‘Woke for the point of being woke’: DEI must link with organisational performance

Much has been made about the recent decisions of companies across the globe pulling out of their DEI initiatives, with many pointing towards “woke” ideology as the problem.

In recent months, many companies, including Walmart and Ford, have scaled back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, buying into the labelling and criticisms of them being products of “woke” ideology.

HR Leader recently spoke to Errol Amerasekera, director of Bluestone Edge, about this trend, to which he noted that some of the backlash of these policies may, in fact, be warranted.

“It is oversimplistic as well as dangerous to frame the backlash to DEI policies as dysfunctional or irrational. This is because the ‘backlash’ may have a point. When organisations create policies that are ‘woke for the point of being woke’ team members feel these policies are in place to only benefit certain segments of the workforce,” said Amerasekera.

“This can create resentment in organisational cultures, or exacerbate pre-existing fault lines. Therefore, the way we think about and implement DEI programs must be linked to the overall wellbeing of the organisation and its performance.”

Amerasekera explained that the shift from organisations towards a ‘purpose beyond profit’ framework resulted in competing expectations between leaders within the company on how business success is measured.

“The nature of the ‘social license’ that organisations have is in flux, as society’s expectations of businesses have changed to include a ‘purpose beyond profit’ motive.

“This is critical as businesses have employees, customers, and other stakeholders who increasingly share those same expectations. This is still an evolving perspective, as there are many who believe organisations will ultimately suffer if they lose the primacy of profit motive.

“For many, including myself, there is the viewpoint that the corporate landscape has evolved too far for a complete reversion to a single bottom-line perspective. This requires leadership to meet and address these increasingly competing expectations, where the idea of purpose beyond profit has been pitted against a single bottom-line approach to how we measure success,” said Amerasekera.

Jasleen Kaur, senior principal of HR advisory at Gartner, who recently spoke to HR Leader about this trend, touched on a similar sentiment, stating that leaders who properly embedded DEI into business outcomes are sustaining and succeeding with these measures.

“Organisations or DEI leaders who positioned DEI to begin with as a business imperative, showed value, showed success measures, outcomes from their efforts, they’re the ones who are going to sustain success or performance. The ones that got leadership involved and got them accountable for DEI, they’re the ones that are going to continually see efforts,” said Kaur.

“The ones that didn’t do all of those things, that didn’t build sustainability in their efforts, they’re the ones who are now panicking. They know, deep down, that their leaders were not bought in; they were doing it for the sake of doing it, and now that they don’t have to do it, they’re not going to do it.”