Why DEI belongs outside HR, despite being critical to HR (part 3 of 4)

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about when it might be time for an organization to hire an internal DEI leader. We discussed how we believe that when an organization is starting out with DEI or looking to go beyond its own internal grassroots efforts, it is often advantageous to hire a DEI consultant first or as well as an internal leader.

Last week we talked about how the process of hiring a DEI consultant can itself be co-creative.

Now it’s time to start talking about some things that companies and organizations might want to consider when creating and hiring for that internal DEI role for the first time.

The first consideration to start with is:

Will DEI be considered a standalone function separate from HR or will it be integrated into the HR function?

More often than not, especially for small to mid-sized organizations, DEI is considered to be part of the HR function and initial DEI efforts are lead by HR.

In fact, it is often, although not always, HR that reach out to us about hiring us as DEI consultants, and we have worked successfully with many of our clients this way.

However, we are increasingly of the belief that DEI should not be conflated with HR and that it is beneficial to have DEI as a separate function from HR.

Here are some of the reasons why.

1) DEI and HR have different goals and responsibilities

Let’s start with considering that HR is designed as a function whose main purpose is to “manage the human capital of an organization.” This includes designing and supporting all stages of the employee life cycle, from recruiting, hiring, and onboarding, to mentoring, learning, professional development, performance evaluations, supervision, compensation, benefits, recognition, advancements, promotions and succession planning through to employees exiting the organization. HR has to ensure compliance with labor laws and regulations, as well as adherence to company policies.

We believe that DEI, on the other hand, is a much broader concept that should be integrated and operationalized into every aspect of an organization. At Co-Creating Inclusion, our DEI organizational assessment framework includes the employee life cycle and HR policies and practices, but also includes workplace culture (things like levels of psychological safety, openness to collaboration, how decisions get made and communicated, how input and feedback is gathered, appetite and aptitude for change, inclusive leadership skills etc). We also look at what we call “the work itself” ie the mission, vision and values of the organization, the products and/or services it delivers, how it interfaces with clients, customers, vendors and communities, as well as other stakeholders and partners. In addition, we usually find many opportunities for growth in the project life cycle ie operations - how work gets assigned, managed and delivered.

While there is overlap, the goals and responsibilities are different enough that it makes sense for DEI and HR to be two separate functions.

2) DEI and HR require different skillsets and experience

Because of the different goals and responsibilities, DEI and HR have some overlap but mostly require vastly different knowledge and experience. They are literally completely different fields!

As DEI consultants we are very clear that we are not HR experts or professionals, just as we are not legal experts or mental health experts, or experts in our clients’ industries (with some exceptions based on our team’s past experience!) Instead, we work closely and consult with experts from these areas, and believe DEI should also be seen as a separate profession. While HR professionals may be able to successfully transition into DEI, why should HR professionals be expected to take on a whole new profession at the same time as their current one?!

In addition, those with HR roles within an organization usually already have full time responsibilities and even if you create two separate teams that report up to the CHRO or most senior HR lead, or if you are a small organization and have someone handling HR as only part of their role, it can confuse and detract from the focus on DEI which, after all, is easier to put aside as a “nice to have” rather than the required function of HR.

3) DEI can actually be a conflict of interest for HR

This is always a painful topic of conversation with HR professionals, but the truth is that, regardless of the best of intentions, and no matter how much folks going into HR as a profession do so because they genuinely want to help people, HR is often seen as the “police” within organizations.

After all, HR is tasked with ensuring compliance with labor laws and regulations as well as company policies, which includes handling disciplinary action and mediating conflicts. This is often done by perpetuating a culture and system of surveillance and punishment that comes from our wider culture of oppression that, in this country, came directly out of attempted genocide, slavery and colonization.

In other words, HR didn’t invent this system, but, to varying degrees depending on the organization, they are often upholding it by default.

And not only are they upholding it, but unfortunately, what we quite often find, more than you would like to think, is that, without having done DEI work, HR can be the location of a significant amount of harm related to bias, discrimination, and microaggressions based on race and other dimensions of identity.

For example, some things we see include:

