The attempted coup at the Capitol needs to be brands’ wake-up call about funding...

I’ve worked in DE&I for nearly a decade, but I know I still have a lot to learn. So to prepare for 2021 I wanted to hear directly from my colleagues on the ground. I wanted to know what their pain points were and how they were innovating anyway.

I made a list of over 150 DE&I experts. The list spanned industry, company size, and tenure to ensure a broad perspective. I specifically targeted folks who are the owner (for better or worse) of their companies’ approach to DE&I. I facilitated the conversations like a researcher—attempting to stay unbiased, asking open-ended questions, and focused on listening. I started with broad questions such as “What’s your biggest pain point?” or “What keeps you up at night?”, then eagerly went down any interesting rabbit hole that came up. By the end of the month I’d ended up having 27 conversations with 20 leaders. I noticed some common themes and emerging trends. Here’s a little bit of what I learned:

Diversity Equity and Inclusion is outgrowing Human Resources

DE&I leaders are eager to increase their scope and impact on the business. This shift requires bigger teams, stronger relationships with non-HR and recruiting functions, and a new vision for where the function sits within an organization.

Our teams will expand
Team size came up in 15 of 20 of my conversations. A majority of leaders at midsized (companies with less than 1,000) organizations are growing their teams next year. Those who aren’t growing their teams referenced the need for more resources. One leader, at a company with around 800 employees, plans to end 2021 with 5 direct reports. As our function matures, it’s safe to say that the days of DE&I leaders working alone are long gone.

We will broaden our scope and impact
The scope of responsibility for leaders is broadening to include product, strategy, and sales. A quarter of the leaders I spoke with are setting goals around product accessibility and customer development. One leader is intent on leveraging their company’s lending platform to both educate and equip Black and brown folks with financing tools. In the long run, increasing diversity and inclusion within the customer base is a win-win for both underserved populations and the company.

The compliance (and frankly, risk-averse) nature of human resources, legal, and finance [groups] can be counter to the needs of diversity leaders. Collecting data, adjusting recruiting processes, and the like can be slowed down without partners that are open to taking risks. For example, one leader is in an ongoing battle with Legal to report promotion rates, broken down by gender and ethnicity. Without this vital information, she wouldn’t be able to measure the results of her career development initiatives.

Second, about a quarter of the folks I spoke with don’t report to human resources, opting instead to report directly to the CEO or sit on their strategy and operations teams. I believe we’re about 5 years away from DE&I emerging as its own function that sits in between HR and Operations.

Metrics that matter

My colleagues noted that they’re having fewer conversations with executives about the business case for diversity and inclusion. Instead, they are defining success metrics. Out with the why metrics, and in with the how metrics.

The majority of leaders are focused on metrics that quantify the health of the organization, and the strength of their initiatives. Common metrics include:

Frequency, and specificity: Leaders are comparing shifts in representation of women and underrepresented people of color quarter over quarter. There’s also a special interest in breaking down representation by department and paying attention to intersectional demographic data.

Leadership demographics: Diversity in leadership is a leading indicator of a more diverse company in the future. DE&I departments will be looking at the demographics of directors and above to the rest of the employee population.

Engagement survey data: The majority of leaders use insights from engagement surveys to measure how inclusive their companies are. More than half have added specific diversity-related questions to their annual engagement surveys and report on trends every six months. Questions such as, “Does your manager value diversity on your team?”

Unique metrics that matter

Referral pipeline diversity: Referrals generally have the highest rate of hire at a company. Diversifying that pipeline might increase diversity faster than other channels.

Total available market of talent: This metric came up in tandem with setting diversity recruiting goals. Leaders are eager to understand the breakdown of the talent market based on factors such as role, level, location, in order to make sure goals are realistic. LinkedIn Insights & the US Census was cited as a way to get that data.

Employee Resource Group engagement: Some leaders are quantifying the impact of their ERGs by comparing engagement survey scores from the entire employee population to scores from ERG members.

