Companies around the world are pouring money into DEI programs. Some are reportedly spending tens of millions of dollars, and it has been estimated the global market will reach $15.4 billion by 2026. However, unless you’re robustly evaluating your impact, it’s hard to know whether what you’re doing is making things better. In fact, it’s possible you’re making things worse.
Copious academic research has been conducted on DEI initiatives, but much of this work has been conducted in labs and online, not in real workplaces measuring impact on meaningful behaviors. This makes it hard to be certain how these initiatives might play out in actual companies. After all, lab and online participants face different incentives, contexts, and considerations than employees in the real world, all of which could influence how a proposed DEI initiative plays out in practice.
Before rolling out a potentially costly initiative, it’s worth verifying that it works in…
This article was written by Edward Chang and originally published on hbr.org