What worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in 2022? Where was there room for improvement? What trends will prevail in DEI in 2023?

We asked Yolanda Chase, Chief Diversity Officer at WTIA, and Michael Schutzler, CEO, WTIA, to share their unique perspectives on the current state of DEI and how tech leaders can continue to create positive momentum in this space in the coming year. 

Q: What worked well in DEI in 2022?

Yolanda Chase: What worked well was our ability to reach out to signatories who originally committed time and effort into building more equitable and inclusive workplaces via the Anti-Racism in Tech Pact, and really being able to understand their progress, how far they’ve come, and areas of challenge. It played a significant role in helping us determine how we deliver solutions relative to attracting, retaining, and developing talent through an equity lens. 

Attracting, developing, and growing BIPOC talent, and then designing our meetups and workshop sessions to meet that need. And also providing space and opportunity for networking for organizations—part of the Pact or not—to interact and talk about their challenges and where they need more help and share best practices, etc. So I think that worked beautifully in 2022, and more of that to come in 2023.

Michael Schutzler: Nobody knew that WTIA was focused on diversity initially because it was like a magic trick. Nobody was watching the right hand while the left hand was doing something else. We built an apprenticeship program. The whole world was fascinated by the fact that we were in the training business, and our real focus was that 80%+ of those apprentices were going to be underrepresented groups in jobs largely held by White men. Our archetype for that was, “Can we successfully recruit Black women?” That was six, almost seven years ago.

Nobody thought of us doing DEI work. Then in the summer of 2020, we started the Anti-Racism Pact that Yolanda referred to. There were roughly 70 organizations that signed up to join, deliberately and specifically focused on diversity. The very first response from member companies and from the public and the local media was, “Why is a trade association working on DEI? Who do you think you are?”

A year later, in 2021, we were still somewhat in a pandemic. People had almost forgotten that George Floyd was murdered. In fact, people had almost forgotten that racism is an issue in the tech industry, and everybody ignored us. We did our work, but for the most part, nobody cared. 

Our board of directors agrees with our focus, understands, has fully internalized, and now articulates on its own behalf, that diversity is our strategic differentiation as a trade association. Find me another chamber, find me another association that says, “our strategic purpose is diversity, that’s item number one.”

Nobody else is doing that and we’re now credible. I’m excited about what that means for 2023 and beyond because we’ve finally been given permission by our member base, our stakeholder groups that we work with, our partners, and the general public who occasionally engage with us. We’ve been given permission by that social fabric to be thought leaders in this space. And that’s pretty cool. 

Q: What are some success stories that have come out of our DEI efforts?

Yolanda: Outreach is one. They received an award we gave through the DEI Summit in 2021. Their focus was on hiring a specific leader to come in and lead their DEI efforts. Their CEO was committed, not just through the signing of the Anti-Racism in Tech Pact, but also living the values by hiring a woman of color, providing full access and a runway so that real sustainable inclusion exists.

Michael: Because we’re a tech trade association, I’ll focus on the tech sector. Last year, something on the order of $2 to $3 billion was spent by large tech companies, mostly public companies, on DEI initiatives. And the outcome of all of that spending and a lot of public banging of drums was actually a retrenchment. There are fewer underrepresented groups working in tech than there were before. 

That isn’t because the industry hasn’t become good at recruiting women, people of color, people with disabilities, or veterans. It’s challenging to retain those people because almost everything has been performative. There has not been a systemic change.

When there is a budget allocated to DEI, the money is not being spent on leadership development or organizational design changes. It’s being spent on awareness training or vendors owned by underrepresented groups. Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great component of a diversity strategy. But everyone seems to have missed the fact that diversity is an outcome.

Diversity is not the beginning. The beginning is leadership that creates an inclusive environment. I’m happy to say that some of the smaller companies that we’ve worked with get it. Because they’re at a scale where they can easily see and feel the pain from, “We recruited some people of color—and they’re gone.” 

We’ve also seen progress with other small companies; Outreach is one. There’s also a local gaming company here called FlowPlay that figured DEI out years ago and has gotten brilliant at recruiting and retaining all manner of diversity because they understand that item number one is inclusive leadership. 

