How to Connect Culture and DEIB to Results for Lasting Change

Spend too much time on LinkedIn, and you’ll start coming across two thoughts on the current state of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in the workplace.

Death to DEI.

Long live DEIB.

What’s going on?

In this article, we’ll explain:

• How DEIB in the workplace has evolved over the years
• Why organizations should look at DEIB through a cultural lens
• What needs to shift about DEIB in the workplace
• What Compass recommends for sustainable DEIB change

Our framework drives lasting change by connecting DEIB to results. But before we explain this model, we first need to explore the history of DEIB and workplace culture.

Where did diversity training start? How has DEIB changed in recent years, and when did one-time trainings become the catch-all solution? Why is DEIB currently experiencing a backlash?

Let’s get to it.

An Introduction to DEIB and Culture

To put it simply, culture is what a group has learned about how to fit in and be successful that influences how we think, behave, and interact with others. When a workplace culture includes belonging, that means employees feel comfortable being their full authentic selves.

Historically, when leaders endeavored to improve the workplace, they didn’t generally consider any aspect of DEIB. But companies had to change following the social movements and labor laws of the 1960s.

The Origins of DEIB in the U.S.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees and job applicants from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Subsequent laws protect workers from discrimination based on other dimensions of diversity, including age, disability, and pregnancy.

If companies continued to operate with a discriminatory culture, they were at risk of legal repercussions. And thus, diversity training and other diversity programs were born.

The earliest forms of diversity training were primarily race-based anti-discrimination training. Over the decades, this first expanded to include gender diversity training and then expanded again to be a multicultural approach that acknowledged the many dimensions of diversity like age, veteran status, and educational background.

With this broadened understanding of diversity, training also began to focus on inclusion. Going back to 2004 on Google Trends (the earliest year available), the term “diversity” has remained consistently popular. “Diversity and inclusion” starts to appear around 2011, with an increase in 2014. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” starts to appear around 2016, with an increase in 2020.

How 2020 Changed the Conversation About DEI

We previously covered the impact of 2020 in the article “DEIB in America: Past, Present, and Future.” To quickly summarize, Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, killed George Floyd, a Black man, and the world experienced a visceral, emotional response.

Suddenly, people of all ages, races, and nationalities were joining long-time activists in their protests against racism. This led to new DEI conversations and initiatives, including in corporate spaces.

But as business leaders tried to do the right thing—quickly—their DEI solutions sometimes missed the mark. For example, after years of multicultural DEI work, DEI initiatives often reverted back to a primary focus on race, ignoring or minimizing other dimensions of diversity. This is one reason DEI is experiencing a current backlash, especially as some people have conflated DEI with affirmative action.

At the same time, DEI leaders have tried to recognize the limitations of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is why many have broadened this framework with a fourth word. Some have added justice or accessibility as their fourth term.

At Insight Global, we have chosen belonging as our fourth term to expand the DEI framework (to DEIB), because it encompasses all of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the workplace, belonging occurs when employees feel connected to and accepted by both leadership and each other. We want all Insight Global employees to feel that sense of belonging, regardless of their background or identity.

The Future of DEIB

To achieve sustainable DEIB change, organizations must shift their perspective to view DEIB issues as integral to their overall culture, with a focus on business-critical outcomes and results. This involves several key shifts in approach:

• From compliance to connection: Instead of merely adhering to legal requirements, businesses should aim to improve working relationships among employees, especially across different demographics.
• From specific groups to everyone: DEIB initiatives should be inclusive of all employees, not just specific demographic groups.
• From moral value to business value: Yes, investing in DEIB is the right thing to do, but it also needs to improve business results. It’s critical to establish a line of sight between at least some DEIB initiatives and business results.
• From external theories to internal practices: Instead of relying solely on generic DEIB theories, organizations should develop tailored programs that address their unique challenges and opportunities to improve both belonging and business results.

Which brings us to the different way we approach DEIB and culture change.

Our Approach to Culture and DEIB

“Businesses don’t exist to have a great culture. They exist to serve their purpose and their culture either helps or hurts their ability to do so.” – Edgar Schein

Schein was arguably the top global authority on the topic of organizational culture when he passed away on January 26, 2023. We’ve written before about his cultural expertise and the importance of connecting culture to results. Let’s briefly review that here.

Connect Culture and DEIB to Results

Results are the feedback loop that determines what ends up in our culture.

Think about it. You’ve probably experienced this feedback loop without even realizing it. Anytime you try something new, it either works or it doesn’t work.

For example, you set a clear meeting agenda, and the meeting goes well, so you set a clear meeting agenda next time. Or you set a weekly recurring meeting, but you realize it keeps ending early because there isn’t enough to discuss, so you switch to a biweekly schedule.

Just as your behaviors change based on results, so do the behaviors of the people around you. Your effective meetings inspire others to run their meetings the same way. Eventually, if more and more people replicate these behaviors, and these changed behaviors deliver results, this may become part of your culture.

