Strong DEI initiatives are built into a company’s culture and stand the test of time. Hear from Ashlee Davis, Head of DEI at Ancestry, about two key ingredients for building a successful approach to DEI.
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gettyDEI, DEIB, DEIBJ, and even JEDI…I’ve been in the professional space of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), civil rights and human rights advocacy for over 15 years, and some days all of these letters still feel like a bit of alphabet soup. Whatever acronym is used, at its core, this work is about creating and preserving an equitable talent lifecycle where the best person is hired and promoted, and you also deliver the best product or service for your customers. Business leaders should not be deterred by the headline of the day and cyclical, distracting debates over the facts and importance of good and profitable business practices.
For years Ancestry® has recognized the importance of investing in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion – “DEI” – which we use as an all-encompassing term for the various offices and roles that support equity, inclusion and innovation across our business. For more than 40 years, Ancestry has enabled family history discoveries through digitized historical records and AncestryDNA®. We aim to help everyone—regardless of race, ethnicity, or heritage— discover, craft, and connect around their family story. Attracting and engaging a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforce is integral to powering these discoveries. You can learn more about our overarching DEI strategy in our annual Impact Report.
Partnerships with Grads of Life and other community organizations, have supported us in continuing to dive deeper into DEI at Ancestry. Just a year ago, we partnered with Grads of Life to complete a comprehensive DEI review, using their Opportunity Identifier tool to assess our organization against 300+ leading DEI practices. The results helped us identify and establish measurable areas of improvement within 5 specific pillars: Strategy, Governance, & Accountability, Equitable Talent Journey, Family-Sustaining Wages & Benefits, Inclusive Culture, and External Engagement.
When working with trusted outside counsel, openness and honesty about where you are on your DEI journey is key to really understanding where the greatest areas of opportunity exist. We shouldn’t be afraid to share our challenges because there are great partners available to help solve them and make meaningful progress, and the truth is that none of us should go about this important work alone.
As I reflect on my experience at Ancestry and in the broader DEI field, two key lessons stand out for what makes DEI initiatives successful:
1. Effectively communicate all the benefits of DEI
In the private sector, prioritizing the business objective of DEI is important, but that must be balanced with an emphasis on benefits of inclusion for everyone. The business case for DEI is a strong one, whether that be monetarily (e.g., Total Addressable Market expansion and financial outperformance), or through nonmonetary outcomes (e.g., employee satisfaction and productivity). Linking DEI strategies to business outcomes is good for short-term and long-term business growth because it positions you not only for the diverse customer base available today, but the increasingly diverse customer base of tomorrow.
While the business case for DEI is important, if the only thing an employee hears is how profitable a company expects to be by hiring diverse employees, well, that strips employees of their own humanity. It is essential that leaders also emphasize how an equitable workforce creates a culture of belonging where innovation and well-being thrive. At Ancestry, our CEO Deb Liu recently launched the inaugural CEO Leadership Award that brings these pieces together. A central component of this award’s selection scorecard is whether the Ancestry employee has demonstrated inclusive leadership behaviors that led to transformative product, technology or workplace experience.
With Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies still working to increase diverse representation, it’s true that a large portion of the business value and positive financial returns of DEI will benefit those who are neither women, nor racially or ethnically diverse. This makes it critical for DEI business objectives to have balanced messaging that speaks to both the positive business and personal/organizational outcomes we stand to gain by working together.
2. Set measurable DEI goals that span beyond the HR team
This work is without a doubt a marathon and not a sprint, but the rewards are highly valuable whether you’re considering revenue or employee sentiments. To ensure success and mitigate risk, organizations must lead with intentionality and prioritize and embed DEI company-wide.
While you may need to “slow down to speed up,” bringing multiple internal stakeholders to the table of DEI planning is vital (e.g., Legal, Marketing, Tech, Communications, Finance, Facilities Management, and everyone in between). DEI only works at an optimum level when it's embedded throughout the organization, not living in an HR silo. DEI work can at times feel like an insurmountable feat. However, being a DEI practitioner is one of the rare roles where our very purpose should be to do our job so well that one day, we work ourselves out of a job. This objective can only be achieved when we not only welcome additional partners to the work, but also give them the skills necessary to bolster their own DEI competency and embed inclusion and equity into their team’s strategies and everyday interactions.
Creating DEI Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that are measurable and aligned with your ultimate DEI “North Star” in mind is also absolutely essential. As management guru Peter Drucker noted more than 70 years ago, “What gets measured, gets managed.” This is no less true for the DEI space, especially in a world where DEI initiatives are under increased scrutiny. Selecting the right OKRs requires that you slow down to collectively identify what you want to solve, the activities that will get you there, and the key results that need to be achieved for both incremental and long-term success. To keep embedding DEI throughout the organization, DEI OKRs should span the organization and not be confined to HR. Also be sure to adequately resource these strategic DEI objectives so that you can create an equitable workplace for employees and a globally attractive and accessible product or service for your customers.
At Ancestry, we track OKRs related to expanding our company’s equitable talent lifecycle, increasing the conversion rate within diverse market segments, and enhancing accessibility features for our customers. We use these OKRs to tell us if we’re making progress against our DEI North Star across all aspects of our organization. We use these DEI OKRS to openly communicate the positive workplace and workforce outcomes our collective efforts will have.
No matter your role at your company or organization, you have a tremendous opportunity to go beyond the alphabet soup of DEI acronyms and create lasting programs that meaningfully serve your customers, workforce and bottom line. To do so, focus on both business and people benefits of these efforts and integrate DEI across the organization, supported by clear and well-resourced OKRs. Having measurable goals and being able to clearly define what success looks like is game changing in the world of DEI.