Locally, we’re starting to see some companies we can partner with. We’re a Center of Excellence. We help companies figure out how to cultivate change, and we point them to resources to help them. To be effective, we have to first find an organization with leadership that understands item number one is the system they run, not how many people of color are in the mix. It’s a big shift.

Q: Where do you think there’s room for improvement?

Yolanda: Every organization can do better. What I’ve seen over the last 33 years practicing DEI is that there is progress being made, albeit slow and steady. That said, we’re still seeing significant disparities in pay, employee benefits, and economic vitality for Black and Brown people.

We want to see a lot more traction and action being taken by leaders to say, “I have a deficit in my understanding of what DEI even means.” The improvements have to be centered around a leader who says, “I believe in inclusive and equitable workplaces with an outcome of diversity, but I am still struggling with concepts. I am still struggling with how I show up as, for example, a White male or even a White female. How do I support this when I don’t have the mastery and I haven’t embodied the competencies required for me to see deficits in equity every time they pop up inside my organization or when we’re having strategic conversations about the direction of the business or product development?” 

Q: What are your top predictions for upcoming trends in DEI in 2023? 

Yolanda: In the context of the Great Resignation and the exiting of BIPOC talent during the pandemic out of organizations because of microaggressions and poor culture, more organizations will be mindful of external contributing factors—external criticalities can create cultural issues inside our workplaces.  Culture, how we do work, how we welcome people into the workspace, and what we provide for them are primarily impacted.

We’re also seeing equity and inclusion leadership competency development as a growing trend we need to pay attention to. I anticipate we’re going to see more on the leadership development side, and I’m hoping that leaders start to understand competency building is key and begin to act on it.

I also anticipate there’s going to be a greater focus on culture and how we attract and retain talent, as well as a deeper understanding of what talent is looking for inside an organization. For example, Gen Z talent wants to not just see more diversity, they want to be able to point to it and understand at the micro level what an organization is doing to live and breathe their values in DEI. A lot of that is going to be driven by the new generations of talent coming into the workplace.

Michael: That Gen Z is looking for diversity is a phenomenon in a wider context. I want to make sure it isn’t lost. It’s quite interesting. 

It started with us being in a pandemic and a cry in society and especially in the tech industry that said, “Diversity’s a necessity; there’s still racism.” 

Now there are layoffs happening and there’s an existential threat all around us, at least in the tech industry. While the rest of the economy has been growing jobs like weeds, this industry is actually contracting. In that environment, our industry has an interesting DNA that’s the result of growing up with an existential threat due to competition and a limited amount of capital. Every single tech company is like this. Our DNA is to ship the product, and make payroll—nothing else matters. In the current environment, many companies that were making progress toward addressing internal DEI challenges are saying they can’t afford to focus on it. 

Generally, marketing and human resources are the first to get cut in a budget process that’s under duress. It’s not sales because revenue still has to come in. It’s usually not service because companies want to keep the customers they have. Everything else gets cut. 

There are tech companies that recognize the DEI work they’re doing isn’t about being magnanimous. It isn’t because of racial and social justice. There may be personal energy and passion among leadership when it comes to those topics, but that’s not why a company makes DEI a priority.

Company leaders want to do work in diversity and prioritize DEI because they recognize there’s an extremely limited pool of talent and there are fewer White men to hire. The people coming into the talent pipeline expect companies to create inclusive environments. They’re saying “diversity,” but what they’re looking for is, “Does leadership actually make me feel welcome? Do I feel like I belong in this organization? Do I have autonomy? Am I valued for my competence? Am I actually a part of this organization?”

If you’re an organization that’s only worried about shipping the product and making payroll, you don’t care about that sentiment. I’ve seen it over and over again in my career; culture is an excuse for why a company’s workforce is predominantly White men because others don’t “fit the culture.” Companies with a culture of inclusivity— that promote and celebrate diversity because it brings new points of view to problem-solving—are going to win. It’s starting to shift already and within the next 10 years, embracing DEI is going to be a core competency that separates the winners from the losers in talent acquisition, and ultimately, talent retention.

I’m confident that over the next year or two that’ll become more and more clear. If you have enlightened self-interest as a company leader, you’ll recognize the need to adjust your leadership competency requirements and training to create an inclusive workforce. Otherwise, you’re going to have a hard time recruiting or retaining talent.

