Becoming a more inclusive and diverse organization is not just the right thing to do — it’s essential to innovation and business success. Yet as race has become a more visible and urgent workplace issue, most organizations have not moved past episodic reactions to tragic events to creating sustainable change. The current reckoning on race in the United States has revealed that organizations have not made enough progress toward becoming truly equal workplaces.
How to Set — and Meet — Your Company’s Diversity Goals
The foundational first step toward creating a more diverse workforce — and realizing the many benefits it can bring to an organization — is the same as with any other business effort: setting goals. Accenture had set internal representation goals for many years, but realized that change would come only if it held itself publicly accountable. The company created its own goal-setting methodology based on a set of five key actions: 1) Analyze locally so your goals reflect the communities where your people work and live; 2) Focus on skills, not education; 3) Work the education-location equation and identify the proportion of residents with and without bachelor’s degrees, by race/ethnicity, in your largest office locations; 4) Pressure test your goals to ensure rigor and reasonability; 5) Build your own pipeline.