What to Do in Today’s Environment, Part 2: Shore Up Your Business Case
With all the whiplash in the US related to DEI, it can be hard to know what to focus on right now that will bring your organization value. In our last newsletter, Jamey Applegate talked about the importance of optimizing what you have in place already. The next step is to shore up your business case.
When you provide clarity on what you are achieving through your DEI work, a lot of the noise about DEI automatically fades into the background. Even if you have had to pare back some of your DEI work due to a perceived risk (perhaps you are a large company in your sector or are dependent on federal funding), it is still important to quantify the value of what you are investing time and resources in.
The most common benefits that come from DEI that we see are improved retention, engagement, and productivity at the employee level, which lead to more innovation, better risk management, and new market opportunities at the company level. All of these together drive revenue, margin, and cost savings.
A framework we have developed to help people understand the breadth and financial magnitude of their work is our Equity At Work DEI Impact Framework™:
The purpose of this framework is to help you understand the trade-offs between DEI initiatives and to help you prioritize what to go after based on your desired impact. The x-axis spans individual impact to enterprise-wide impact, while the y-axis spans low to high financial impact. The axes are the steady pieces here; you can plot any DEI activity you are considering or planning on the framework.
As you build your own version of this impact framework, review where your activities are concentrated, the breadth of your impact (individual to enterprise-wide), and the degree of financial impact associated with each. Then look at the engagement scores, productivity measures, turnover, and other KPIs that align with what you have plotted, and you can measure a correlation between these activities and the output.
Don’t forget to communicate the value you are bringing to your people and your business! Having a business case only matters when people know about it.
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