Management Needs To Show Leadership

While rank-and-fi le 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. And they want to see top executives devoting corporate resources to DEI initiatives.

“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.”

Only 44 percent of those surveyed said the executive team “owned” their company’s DEI strategy while 48 percent said it was owned by the HR team. (Eight percent said no team owned the DEI strategy.)