Strategy Development Tip Sheet
DEI Practitioners Toolkit
How to Toolkits
Tip Sheets
Tools
DEI Practitioner Toolbox
Strategic Planning
Creating your diversity and inclusion strategy requires considerable time and thought and resources. Here you’ll find some tips for getting started and setting yourself up for success early on in the process.
Tanya Menon: The Secret to Great Opportunities? The Person you haven’t Met Yet
Interactive Exercise
Ted Talks
Inclusive Leadership
Unconscious Bias
We often find ourselves stuck in narrow social circles with similar people. What habits confine us, and how can we break them? Organizational psychologist Tanya Menon considers how we can be more intentional about expanding our social universes — and how it can lead to new ideas and opportunities
Mastering Self Promotion
Back Pocket Exercises
Interactive Exercise
Career Development
Employee Resource Groups
Member Development
Personal/Professional Development
The mere idea of self-promotion can be extremely uncomfortable for most people. This exercise uses the art of storytelling – specifically telling someone else’s story – as a way to practice the art of personal promotion, view your success through another person’s eyes and utilize that story to craft a more powerful version of your own story.
Meaningful Conversation Planning Guide
Templates and Frameworks
Tools
Employee Resource Groups
Member Development
Personal/Professional Development
ERGs often provide their members access to leadership through strategic networking events and activities. This guide provides a series of tips and conversation starters that helps your members properly prepare for a meeting with leadership.
ERG Member Engagement Survey
DEI Checklists & Quizzes
ERG Leaders Toolkit
How to Toolkits
Tools
Employee Resource Groups
Member Development
The member engagement survey is a tool for ERG leaders to assess the needs of its member base in order to provide highly targeted and effective development opportunities, engage ERG members and enhance communication and outreach.
By making employee development a primary focus of your ERG, you can play a key role in cultivating the organization’s most valuable asset – it’s people. Here are five ways and five reasons why your ERG can and should support organizational goals through employee development.
Customer Connection Conversation Starter
D&I: Making it Count for Sales
Dialogue Drivers
Interactive Exercise
Awareness/Foundation Building
Business Case/DEI ROI
Middle Manager Engagement
The Making it Count for Sales Conversation Starter is a series of discussion prompts designed to help managers and their teams recognize opportunities to leverage diversity to improve client / customer relationships and business results.
Customer Connections Worksheet
Templates and Frameworks
Tools
Awareness/Foundation Building
Business Case/DEI ROI
Cultural Competence
The Customer Connections Worksheet is a tool designed to help individuals explore model behaviors in order to plan for an inclusive and productive client business interaction.
What are the Biases that may be Affecting Your Decisions
Article
Allies & Champions
Awareness/Foundation Building
Unconscious Bias
There are several types of biases that frequently show-up in our workplaces and can negatively impact progress made toward diversity and inclusion related goals and objectives. Learn more about them in this article.
The STAND Framework is a tool you can use to manage bias by rethinking and reevaluating your first impressions. It is a process you can refer to help guide your decision-making process
We Choose You – Exploring Organizational Norms
Back Pocket Exercises
Interactive Exercise
Awareness/Foundation Building
Unconscious Bias
The We Choose You: Exploring Organizational Norms and Biases Exercise is a 30-minute experiential activity designed to help participants recognize the existence of organizational norms and biases that may be limiting the opportunity and success of marginalized employees.
Intent vs Impact Exercise
Back Pocket Exercises
Interactive Exercise
Belonging
Inclusion
Inclusive Leadership
Organizational Culture
The Intent versus Impact Exercise is an interactive exercise designed to help participants explore the unintended impact of their words, actions and decisions.
A Shift in Mindset: Middle Managers as your Biggest Champions
Article
D&I: Making it Count for People Managers
Middle Manager Engagement
Organizations have struggled with the concept of middle manager engagement since middle managers were part of the picture. And this phenomenon is not reserved for Diversity and Inclusion practitioners alone. Too often organizations forget the simple things when it comes to middle managers like […]
Celeste Headlee: 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation
Back Pocket Exercises
Interactive Exercise
Ted Talks
Inclusive Leadership
Personal/Professional Development
Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation. Participants will listen to her Ted Talk and engage in interactive discussion and practice exercises to advance the concepts shared in her talk.
Cultural Fit Versus Inclusion Discussion Guide
Dialogue Drivers
Interactive Exercise
Belonging
Employee Engagement
Inclusion
Organizational Culture
Talent Management
In this short video a group of hiring managers discuss the concept of cultural fit and how focusing on criteria when assessing candidates enables them to mitigate the impact of bias on their hiring decisions. The discussion guide can be used to further explore the concepts and practice applying them to real workplace situations.
