Jacqueline Foster-Mutungu | Principal | Johannesburg | Boston Consulting Group (BCG), | mail me |
In recent years, business leaders have made significant investments in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). However, ask employees about the impact of DEI efforts within their companies and you’ll hear a different story.
Despite years of significant corporate investment in DEI, outcomes have been modest at best, and our research backs up employees’ perceptions that while their company has done enough in DEI, many of the employees targeted with such programmes do not benefit from them.
Having a diversity programme in place
Up to 75 percent of South African respondents surveyed, as part of our 2020 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion survey, reported that their company has a diversity programme in place, while nearly 60 percent stated that their company has done the right amount of work in terms of DEI efforts.
However, up to 38 percent of targeted employees in South Africa have not benefitted from these programmes. While this share may be comparably low compared to other countries where it goes up to 75 percent – it is more than a third of targeted employees.
The growing value of DEI is further backed up by our study Decoding Global Ways of Working, in partnership with The Network and local affiliate Career Junction. South Africans researched as part of the study were found to care more about diversity than the global average.
Eighty-two percent of South Africans said that diversity and inclusion had become more important to them in the past year, compared to 69 percent globally.
Diversity and inclusion was also particularly meaningful to the country’s young people, with 87 percent saying diversity and inclusion had become more important to them in the past year. Half of the South African respondents overall would even refuse to work for an employer that does not match their beliefs in this area.
Reimagining diversity, equity, and inclusion
All of these are examples of the overwhelming importance of prioritising DEI efforts. However, we have hit a ceiling in terms of the impact this important work is making. This is largely because DEI initiatives tend to segment people into groups and assume they define the workplace experience.
Locally, 11 and 3 percent of respondents stated that their company has done too much or far too much in terms of DEI efforts, while 21 and 7 percent reported that their company has done too little or far too little when it comes to DEI programmes.
In reality, individuals are made up of a variety of identities, for example a black female employee can also identify as LGBTQ and be a caregiver for siblings, while a white male employee might be a single parent and have a physical disability.
Leaders need to adapt their DEI work for a new and diverse generation and attack the problem from an entirely new perspective. They must focus on three key elements to enable a significant change
