DEI or die? Managing talent with diversity in mind

Work on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives must continue within legal practices and other businesses, while being fit for our times and fit for our firms, writes Leone Green.

In short:

• Some prominent multinationals are moving away from DEI initiatives, muddying the waters for diversity actions.

• Designing new and attractive career paths – which are of interest to multiple generations and people from diverse backgrounds – will be crucial to success and profitability.

• Talent management that recognises the need for diversity of thinking, and equitable opportunities for all, is a continual work in progress.

Late last year, I wrote an article for the Law Management Journal focused on diversity, equity and inclusion and the need for deep listening to contrary viewpoints.

This focus on listening is crucial to find where there is consensus, and to help people feel heard and understood; all employees that is, regardless of their personal attributes.

With the change of administration in the United States, this topic has gained even more traction, with many prominent multinationals stepping away from DEI initiatives to meet new government requirements. So, what does that mean for us in Australia? What can we learn from this? Is it DEI or die, or is DEI about to die? Do we need to act on this? And what does this have to do with talent management?

Don’t miss out

Our communities are diverse – featuring different genders, ethnicities, religions, educational opportunities and socio-economic experiences. As I noted last year, if we are not considering all of this in our people strategy or talent management approach, we are going to miss what would otherwise be available to us in the market for talent.  

Talent management is an interesting umbrella term, first coined by McKinsey & Company in the late 1990s, and covered in an article The War for Talent. It’s a broad term because it covers the full spectrum of managing people; from attracting the right people, hiring the best people and developing the future leaders etc. A more recent article from McKinsey, What is Talent Management?, highlights five core areas for consideration:

• finding and hiring the right people
• learning and growing
• managing and rewarding performance
• tailoring the employee experience
• optimising workforce planning and strategy.

Both articles are worth a read as food for thought on where, or how, we might improve our approaches to talent management, and the five areas explored in the second article can form a clear guide on approaching talent management within our firms.

For now, let’s focus in on the issue of tailoring the employee experience. If we consider the law firm experience of some decades ago, it was likely easier to tailor the experience to a stereotypical lawyer seeking to climb the ladder to partnership. That model worked for many years and it didn’t appear to be broken, and some may argue it’s not broken and are still working on this basis. The data suggests, however, that the firms that enhance and embrace the diversity of their workforces, and design workplace experiences that deliver to that diverse workforce, are not just winning the talent management game; they are also likely to be more profitable.

So, do we need to reconsider what the employee experience looks like within our firms? Is it ready for a redesign?

Macquarie Bank, while focusing on the need to balance four generations of employees in the workforce for the first time in history (one diversity aspect of its own), noted in its Law 2024 paper:

The road to partnership has long been viewed as the pinnacle of the commercialisation of the profession. However, many lawyers now seek alternatives and firms must be creative in designing new and attractive career paths.

How do we do this within our firms? And is this DEI, or is this just smart talent management? I would like to think that it’s both, and that the label we give it only matters if we want to tear it apart. The label I would give it is strategic people planning, which includes a consideration of the diversity of our current and future workforce. It’s strategic if, and only if, it aligns to a business strategy. And it is strategic people planning because if we don’t plan in this space, we get stuck in a constant reactive model – recruiting at pace and employing who we can get, rather than developing our future leaders.

The way forward

Where do we start? Here’s a way to jump straight into the employee experience element – only one part of talent management, but a vital part when it comes to DEI: 

• Current employee experience – ask your employees for feedback on their current experience, and gather the data. Listen carefully to what your employees are saying works and doesn’t work in the current environment, and where there might be opportunities for improvement. This might be data already available to you within an engagement survey; if it’s not, design a survey that asks questions to which you want the answers, and which you want to address.
• Future employee experience – start small, but find clear actionable ways to improve the employee experience for the diverse range of employees within your firms, based on the data that you have collated. Make it part of your strategic people planning and track the actions and their impact.
• Keep iterating – employee experience is not a set and forget, and design thinking principles will tell you that you must keep listening, with empathy, and design in real time – keep improving as you go. Keep an eye on the metrics that matter (are your employees engaged, are they giving you their discretionary effort, are they staying with you?) and keep designing with improvement of these metrics in mind.

Want more on this? McKinsey has a great nine element model that focuses on the employee experience, giving you plenty of ways to frame this up in a way that fits your firm.

Importantly, let’s remember that we live in a diverse community and culture; not a mono or static community. Therefore, we need to manage our workforces in a way that recognises the diversity, ensures all our people feel included and are treated fairly and equitably.

This is not an easy task. There is a reason why DEI teams and initiatives have been working hard for the past decade. The work needs to continue, fit for our times, and fit for our firms, and for the benefit of our people, our firms and our communities. Talent management, now more than ever, needs to carefully recognise the need for diversity of thinking, equitable opportunities for all and inclusivity for all. It’s a continual work in progress.  

Leonie Green is the co-founder and director of the Corvus Group, a workplace and legal advisory firm with more than 20 years of senior legal and HR experience working in Australian and international companies. She practised as an employment and industrial relations lawyer for a number of years prior to moving into management roles in industrial relations, shared services and human resources. She can be contacted via email at leonie@corvusga.com.au.