Measuring Belonging
Creating RESPONSIVE AND MEASURABLE DEI STRATEGY
A Case Study By Marie Deveaux
ABOUT THE CLIENT
The client is a global non profit think tank dedicated to creating dialogues and influencing policy. We worked with the team within the organization dedicated to critical energy, environmental, and climate change issues.
PARTNERING WITH HIGH TIDES CONSULTING
Our client partnered with High Tides Consulting so that members of their team could better address challenges of implicit bias and the overall team culture to better embody the public facing statement of anti racism that they had published the year before. They were seeking external support to help codify team culture and operationalize their equity and belonging goals.
The main goal of our work together was to better understand the current individual and team experience of inclusion and support the team in a progressive dialogue to create actionable next steps to progress their advocacy on their team, within their organization and in their industry.
PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
We focused on five primary objectives to accomplish this:
- Establish a baseline for understanding the current team members’ experience of DEI and identify gaps in knowledge and skills to be addressed.
- The team would create an ongoing and historically informed dialogue about structural inequities and use that lens to co-create a team vision that could serve as a role model for others in their organization.
- Increase psychological safety in the intrapersonal relationships between team members so that each person feels welcome, and empowered to engage in critical and constructive conversations about how to further enhance the culture of belonging on the team, the organization, and in the climate and energy industry.
- Create an actionable strategy to craft external branding and communications that could attract collaboration from a more diverse pool of thinkers and contributors to the policy conversations around global climate issues.
- Collect data to measure their team’s shift in creating inclusive culture and belonging over a 12-18 month period to serve as a test environment for other teams within the organization and as an example from which to model their own equity strategy plans.
timeline
CREATING THE LEARNING PATH
We spent the first 30 days with the client collecting data via 1:1 interviews and the disbursement of the customized employee engagement measurement tool. Then using those findings, we curated a 6 month customized learning path for the team to engage in as a cohort. The workshop series allowed the team members to fill their knowledge gaps and craft their team vision and strategy in response to their own data. The following workshop themes were chosen based on the presenting challenges articulated through the interview and survey collection process:
- Examining histories of systemic oppression in their country and industry
- Creating team vision and values in response to those structures
- Foundations of inclusive leadership
- Analyzing their own engagement data via SWOT analysis
- Steps to creating their action plan for the next year
- Active practice in bias checking within their team and with organizational and industry wide stakeholders.
PROGRAM RESULTS
Following the more structured workshop path, High Tides supported the team in hosting another 6 sessions of team conversations via Communities of Practice. In this format the team began to integrate the learnings from the workshop series and continue the conversations started with High Tides, relying on each other as the key accountability partners. This resulted in the team members themselves leading more of the conversations, creating systems for inviting more feedback and productive disagreement in their team operations, and the creation of the team’s DEIB council with a shared accountability structure for rotating leadership each quarter. Direct results of those sessions included:
- The creation of a team transparency statement to be used in public facing venues
- Redefinition of their fundraising parameters and pillars as it relates to social ethics
- Adding an Environmental Justice 101 course to future forum agendas
- Operationalizing systems for feedback and realignment to core values during 1:1 conversations between managers and direct reports
After 16 months of work with the team, High Tides collected another round of data regarding the same 9 priority areas the team had identified during the design of their baseline survey. The greatest improvements were seen in the areas of:
Commitment to DEI
Coworker Inclusion
Felt Sense of Belonging
Knowledge and Awareness of DEI Concerns
CONCLUSION
At the conclusion of the program High Tides met with the full team once again to discuss their deltas and needs as a result of the 16 month engagement. Many acknowledged increased levels of awareness and comfortability in bias checking others within their team and across the organization, as well as an increased sense of empowerment in creating change and feeling safe to challenge the status quo on their team and in communication with other colleagues in the industry.
The team continues to engage in frequent internal surveying, no longer requiring the external structures of a consultant to collect and respond to their own data around team culture, nor to moderate their own conversations where productive disagreement supports strategic change initiatives. High Tides remains a resource as the team continues to grow and seeks to onboard new joiners with the renewed values and team purpose statement that was crafted as part of this work.
Additionally, because the team was so successful they continue to recommend similar work plans to other teams within their organization, as their team culture is noticeably more open and collaborative than others within their company. To date, High Tides has engaged with two other teams to replicate the results experienced with the climate change group.
The practice of walking through these topics and the opportunity to discuss them openly with colleagues in a structured environment is extremely valuable!
Curious about bringing this kind of impact to your organization?
And we will follow up with ideas tailored to your team.
