DIVERSITY STRATEGIC PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION

At WFD we partner with diversity officers to create strategies--built on a foundation of shared values and beliefs--that win top management's highest commitment and drive business results.

WFD builds a diversity strategic plan on six pillars that drive organizational change and align diversity values and beliefs with business goals.

WFD’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategy Services

WFD’s diversity and inclusion strategy services guide organizations through every step of the strategic process from formulation to implementation.   

1. Diversity Analytics 
WFD brings twenty-five years of measurement experience to answering the three existential questions of diversity and inclusion. 

The Business Case Question: 
Why should our organization focus on diversity and inclusion?

WFD takes a highly collaborative, but hard-nosed, objective, business approach to the development of business cases or rationales for diversity.  WFD has found that simply dropping a pile of data on leaders does not create a winning business case argument.  Instead, we take a collaborative approach, crafting a business case with you, that draws upon your organization’s own experience and data in combination with arguments drawn from our extensive database of carefully documented business case data points. 

The Strategy Planning Question: 
On what initiatives should we focus our attention and in what order? 

WFD brings its wide knowledge of the diversity and inclusion research of what works and what doesn’t together with deep data about your organization.  WFD offers off-the-shelf and customized diversity and inclusion work climate and culture surveys and qualitative data gathering to determine the key leverage points to advance your strategy.    For organizations that have developed their own data or are “survey weary,” WFD makes sure your data will stand up to top management scrutiny and brings advanced analytical techniques, methods, and presentation graphics to elaborating the meaning of your existing data and linking it to strategic initiatives. 

The Outcomes Question: 
How successful have our diversity initiatives been? 

WFD helps organizations establish strategic objectives with goals, measures, and targets and then cascade those measures throughout the organization to create a diversity accountability system.  We design diversity and inclusion strategy scorecards or dashboards that tell you how the diversity and inclusion strategy is progressing and loop back to the planning process to tell your organization what steps to take next.  Our scorecards offer a balance of leading and lagging indicators to ensure that your data is predictive of what’s coming and robust about what it has accomplished.  It can tie your diversity initiatives to employee engagement measures to determine which of your diversity initiatives are contributing most strongly to employee engagement and on what your diversity strategy should focus that will leverage employee engagement.  It can determine the degree to which your diversity and inclusion initiatives are contributing to productivity, job satisfaction, innovation, and a variety of other organizational and business outcomes.  Below is a scorecard WFD designed for a federal agency. 

2. Committed Leadership 
Depending on the state of diversity strategy in your organization, WFD starts with educating the leadership team and often the diversity council and employee resource group leaders about what it takes to achieve diversity strategic success.  It brings leaders face-to-face with the current state of diversity in their organizations, shows them what diversity leadership is all about, and takes them on a deep exploration of their own level of commitment and what it will take to move up the ladder.  It designs accountability systems to give leadership a rudder with which to guide the diversity strategy.  WFD works with leadership teams, diversity councils, and employee resource groups to provide feedback from data gathering and analysis.  It brings deep expertise and experience facilitating senior teams to make the decisions that drive the diversity process. 

3. Integrative Infrastructure 
WFD assists organizations in developing an infrastructure to manage the strategic diversity process and programs and integrate across the organization.  We take a look at what’s in place and how it’s working and customize structure and solutions to fit your needs, circumstances, culture, and budget.  In some cases, the recommended infrastructure includes setting up a diversity office, a diversity council, and employee resource groups for success.  In others, it might include an acknowledgement of what structures are already in place and clarification of roles and responsibilities and accountability mechanisms.  In still others, infrastructure is kept very light and the diversity and inclusion strategy is implemented through the existing organization structure. 

4.  Aligned Culture and Systems 
WFD assists clients in defining and articulating the diversity values they will seek to fulfill and aligning strategy with the organizational culture and the desired diversity values.  The diversity strategy is aligned with organizational systems, especially those that we have found to have a significant impact on diversity strategy success—performance management, career development, and reward and recognition systems. 

5. Intensive Communication 
Communication should be internal and external.  Internal may focus on making the business case, communicating the strategy, providing updates and telling success stories.  In its early stages communication is often face-to-face with large groups of employees and is typically two-way with senior management listening as much as or even more than speaking.  As organizations achieve success, communications is increasingly external to get the organization’s message to the diverse talent it is seeking.  In all cases, the communication strategy sets goals, identifies audiences, crafts messages, and determines the best medium to deliver messages to their audiences. 

6. Targeted Diversity Policies & Programs
WFD offers a wide range of off-the-shelf and customized diversity programs, including mentoring, training, employee resource group support, expert planning and facilitation of diversity council and leadership meetings, recruiting assistance, and work-life.  WFD’s training offerings include: awareness, unintended bias and microinequities, managing for inclusion and collaboration, leveraging differences, and working and managing cross-culturally.  We also assist in the evaluation and promulgation of diversity policy.

Additional Information on Diversity Strategic Planning and Implementation

• Diversity Strategy brochure
• Read Diversity Strategic Planning articles