Q: How do leaders make important DEI conversations the focus of the workplace and the employee experience? 

Yolanda: You need a culture that supports having conversations around DEI, so you have to create it. It’s incumbent upon the leaders at the highest level of the organization to say, “We’re going to create and nurture that organizational dynamic.” That’s the first thing. It’s not difficult to create that environment, or at the very least, to state an intention to create that kind of environment. 

The next piece of that is the work that you need to do to make sure that you can have those conversations and that it’s top of mind in the organization, and setting standards on how you have those conversations and when you have them. We (the COE) talk a lot about integrating DEI into the business model, and that’s part of it. 

You hear so many leaders, specifically White men that say, “Oh, I’m just a White privileged guy and I don’t get this, so let me just toss this over to the BIPOC person over here, they can do it.” That leader is pushing the onus off onto someone else and not understanding that if they are not thinking through the lens of DEI, if it’s not top of mind, if they haven’t embodied or mastered it to a certain degree, then that is going to unconsciously come to bear in the strategic decisions they make. That’s a reality. They’re going to be thinking through the standard leadership lens of how they operate a business. Now, they could have a Diversity Way-Maker™ sitting next to them who says, “Hey, this is what I want you to think about when you’re going through the strategic planning, when you’re making decisions on X, Y, and Z.” A CEO ally who is committed will honor that individual’s input, skills, and abilities, trusts them, and allows them to challenge the status quo through effective DEI advisement.

It begins with the leader. You hear a lot about, “Oh, we’re going to do grassroots on X, Y, and Z in our organization, but it is going to be centered around the employee experience, employee engagement. It’s going to be bottom up.” And yes, bottom up is important to complete the DEI ecosystem. However, changing culture and behaviors, and integrating ideas and conversations into every business decision is a top-down priority.

Additionally, organizations want to implement race equity,  disparity, and race history conversations in environments where people may not be ready to receive it properly. It’s like if somebody says, “Hey, let’s go skiing,” and you’ve never been before. So you go up to Vail and you’re dressed in your regular clothing, and you’re on the mountain and then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m freezing, I’m uncomfortable, I’m hungry, I don’t know how to ski. Now I’m going to start lashing out because I’m hangry and cold.” That’s how our bodies naturally respond to things that are unfamiliar or clash with our values.

So individuals need to be prepared to have those conversations to avoid race conversation shock. They may end up having the conversation, but now they don’t know how to compartmentalize it. They don’t know how to apply it to their current state because they haven’t done anything introspective to deal with some of the things that may be triggering them, like certain terms that are used, like White supremacy, racism, and bigotry, for example. So we have to be cautious about how we’re introducing conversations without preparing employees first for what they’re going to experience as a human in those conversations. It’s important to consider how they’ll receive that information. 

Michael: Nothing matters if the CEO isn’t on board. I’ve grown up in the tech industry over the past 40 years, and I’ve seen the same things over and over again. If the CEO says “The customer is king,” then the customer is king. If the CEO says, “Cash is king,” cash is king. 

Creating an inclusive workforce and a leadership system that centers around diversity is not a “nice to have.” It is essential. Equity and inclusion must be integrated into your business just like cash or treating your customers well. If you don’t have a diverse workforce and an inclusive leadership style and culture, your company isn’t going to succeed. If the CEO doesn’t believe that, then they’re going to say, “Cash is king,” and worry about diversity tomorrow. Then it doesn’t matter whether or not you have the best leaders on the planet. They’re not going to focus on DEI unless the CEO pushes it. 

The most important element in DEI is not the HR department. They’re a critical partner to execute on DEI. But at the end of the day, they’re not going to get permission from the organization to focus on the hard work necessary to create an inclusive workforce and work environment unless the CEO says it must be so. DEI integration starts from the top down, and CEOs must not only embrace it but evangelize it for the organization to cultivate meaningful and lasting change.

WTIA continues to innovate when it comes to partnering with business leaders to help them weave DEI into the fabric of their organization. Talk to us about how we can help you master DEI competencies and transform your organization’s recruiting and retention efforts by cultivating a more inclusive and equitable culture for all. Visit https://www.washingtontechnology.org/dei/solutions/ or contact the WTIA DEI Center of Excellence directly at dei@washingtontechnology.org.