For culture to change, there should be a feedback loop from results that reinforces the targeted behavior. Otherwise, it may just be a temporary change.

DEIB initiatives work best when they have a positive impact on results, creating this feedback loop. It’s no longer enough to say that DEIB drives innovation. DEIB in the workplace needs to connect directly to the performance of your organization.

This starts by understanding how different aspects of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging can help OR hurt performance.

Recognize How DEIB Helps and Hurts Performance

Every industry, every company, even every team in the same workplace is different. This is why generic DEIB solutions rarely work. Successful implementation of sustainable DEIB policies starts by understanding how cultural norms might vary among different demographic groups and then assessing DEIB in your own workplace.

For example, you want to encourage diversity of thought. You want employees to speak up.

But if you have team members from a culture that values conformity, they might hesitate to share unique ideas. That culture might stem from nationality, military background, or even experience in a previous team at the same company.

To change the culture of your team, don’t call out individual people or an individual demographic. Instead, focus on patterns and behaviors that are holding back performance. What changes can you implement to encourage everyone to express themselves and offer their opinions?

This leads us to the next point, trying new things to get new results.

Use Pilots and Shared Learning to Drive Results

One reason DEIB initiatives “don’t work” starts with their creation and implementation. It’s too easy to choose DEIB initiatives that work in other companies, without considering how they’ll work for yours.

Think about any change you want to make in the workplace, like upgrading technology. Do a few leaders choose new software, buy it without consulting anyone else, and then install it on all employee computers? Probably not.

So why do too many organizations treat DEIB solutions that way?

You have to experiment to learn what helps and hurts results in your specific organization. You already know this with other changes in the workplace. Pilots and shared learning should also be applied to DEIB.

What does this look like?

It starts by developing leaders who can foster a culture where all employees can maximize their potential. Buy-in from leadership is essential to promoting belonging in the workplace, but they first need to see the throughline to business results.

How do you get there?

With the Culture Habits.

The Compass Model: Culture Habits

We just went over three ways DEIB needs to change for it to be effective and sustainable.

• Connect culture and DEIB to results
• Recognize how DEIB helps and hurts performance
• Use pilots and shared learning to drive results

But how do you take these principles and apply them to your workplace?

We developed a framework for driving learning and results that we refined based on feedback from Schein. We call this the Culture Habits. (You can read more about the Culture Habits in our previous blog.)

Getting Started with the Culture Habits

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably already a DEIB leader, but do you know where your company stands? Our DEIB maturity model breaks down company DEIB into three levels: Introductory, Foundational, and Transformational.

In our experience, most companies are at Introductory or Foundational because it’s challenging to reach Transformational.

But once you’ve established programs and trained leaders, teams are ready to learn more inclusive ways to deliver results. We use the Culture Habits to bridge that gap, to facilitate shared learning among leaders who will then raise their companies to Transformational.

Transformational is where sustainable change happens. Transformational is where DEIB initiatives directly and intentionally impact results.

We start by meeting for one or two days with a leadership team or a cross-functional team. Following the Culture Habits framework, we facilitate both high-level and practical discussions to connect DEIB efforts to performance improvement.

Connect

Improving connection is the first step to achieving belonging in the workplace. We define connection as the level of open and trusting relationships and shared commitment to achieving results in pursuit of a defined purpose. To achieve this, teams must:

• Connect to each other
• Connect to purpose
• Connect to results

We’ll briefly outline what this looks like.

Connecting to Each Other

Connecting to each other lays the groundwork for everything else. It’s too easy to “learn” about those who are different than us. What really matters is being vulnerable with each other. This starts with deeper conversations (Compass Conversations) where everyone feels empowered to discuss their unique dimensions of diversity.

When your team members discuss their own dimensions of diversity openly, it allows everyone to appreciate the unique strengths that people contribute to the workplace due to their diverse backgrounds and identities. Compass Conversations allow participants to move from superficial understandings of differences to truly appreciating each person’s diverse traits.

Connecting to Purpose

Connecting to your team’s purpose or company’s purpose doesn’t need to be complicated. This conversation gets everyone on the same page about the impact you want to make, whether that’s your team’s impact on the overall company or the company’s impact on the world. How does DEIB connect to purpose?

Connecting to Results

This is where you select a prioritized set of results that align with your purpose. These are measurable business results like growth, innovation, customer experience, etc.

From there, your team creates a vision of how DEIB impacts results so everyone can learn more and scale.

For example, if you feel like you need more diverse teams across locations to better connect to customers with different local demographics, that indicates a lack of DEIB in the workplace is hindering business results.

Explore

After your team has established connection, you’ve built the psychological safety necessary to explore how different identity groups experience culture.

Keep in mind, there is not a singular culture at your organization. Team culture is different from departmental culture which is different from company culture. Plus, individuals all have their own cultural backgrounds influencing their beliefs and actions in the workplace.

Exploration is where you define what is helping and hurting people and results. This looks like learning about DEIB through your existing culture instead of conducting external research on what “should” work.

