You are committed to making your business more inclusive. Great! Now, where should EDI actually sit in your organisation in order to be effective?
Here are different approaches, with theirs pros and cons.
EDI within the HR directorate
Most organisations see EDI as a people matter. Ergo, it’s an HR issue.
And it is true that HR should already have a handle on many EDI-related aspects: the legal obligations and their translations into policies and procedures; the essential touchpoints throughout the employee lifecycle; the associated data; the connection with Learning & Development.
HR is also inherently cross-functional, and therefore can offer a strong conduit to infuse EDI across your business.
Yet the CIPD itself, the leading professional body for HR, L&D and Organisation Design practitioners, acknowledges that placing EDI within HR poses a challenge.
In their very own EDI accreditation course material, they cite the following stats:
- One third of respondents said getting help from HR is hard or nearly impossible
- 31% aren’t sure or don’t trust the HR team to respect their privacy and confidentiality
- 47% aren’t sure or wouldn’t trust HR to help them manage conflict with another member of staff
- Less than 50% trust HR to act impartially
Source: https://cezannehr.com/infographics/trust-in-hr/
Building trust and psychological safety is a fundamental pre-requisite to fostering inclusion and belonging. If your employees’ trust in HR is low, placing EDI within their purview will strongly hinder your progress.
EDI within HR can work well if:
- Your HR department is highly trusted by staff
- It interacts well will all functional areas leaders within your business
- It has a strong capacity for data gathering and analysis
EDI within its own directorate with direct reporting to the CEO
Another approach is for your EDI leader to report directly to your CEO.
This sends a powerful message to internal and external stakeholders: EDI is a top business priority.
It usually goes hand-in-hand with EDI objectives embedded into the wider business strategy. And, even if your organisation is only starting its diversity and equity efforts, it shows that these aren’t just empty words – your business is putting its focus where its mouth is.
Done well, this placement also models proactive leadership on the subject. If your CEO is prepared to learn more about EDI, to understand how inclusion connects to performance, and to make data-driven decisions around diversity, it encourages employees at all levels to do the same, from board members to junior staff.
Practically, a direct reporting to the CEO often translates into faster decision-making and easier access to resources for EDI initiatives, which is especially valuable in the early stages of EDI work.
On the flip side, mid-sized businesses often have concerns about investing in a board-level leader, mostly because they do not need full-time support. The solution here a fractional approach – C-suite, part-time EDI leadership.
EDI reporting directly to your CEO is excellent to:
- Emphasise the strategic importance of inclusion
- Foster engagement with the work across the organisation
- Speed up decision-making, especially in the early days
EDI within the Governance directorate
If your organisation is more advanced on diversity and inclusion, EDI can fit naturally within the governance function.
All aspects of business governance either impact or are impacted by EDI:
- Its focus on the processes and practices that foster a culture of accountability, transparency and integrity
- Its role in identifying and mitigating risks to the business, be they financial or reputational
- Its obligations on compliance and reporting
- Its oversight of stakeholder engagement, from employees and customers, to suppliers and the wider community.
That said, the governance directorate can somewhat stand at arm’s length of business operations. If yours is too remote, EDI under Governance risks becoming a paper exercise.
Ensure that your EDI leader is supported by a broad range of change agents throughout the organisation, to continue delivering true progress on EDI.
EDI as part of Governance:
- Indicates that inclusion and equity are fully embedded in the business
- Capitalises on well-established processes and controls
- May become a paper tiger if left without clearly defined operational agents
EDI as part of Health & Safety
This is a more uncommon approach, but it has specific merits.
The first is following an EDI-related incident, say a harassment or discrimination case. Sadly, many organisations only look at EDI reactively, in response to such incidents.
The welfare of individuals is heavily impacted in these situations. That of the direct victims first and foremost. But also of many other employees: those identifying with the characteristics discriminated against; close colleagues; witnesses; even the perpetrators.
Your organisation has a duty of care for all of them, and you must bear in mind that all these individuals may still need to work in close proximity for some time after an incident. Impact on stress, mental health, even physical health in the most egregious cases, must all be addressed with utmost sensitivity and impeccable processes.
By positioning EDI with H&S, you convey the message that inclusion is a welfare issue, and that safety also encompasses keeping individuals safe from the actions and behaviours of fellow colleagues.
Aside of the practical merits of this structure (reporting, legal obligations to HSE etc), it can help ease the reputational harm of such events, by showing that your organisation has a zero-tolerance approach to EDI breaches, just as it does to other H&S matters.
There is a second scenario where placing EDI in the H&S remit is worth considering: when your business has a strong physical component.
Don’t forget that inclusion is also about physical accessibility. In the construction, farming or mining sectors, for example, inclusion starts with PPE and tools safe to use by employees of all body shapes and sizes.
Sitting EDI within Health & Safety makes sense
- To position inclusion and equity as a welfare issue
- To make use of the existing non-negotiable H&S processes to address EDI incidents
- To promote inclusion in sectors where physical characteristics have historically been a barrier
EDI wherever Quality resides
This last option might surprise you the most, but hear me out.
Quality and ISO 9000 used to be the latest greatest thing back in the 1990s. Now it is an everyday concept in business.
What does Quality have in common with EDI? Its route to integration.
EDI is the latest key concept all organisations should be addressing, but we don’t quite know what to do with it.
Looking back, Quality often first stood as an ill-fitting category, sometimes on its own, sometimes bolted onto Governance or Operations. Then, over time, organisations understood that Quality needed to reach every part of the org chart to be effective. Over the past 10 or 20 years, Quality gradually found its natural home within your business – somewhere distinct enough to make a difference, yet embedded enough to feel mainstream.
Capitalise on what works: if your Quality department already does this well, irrespective of where it sits in your structure, it is well worth considering locating EDI within the same functional area.
Positioning EDI with Quality:
- Works with your business’ DNA and methods
- Relies on existing structures, communication and decision flows
- Capitalises on lessons learned from previous trial-and-error
A final word
While positioning EDI thoughtfully matters, this alone won’t guarantee success: workplace inclusion only improves when all areas of your business engage with the work.