Elif Shafak: The Revolutionary Power of Diversity of Thought
Interactive Exercise
Ted Talks
Awareness/Foundation Building
Business Case/DEI ROI
Inclusive Leadership
A native of Turkey, Elif Shafak has experienced firsthand the devastation that a loss of diversity can bring — and she knows the revolutionary power of plurality in response to authoritarianism. In this passionate, personal talk, she reminds us that there are no binaries, in politics, emotions and our identities.
Frances Frei: How to Build and Rebuild Trust
Interactive Exercise
Ted Talks
Inclusive Leadership
Psychological Safety
Respect in the Workplace
Trust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it’s broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it.
With the constant barrage of news feeds, tweets and blog posts it’s almost impossible to keep discussions regarding charged topics such as politics, religion, race, immigration, gun control and women’s rights from permeating our workplaces. It can be tricky to navigate topics like these at work. But, with some basic ground rules, these discussions can be enlightening—no matter which side of the issue you’re on.
Working Parents Discussion Guide
Dialogue Drivers
Interactive Exercise
Allies & Champions
Awareness/Foundation Building
Employee Resource Groups
Member Development
In this short video working parents talk about the challenges they face balancing work and parenting. Watch this video as a group and use the discussion prompts to explore reactions to the video and advance the dialogue – work-life is not just a working parent’s issue.
Better understand military veterans including the military experience, transition into civilian life and leadership lessons learned along the way.
Sample questions you can use to prepare short success stories that profile employees at your organization and share key success factors and lessons learned.
Honoring Vets at Your Organization
Templates and Frameworks
Tools
Diversity Dimensions
Member Development
Veterans
Many organizations are placing increased emphasis on including military veterans in their diversity and inclusion strategy. Here are some ideas you can adopt or adapt at your own organization.
The Role of HR in Diversity & Inclusion
Article
D&I: Making it Count for HR
HR Business Partners
Talent Management
This article explores how HR leaders and practitioners have the opportunity to champion and lead D&I efforts with inclusion-forward policies and procedures, by spearheading skill and competency development across the organization, and most importantly by leading through example.
Diversity and inclusion can be linked to organizational performance in 3 key areas workforce, workplace and marketplace and Human Resources has strategic responsibility for both the workforce and workplace pillars.
Hiring Decisions Exercise
Back Pocket Exercises
Interactive Exercise
Awareness/Foundation Building
Recruiting
Talent Management
Unconscious Bias
The Hiring Decisions Exercise is a 30-minute experiential activity designed to help participants recognize the existence of personal assumptions and unconscious biases and the impact on behavior and decisions.
Allies play a very important role in creating inclusive work environments. Allies can help amplify the message, break down barriers and secure support of the masses. So, when you’re ready to step into the role of ally, here are some things you can do to ready yourself and increase your effectiveness.
Practical Tips for Getting Involved
The Bystander Conundrum: How to be an Ally
Tip Sheets
Tools
Allies & Champions
There are many ways to respond to the behaviors and actions we witness in our workplaces and our communities that range from supporting oppression to driving inclusion. Most of us would agree that it is far more appealing to support inclusion over oppression. Deciding to get involved and how we get involved is just that – a decision. Often what holds us back is fear and uncertainty. Here you’ll find several practical ways you can step up and get involved.
What Prevents Us from Getting Involved
Article
The Bystander Conundrum: How to be an Ally
Allies & Champions
More and more clients are asking us for training and resources that addresses the Bystander Conundrum, recognizing that there is an opportunity for employees to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Most of us believe that when something bad is happening, it’s our responsibility to step in and that it’s better to serve as an ally than a bystander. We’d like to think that if we were witness to non-inclusive, inappropriate and in some cases even discriminatory behavior we’d step in and help. But the reality is that the majority of us don’t.
The Role of Allies in Creating an Inclusive Work Environment
Article
The Bystander Conundrum: How to be an Ally
Allies & Champions
Allies can work to mitigate bias, eliminate prejudice and fight inequality in our workplace and societies. In addition, allies can help create an environment where everyone feels welcome, supported and can contribute their best work. Allies are also key to an organization’s ability to create a truly inclusive workplace. So what role can allies play in supporting your organization’s diversity and inclusion strategy?
The Business to Business Case for Diversity and Inclusion
Article
Awareness/Foundation Building
Business Case/DEI ROI
The business case is easier to make in a consumer direct market but, certainly there is a strong case in the business-to-business market as well. We want to take a look at the business case in a sales organization from 3 different perspectives: Workforce, Workplace, and Marketplace.