Moving beyond vision statements to address employee experience 

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have been a top priority for many corporate boards and executives this decade. While companies often address representation first, especially in leadership, many are also actively working to create a culture in which all employees feel they belong – and which supports equitable outcomes in health, wealth and career.

If your organization is looking to evolve your DE&I strategy to achieve equitable outcomes, consider an approach that focuses on experience, which differs in important ways from those focused on compliance and design. A compliance approach addresses unfair treatment of broad groups. Goals might include improving the gender ratio in executive roles and equal pay for equal work. This approach furthers diverse representation and nondiscrimination.

A design approach ensures that plan design, coverages, and provider accessibility for specific identity groups reflect the employer’s philosophy toward inclusion. This might result in adding coverage for gender-affirming medical treatments, nontraditional maternity services such as doulas, and access to diverse providers. A design focus furthers inclusion and access.

Both of these approaches start by examining what is offered to employees.

An experience approach, on the other hand, reviews employee experience, patterns, and outcomes within the rewards programs to determine where disparities and inequities may exist. This type of review might uncover different retirement savings levels by gender; disparate medical outcomes by race; or patterns in performance reviews reflecting some type of bias. Approaching your total rewards strategy from an experience perspective furthers equity in outcomes.

How can my organization approach DE&I from an Experience perspective?

Start with data. While most employers have data on race, ethnicity, binary gender, and some disability classifications, there are other data elements that you may want to consider collecting, such as sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). Additional data elements may be retrieved through alignment with existing data, such as geographic and socioeconomic elements of communities through home zip code.

Measure intentionally. In a recent blog on multidimensional analytics, we suggest that data based solely on race or gender may not tell the full story. Rather, considering a multidimensional framework of your workforce – which may include age, income, tenure, zip code, race, gender, enrollment experience and more – provides the opportunity to group population characteristics into distinct “personas” and narrow the drivers responsible for certain outcomes. For example, lower saving levels among employees identifying as Black may actually be a result of another characteristic such as being younger and not yet eligible for savings programs. If Black employees have lower saving rates in most personas (including older personas), then there’s a trend that coincides with racial identification that can be considered within strategy-setting.

Consider the impact. The investment you make in a total rewards program is a significant part of the employer-employee value contract, especially in today’s market. Ensuring plan designs are competitive is a start, but employees are seeking employers who demonstrate caring and commitment to their employees, too.

Understanding inequities and taking action to alleviate them can have a hugely positive impact – not only on current employees and their families, but on future generations. When data analysis finds that career employees with similar pay but in different racial groups have accumulated significantly different retirement savings, the story is bigger than the data – the difference is felt in the lifestyle that is afforded in retirement and the financial support provided to family and community, as well as in the organization’s reputation for how it treats loyal employees. When data analysis shows different wellness visit rates among school-aged plan members in lower-income rural areas compared to affluent suburban areas, the difference is felt in the ability to detect and treat health concerns early and improve future health outcomes, as well as in the productivity of employees who come to work knowing their children are healthy and happy.

Take action. Having data that illuminates actual employee experiences provides direction and the ability to prioritize next steps. It also allows for ongoing measurement to determine if actions were impactful. Some actions that employers have considered or implemented:

• Financial coaching to improve financial security within employees’ individual circumstances, including optimal benefits balance and enrollment
• Reviewing or revising vendor communications for cultural relevance, inclusive messaging, and relevant representation for multiple touchpoints (such as print materials, digital support, service agents) for increased or targeted program engagement
• Adding access to low-cost short-term loans or earned wage access to limit the use of retirement savings loans or alleviate concerns about possible medical expenses
• Engaging with employees through digital focus groups, providing them with a “seat at the table” in creating and implementing meaningful actions

Focusing on experience can help ensure that you set out to solve problems that actually exist, not ones you think might exist.  When you take action that addresses employees’ lived experience, you demonstrate to them that the organization is moving beyond DE&I vision statements to impactful strategies.