor leadership practices.
Supporting the plan with a story
Every organisation is unique in its culture, practices, and pressures. When it comes to EDI, regulators will expect to see a story and a golden thread from data to plan, through to the desired outcome. Taking a methodological evidence-based approach and paying attention to the considerations I’ve touched on here will make the plan more manageable, and effective – a plan you can be confident to invest in.
If you would like to talk to Katie about Half the Sky’s consulting services, please email: info@halfthesky.co.uk
In her next blog in the New Year Katie will be discussing an approach to tackling new rules and regulations around EDI for Financial Services.
