Not Meeting Your DEI Goals? Maybe It’s Your Lousy Jobs
Reaching long-term equity and inclusion goals is impossible without improving the quality of lower-level jobs
By Ellen G. Frank-Miller, PhD and Michelle Wilson, EdD
Can you name the big barrier to achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals that’s not being talked about enough? It’s bad jobs.
A lot of companies are talking up their commitment to DEI goals but continue their outdated low-road business strategies that rely on high turnover among lower-level employees. When job churn is built into your business model, you are undermining your DEI strategy.
Workplace equity and quality jobs go together; you can’t achieve equity where dead-end jobs persist. Organizations that ignore the reality of their bad jobs are creating – intentionally or not – structural barriers that allow systematic racism to exist for marginalized or overlooked groups in lower-level jobs.
You can’t simply hire your way out of the problem. To achieve DEI goals and the resulting favorable business impact, you must advance the historically marginalized employees you already have.
Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman’s new report, Building from the Bottom Up, finds that most lower-level employees want to stay with their current employer. That means churn is not inevitable – it’s a result of what employers do, and that’s a key advantage you can build on.
Here are five signs your company is undermining your DEI goals with bad jobs:
You accept high turnover in a misguided effort to keep staff costs low – you’re managing employees as expenses rather than assets
You’ve designed jobs that are dead-ends instead of pathways to advancement
Your employees have few or no opportunities to acquire new skills during their day-to-day work
You routinely hire part-timers to avoid paying employee benefits
You schedule work shifts without regard to their impact on workers
These all represent systems, policies, and norms that undermine DEI efforts. Ask yourself whether they benefit some groups while marginalizing others? Or do they operate in a way that creates equitable outcomes?
One example: Is it equitable for executives and workers on the factory floor to pay equal amounts for health insurance premiums despite massive differences in salary?
Of course not! If employee contributions for insurance premiums aren’t scaled to salaries at your company, then your policies are inequitable, unnecessarily affecting lower-level staff and undercutting your DEI efforts. That’s one easy place to make your jobs better.
Want to reach your DEI goals? Then make deliberate choices to dismantle negative business practices. Here’s another easy target: turn a critical eye on HR’s Learning and Development function. Are they putting real time and dollars into developing existing lower-level staff so they can promote from within? Or are they investing heavily in “recruiting top talent,” a buzzword for a focus on jobs that require college graduates?
Companies created these conditions and they can fix them, too. Here are five evidence-based ways to stop the churn and reach your DEI goals:
Raise wages, but don’t stop there
Reduce reliance on part-time workers in favor of full-time positions that create greater engagement with the company
Overhaul benefits plans through an equity lens (remember those health insurance premiums we talked about?)
Build stable, predictable work schedules that offer adequate work hours and income stability
Invest in pathways to wage growth and career advancement
Our colleague Tom Strong likes to say that every job that has ever existed was designed by someone.
Companies routinely invest enormous resources in designing their products and services in order to win in the market and that same kind of investment can be applied to designing good jobs for lower-level workers to win at the retention game. Better jobs add value to the business, reduce turnover and burnout, and increase engagement for better balance sheet results.
None of these vital steps happen by accident. They require resources and commitment, but extensive research shows they pay off with sustained competitive advantage.
Our organizations, WORC (the Workforce & Organizational Research Center) and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, are partnering to achieve these goals with generous support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Walmart.org, and Prudential. Reach out to us to hear how.
About the authors:
Ellen G. Frank-Miller, PhD (ellen@worcimpact.com), has spent her 30-year career collaborating with investors, employers, national advocates, and community-based organizations to help make frontline jobs better and more accessible to all. An organizational scholar by training, Dr. Frank-Miller has 15 years of experience in HR consulting and excels at creating evidence-based programs and policies. Prior to launching the Workforce & Organizational Research Center (WORC), she founded and led the Workforce Financial Stability Initiative at the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago.
Michelle Wilson, EdD (mwilson@nationalfund.org), has served as the Director of Evaluation and Learning at the National Fund for Workforce Solutions since January 2019. Michelle has worked in a variety of settings focusing on issues of access and equity in health, educational, and workforce systems. She has spent over 20 years conducting community-level research, evaluation, and program development and specializes in research and evaluation design and implementation in complex and challenging settings. Michelle earned a doctorate in adult and community college education from North Carolina State University, a Master's degree in applied anthropology from the University of Maryland, and a Bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from North Carolina A&T State University.