A starting point is to analyze your most diverse teams, find out which ones are getting the best results, and figure out what they’re doing differently. Collecting feedback from underrepresented groups can be used to identify approaches that positively impact both business results and culture. This process of “decoding excellence” will be key in the next step.

During exploration, you might uncover some uncomfortable truths about your workplace culture. For example, if your company says they value skills like teamwork and understanding, but then they go and reward aggressive, cutthroat behavior, this shows a misalignment of values that negatively impacts employee success and company growth. This kind of culture may disadvantage those who do prioritize teamwork and understanding. Or you might find that only the dominant group in the workplace succeeds when acting aggressively, while underrepresented groups face repercussions for the same behavior.

Another way that majority and underrepresented groups might experience culture differently relates to appearance. A workplace that treats curly hair as unprofessional—even if just implied and not directly stated—creates an unfair standard. Employees with naturally curly hair then feel pressured to spend a lot of time and money to conform or else miss out on promotions.

While it’s important to understand what individual employees experience and how that impacts their performance, the more meaningful exploration is looking at groups to understand how their shared experiences impact performance. Do artificial barriers exist that inhibit a group’s success?

Another way to think of exploration is a cultural audit. Dr. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., widely considered the “Father of Diversity Management,” recommends that organizations audit their corporate culture as one step in managing organizational diversity.

If the goal is not to assimilate diversity into the dominant culture but rather to build a culture that can digest unassimilated diversity, then you had better start by figuring out what your present culture looks like.

Dr. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr.

Thomas goes on to explain that culture includes the unspoken assumptions, values, and mythologies that drive it. And he clearly articulates that this type of cultural audit requires outside help, as it involves in-depth interviews and close observation of employee interactions.

Improve

Once you’ve explored what’s helping and hurting results, the next step is to apply that understanding to improve your company culture. This is where you take action and create change, starting with small, iterative steps.

Improvement does not mean trying to change people. Remember, the goal isn’t to assimilate diversity into the dominant culture. Rather, improving culture starts with finding ways to fix systems and processes that hold back underrepresented groups, lead to underperformance, and harm business results.

We recommend using pilots to try new systems and processes. This allows you to overcome the most complex challenges before scaling across your organization.

A three-prong approach to piloting works best:

• Work with leaders to develop more inclusive ways of achieving results, starting with what you learned by “decoding excellence” across your most diverse teams
• Integrate best practices into process to promote equity
• Collaborate with historically underrepresented groups to find the best DEIB initiatives (like training, mentoring, and ERGs) to support them as they navigate the culture

Keep testing and trying new things. Listen to feedback. Make adjustments. Remember, this is a journey to belonging, not an overnight fix. Sustainable DEIB change doesn’t happen in an instant.

We turn back to Thomas for guidance on designing pilots. Ask these questions.

Learn

This is where the work all comes together, by taking everything you’ve learned about DEIB in your workplace and scaling it across the organization.

Share the pilot results. Take time to teach the why. Implement new systems and strategies based on what worked—and what didn’t work. Continue to accept feedback and adjust as needed.

DEIB will not evolve without groups learning new ways of doing. Give your people time to learn and grow.

And remember that each Culture Habit is not a one and done approach. Learning means taking the time to reconnect, to explore the new results, to improve systems again, and to keep communication open the whole time.

Thomas offers this advice on working with leaders to lead change in the workplace.

DEIB is Worth the Work

Lasting, sustainable DEIB change doesn’t come easy, but it’s work worth doing. DEIB training and programs can be a great start, but effective change starts by connecting DEIB to results and following through every step of the way.

Dr. Thomas was ahead of his time, writing this about belonging in 1990.

As workplaces become more diverse, with people from different ethnic, cultural, and demographic backgrounds, organizations can no longer expect employees to assimilate to a single, dominant culture. In the past, organizations may have tried to force a common culture or identity based on the interests and preferences of the majority group. However, in a truly diverse environment, that approach no longer works.

Instead, leaders have to work harder towards a shared goal of creating a culture and values that everyone connects to, regardless of their individual background. This shared sense of purpose and values become the unifying force.

To quote Thomas again, “Let’s create an environment where everyone will do their best work.”

Why Compass? Why Insight Global?

Compass is the culture consulting division of Insight Global, a leading staffing firm with one of the strongest company cultures in the country. We are the most results-oriented culture firm in the world.

Compass was born from our own cultural turnaround. We learned how to ignite lasting culture change because we had to. Our culture was broken, but we fixed it in sustainable ways that continue to deliver business results, and now we enable others to do the same.

We drive human connection. We built the Culture Habits to enable growth.

The growth of your people.

The growth of your business.

And the growth of your impact on the world.

About the Authors

Korryn Williamson is the Director of DEIB at Compass, part of Insight Global’s professional services division, Evergreen. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Tim Kuppler is the Director of Culture Solutions at Compass, part of Insight Global’s professional services division, Evergreen. Connect with him on LinkedIn.