POINTING THE WAY
10 Important DEI Trends For The Channel To Keep Top Of Mind For a growing number of channel businesses, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are becoming an important, transformational component of their long-range strategies. “Unisys has long understood its role to build and foster a compassionate, inclusive culture that drives innovation and opportunities for our people, communities and environment,” said Katie Ebrahimi, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys. “To truly have the diversity that represents society at large, we need to implement initiatives to address equity.” According to an October 2021 report jointly prepared by research organization WBR Insights and compliance training firm Traliant, 89 percent of all companies already had a formal DEI strategy in place with the remaining 11 percent planning to implement one within 12 months. The report was based on survey results from 300 U.S. companies across all industries, including the IT industry. The survey also found that 79 percent of all companies planned to allocate more budget and/or resources to DEI in 2022. Here’s a look at 10 key DEI trends that are impacting companies across the channel today. 1. Employees Want To Be Actively Involved Business initiatives within organizations traditionally follow a top-down approach with management setting the strategy. While some DEI efforts have followed a similar path, the real impetus for DEI is coming from employees. “We’re finding that what employees really want is the opportunity to actually lead those [DEI] efforts themselves,” said Sona Khosla, chief impact officer at Calgary, Albertabased Benevity, whose software is used to foster employee engagment and inclusiveness through social responsibility. One approach to addressing employees’ desire to move DEI forward is the creation of employee groups, what some call “employee resource groups” (ERGs) or “affinity groups,” that bring together employees with similar backgrounds or interests— and employees who support them—to provide mutual support and champion change to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace, according to the Great Place to Work website. Unisys has created nine Associate Impact Groups— voluntary, employee-led groups “that foster a diverse, inclusive workplace aligned with our mission, beliefs and goals,” Ebrahimi said in a written response to CRN questions. The Unisys AIGs represent different gender, ability, race and ethnicity communities and include the Unisys Pride AIG, the Women+ Network AIG, the BlackU AIG and the Veteran AIG.
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SPECIAL ISSUE 2022
Solution provider CDW, meanwhile, operates what it calls Business Resource Groups, which serve as forums for employees to “make their voices heard, build awareness, celebrate their affinity area, serve their communities, bolster allyship and provide perspective on diversity and inclusion initiatives,” according to the company’s 2021 Environmental, Social and Governance report. BRGs include the Women’s Opportunity Network, the Hispanic Organization for Leadership & Achievement and Black Excellence United. 2. Management Needs To Show Leadership While rank-and-file employees are driving DEI within many companies, they expect more from high-level executives than press releases that often don’t result in real outcomes. “Employees absolutely want their employers to be making real investments. They want them to be making more than statements and [actually] taking action,” Khosla said. But there is clearly room for improvement in terms of top executive buy-in. Benevity research found that 80 percent of employees believe that company leadership has a responsibility to take action to address DEI issues, but 47 percent did not see management taking these steps. The WBR Insights/Traliant survey found that only 13 percent of respondents described their CEO and/or executive management as “actively endorsing and advancing DEI.” The majority, 58 percent, said, “Though not very visible, our executives are involved in decisions about endorsing and advancing DEI.” And 29 percent said that while executives supported DEI, “they are not directly involved in endorsing or advancing it.” 3. DEI Training Is Crucial DEI training is “the easiest way to communicate what to do (and not do) in the workplace,” noted a report from i-Sight, an Ottawa, Ontario-based developer of applications for uncovering, investigating and preventing incidents, fraud and other misconduct in the workplace. “You can model real-life scenarios for employees to help them understand their biases, learn how to step in when they see harassing behavior and see the value in diversity,” i-Sight noted. Sixty-five percent of organizations are conducting DEI training, according to the WBR/Traliant survey. The same survey found that only 9 percent described DEI training as “very important” while 61 percent said it is “important” and 30 percent said it is “somewhat important.”