HR centering on the needs and protecting the feelings of mostly white leadership and middle managers while doubling down on harm to BIPOC and other staff who are already more deeply impacted by systems of oppression
BIPOC and other staff are often not taken seriously or believed when they raise concerns to HR - perhaps an HR manager will listen sympathetically and say how sorry they are, but they don’t have the understanding or ability to address the situation appropriately
HR becomes the face of an institutional response that is wholly inadequate, often resulting in further traumatization of the BIPOC employee who ends up feeling blamed or are gaslit into blaming themselves for their experiences and the lack of responsiveness
Band-aid solutions often focus on removing the harmed employee from the situation (harmful colleague, vendor, client or customer) without actually holding the perpetrator of the harm accountable or even telling them how they caused harm
Staff lower in the organizational hierarchy, especially frontline staff, and especially BIPOC staff, are often treated as “the help” and disciplined or experience repercussions or retaliation for any response they have to any harm they are experiencing - basically they are expected to not just take it, but to take it with a smile (actually, this happens at every level of organizations)
We have seen even the “nicest” of HR folks subject BIPOC and other systemically marginalized staff to over-surveillance and over-enforcement of company policies, performance standards, accountability and workloads while mostly white but also other non-Black managers and leaders literally don’t just get away with but are promoted and enabled into sometimes egregious levels of incompetence that would never fly for anyone else (see also The Anti-Blackness of Showing Up Unprepared)
Sometimes HR folks are themselves so afraid of retaliation that they are completely non-functional when it comes to employee complaints, or there is a misguided (ie completely wrong) view that “if we don’t believe it happened, we don’t have to investigate it”
We also know it’s a common practice for employees who file complaints to get paid off to sign an NDA and leave the organization

Need I go on?

This is not necessarily an indictment on individuals within HR, as Sacha Thompson says in “If Your DEI Efforts to Report to HR, That’s Why They are Failing”:

“There may be individuals with empathy, but typically they have no power to drive systemic change and/or are helplessly undergoing the same foolishness you are.”

Now let me be clear, HR is not necessarily worse than any other department, but because HR touches all parts of the organization and is meant to be there to help employees resolve issues, their impact of harm and the ways they are detrimental to psychological safety and a culture of equity and inclusion is often greater.

Why would this be the group to lead DEI?

Don’t get me wrong, not all HR departments we come across are like this.

HR can be the biggest advocates for DEI because they understand how important DEI is to them being able to fulfill their function in alignment with their values and intentions.

As I said, we are often brought into organizations by HR who desperately want our help in getting leadership buy-in for DEI because they see the harm not just for employee well-being and culture but to the effectiveness of the organization as a whole.

We have in fact seen HR advocate for those who most need advocating for and make significant strides towards creating a culture of trust and repair.

But even in the absolute best case scenario where HR successfully integrates DEI into all their policies and practices and is not the cause of or complicit with harm, it’s still a conflict of interest when HR’s role is to uphold policy and DEI’s role is to challenge it.

Yes DEI is critical for HR, and there needs to be a strong partnership between DEI and HR, which is why DEI is often part of HR, but to us, it is actually an argument for the opposite. For there to be a strong partnership, DEI needs to be a separate entity.

4) DEI should be a shared responsibility across the organization

Another reason why DEI should be a separate entity is that while yes, DEI is indeed critical for HR, it is also critical for every other function in the organization. Having DEI housed with HR sends the message the DEI only relates to HR, and is only of concern to other departments in the way that HR is ie when it comes to employees.

While a lot of DEI work falls under HR, a lot of it doesn’t.

As Toby Egbuna of Chezie says

“For companies to reach their full potential, DEI must be its own business function… when DEI is its own function, it interacts with every other business unit. Marketing is working on inclusive content, engineering is testing with a diverse audience, etc.” (See: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Should Not Be Under HR.)

Further, HR are often seen as the “culture-keepers.” However, we believe this is a mistake too. Culture needs to be driven from across the organization as well as up and down the organizational hierarchy and should not be “owned” by one department, including DEI.

However, having a separate, dedicated DEI department that collaborates closely with but is autonomous from other departments helps to make this a reality, with DEI taking a leadership role in coordinating efforts, including HR efforts, across the organization, without it being their sole responsibility.

5) DEI should be a leadership responsibility

Because DEI should be a shared responsibility across the organization, ultimately it should also be lead by the leader of the organization, which means that DEI, as a separate function from HR, should report directly to the CEO, Executive Director or other organizational leader. In addition, the DEI lead should also sit on the leadership team/senior management team/executive management team and collaborate closely with all department leads. This creates the dedicated, focused and holistic approach that is most likely to lead to success.

Stephanie Barnes says in “DEI Does Not Belong Under HR”,

“DEI is a business strategy, not just an HR strategy. DEI needs a seat at the executive table and it needs to be treated with as much funding, importance and respect as other departments. A successful company is not likely to succeed without their marketing, finance, engineering or human resources departments. The DEI department should be looked at in the same light.”

For us, our most successful DEI work has happened when we too as external DEI consultants report directly to the CEO and not to HR, and where we work directly with the leadership team as well.

Based on our experiences working with a variety of organizations and stakeholders, this is the only way we work now going forward.

In conclusion…

Of course, there are various opinions on whether DEI should be considered a standalone function separate from HR or integrated into the HR function. Either way, with this decision in place, an organization can go on to create and hire for its first DEI role within this structure. We’ll be back next week to talk about the other considerations we recommend as you go through this process.