Committing to the work of DEI is one of the most important components of building modern people functions.

The use of commitment is deliberate. It's not an act or an initiative. It's a series of acts, initiatives, and commitments - and being accountable to them - demonstrated consistently over time.

The real work of committing to DEI has no end. There is point in time when you will arrive at a fully inclusive and equitable organization. There is no finish or end state if you’re truly committed.

It's important to remember the work is continual and must be recalibrated often, whether you're publicly committing to building an anti-racist organization like Peloton, Culture Amp, or SmartRecruiters, or just working to be more inclusive - the work itself is a journey.

One of the recommendations I most often make is to do the work on yourself before overhauling your programs, so you're taking those steps from a place of understanding. This is especially important for white practitioners like me, who make up the majority of the HR field.

The first thing you’ll learn is that systemic bias is invisible to those whom it’s designed to favor - regardless of your personal beliefs or intentions. Inequity will remain invisible to those in the majority unless we do the work to understand and see it. Start there.

This section of the course is designed to support your journey - with resources, tips, internal prompts, book recommendations, and other tools to help support your education and your efforts to build a more inclusive, equitable, and representative company for all employees.

Internal Considerations

• What are the members of your HR team doing at an individual level to educate themselves on DEIB (book clubs, podcast discussions, forums for candid talks, training)?

• How are you engaging and supporting your employee resource groups (ERGs)? If you’re new to ERGs, use the resources in this chapter to help you build or optimize them.

• Are you having 1:1 conversations with your under-represented employees outside of the context of ERGs to understand their experience in workplace?

• Are you ensuring representation in your interview processes?

• Are your career site and recruitment marketing materials representative and inclusive?

• Are you analyzing pay and promotion equity to ensure parity across your employees?

Optimization Considerations

Specific actions you can take today to become a more inclusive company. This is just a start, but every journey begins with a step. Below are tangible action items you can do today.

• Considering adding pronoun fields to your job applications and HRIS employee profiles.

• Audit your hiring, compensation, retention, and promotion data to look for signs of disparate impact on under-represented employees.

• Audit your job descriptions, career site, and recruitment marketing materials for gender-neutral language.

• Ban “culture fit” as a reason for declining candidates during interviews. Require feedback to be specific.

• Build an internal DEI resource library (books, podcasts, videos, articles). [Note: there are some suggestions in the resources area of this section]