How My Company’s Grassroots DEI Approach Is Leading To Lasting Change
I’m proud of my company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) journey so far, yet we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. We’re hardly alone.
According to a 2023 report from the Global Parity Alliance, although companies are investing heavily in DEI initiatives, the current rate of change means it will take nearly three decades to reach parity in gender diversity and 25 years in ethnic diversity.
Here’s how my company, Centric Consulting, is laying the groundwork for lasting change.
A Great Culture Isn’t Enough
Centric’s culture has always been rooted in treating employees as humans first — this was part of the company’s founding mission, to build a better consulting firm that provided unmatched experiences for employees and clients alike.
It became clear this wasn’t enough in 2020, when the U.S. experienced a racial reckoning on top of a global pandemic that disproportionately affected minority communities.
Those events led to the creation of Centric Together, a grassroots, leadership-supported initiative to engage team members to build a diverse, inclusive and empathic community and to create meaningful and sustainable positive change.
“We were stuck at home, the world was burning around us — it couldn’t just be business as usual,” says Maurice Faison, director of technology services and DEI leader. “We had to acknowledge what was happening in the outside world and take a stand. That was the first time we were really vulnerable as a company, which morphed into formal and informal conversations about people and what they were feeling — the beginning of Centric Together.”
A Grassroots Approach to DEI
Many companies debuted big public DEI statements in 2020 and 2021, but Centric took a different approach, starting with simply listening to our people, opening a space for them to express their thoughts, concerns and feelings — a space to be fully human at work, where they could safely communicate how events in the outside world were affecting them.
Turns out, Centric employees were hungry for the opportunity. In the early days, more than 100 team members volunteered to lead and participate in Centric Together. One of the first changes the group put in place was creating formalized employee resource groups (ERGs) and Centric community groups (CCGs). Based on identities and lived experiences, our ERGs and CCGs give people a non-work-related support system.
“Those ERGs came from a collective crying out,” Faison says. “Speaking for the Black employee group, the ERG draws members closer to each other, closer to Centric, and creates a space to build community and identity here.”
Another early result of Centric Together was our Centric Talks series, conversations on non-business topics we wouldn’t have previously talked about, such as allyship and inclusive leadership.
“Centric Together raised people’s expectations around their workplace experience and opened the door for them to talk about what wasn’t working — it raised our collective awareness and provided team members the ability to raise their hands when things weren’t right so that we could start to address the things that mattered most,” says Jen Barnes, vice president of culture and communications and St. Louis practice lead.
Advancing Our DEI Efforts
While many companies are pulling back on DEI efforts as the economy falters, Centric is committed to significantly advancing our efforts in 2023, as we aim to thread DEI into the very fabric of our organization. Our strategic initiatives for the year include positioning DEI as a business function to work alongside talent management and talent acquisition, with the goal of cultivating an inclusive work environment and taking actionable steps to diversify our workforce, one of which is to mitigate bias in the hiring process.
We want to make sure our actions match our intentions — to provide an unmatched experience for every single employee. That can’t happen if our environment isn’t inclusive.
“For Centric to become a more diverse and inclusive place, DEI can’t be something you opt into,” Barnes says. “We need to have certain things in place, including data and metrics, to proactively see and address trends around how we recruit, hire and promote people and ensure we’re actually doing that from a diversity lens.”
Of course, diversity is just one piece of the equation. Inclusion is the ultimate goal, because when you pair a diverse workforce with an inclusive environment, that’s where DEI truly becomes impactful.
“DEI is now part of our long-term planning,” Faison adds. “It’s not a project or an initiative. It’s part of the company’s DNA, and we’re going to codify it in the systems, policies and expected behaviors of our leaders and employees. That shows commitment.”
DEI Progress Is Underway
We’re already starting to see some exciting results from our recent efforts. One area in particular is our career development model, which includes succession planning. We’re tracking representation across the board, including in the leadership ranks.
We’ve also partnered with INROADS to provide college juniors and seniors with paid summer internships. INROADS is a non-profit organization that provides career development training to talented and diverse students and helps match them with top companies in the country. Over the past two years, we’ve had interns in several parts of our business. Partnering with INROADS has opened up a new source of talented young people ready to start their careers.
“We’re focused on building a stronger foundation for DEI at Centric,” says Amber Blackburn, head of talent and employee experience. “This includes addressing diversity at the hiring level, defining inclusive leadership behaviors, training on unconscious bias, and ensuring that DEI is embedded into all of our people policies, programs and practices.”
DEI is critical to our — to any organization’s— long-term success. It’s first and foremost about doing the right thing, but it also carries significant business benefits. Companies that excel at DEI make better decisions and attract and retain the best people.
We’ve always wanted everyone to feel comfortable, that Centric is an environment they can thrive in and be supported. By continuing our work in DEI, we hope to ensure no employee is left out of that goal.
Centric Consulting is an international management consulting firm with unmatched in-house expertise in business transformation, hybrid workplace strategy, technology implementation and adoption. Founded in 1999 with a remote workforce, Centric has established a reputation for solving its clients’ toughest problems, delivering tailored solutions, and bringing deeply experienced consultants centered on what’s best for your business.