Continuous demographic data collection

About half of the leaders I talked to are collecting demographic data from employees and candidates as early as they can. This is a far better strategy from the usual once-a-year employee diversity survey I’ve experienced in the past. There is an eagerness to collect, analyze, and report on progress consistently (my gut says reporting once a month is average). To that end, some leaders ask employees to fill out demographic surveys within their first 2 weeks with the company. Others are asking candidates to self-identify multiple times throughout their interview process.

Meeting at the intersections

While gender and ethnicity are important, about half of leaders are expanding their focus to the intersections of identity and tracking quantifiable goals and metrics that cover said intersections—for example, one leader was interested in increasing the number of queer women of color at her organization. To track this expanded data set, they are asking employees to self-identify their education level, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, caregiving, and disability status. This is a ton more information than is usually (and legally) necessary, but employees seem keen to express their identity outside of race and gender.

Employee Resource Groups are evolving
Employee Resource Groups are the backbone of a great DE&I strategy. Leaders are leveraging ERGs to rapidly scale diversity and inclusion initiatives. ERG work is being seen for what it is—work. And the scope of responsibilities for ERG leaders is expanding to collaborating with the business, and career development for members.

Abolishing free labor
More employee resource group leads will be getting paid. Justworks was the first company to publicly pilot this practice, and Twitter was quick to follow. A quarter of the leaders I spoke with are paying their ERG leads with either cash, equity, or non-monetary 1-on-1 perks such as career coaching. The vast majority of folks not paying their leaders acknowledged that they are actively exploring how to compensate employee resource group leaders in a fair and equitable way. Whether through intentional recognition, perks, or cold hard cash, ERGs provide a framework for compensating work that positively impacts the company and is typically outside of an employee’s immediate responsibilities.

Focusing on business impact
In the past ERG initiatives have been heavily focused on members, but DE&I leaders are eager to influence and collaborate with HR, recruiting, and marketing teams. One DE&I leader walked me through the tactics he used to transition his ERGs from expanding their scope. He invited ERG leaders  to strategic meetings and connected them with upper leadership. Only after his leads had a deep understanding of the business did they build their yearly charter. Although this was only one conversation of many, his tactics stood out as an emerging practice that we might all benefit from.

Career growth and development
Employee Resource Groups have traditionally been built around networking. Providing a safe space for members is still the top goal for several ERGs across the industry. But leaders I spoke with envisioned their ERGs as career development hubs. A handful track the success of their program by the number of members that get promotions and raises. ERG leaders are positioned as high potential employees. They are given job descriptions for accountability and are first in line for mentorship opportunities. Instead of scheduling happy hours, DE&I leaders are challenging ERG members to use their budget on workshops and resources that will help them develop their skills.

A new way to think about goals

DE&I goals have always been difficult to set and benchmark against. Leaders have learned that progress takes time and are cautious about setting unrealistic, narrowly focused, goals. Instead they’re breaking down goals by department and focusing on frequent, incremental, progress.

Progress over perfection
The days of announcing audacious goals (see my own past mistakes here) are long gone. When asked about goals the vast majority of leaders talked about progress being the only goal worth benchmarking. This sentiment makes a ton of sense given the slow progress that’s been made. Leaders are focused on measuring quarter-over-quarter progress in several areas rather than fixating on a magic diversity number. Leaders I spoke to who were newer to their company explicitly avoided setting benchmarks. Instead, they focused on setting up the infrastructure to measure diversity over multiple cycles. Their plan, they said, was to use the historical data to set up reasonable goals for 2021.

Goals are no longer one-size-fits-all. Most of the leaders I spoke with are eschewing company-wide diversity goals and focusing on department and team-level initiatives. One leader described their approach as putting the onus on functional leaders, and their subsequent hiring managers, to integrate diversity and inclusion within their span of control.

To be clear, DE&I is still a top-down effort, but the system is becoming more complex. For example, at one company a VP of sales is expected to set diversity and belonging goals specific to her department. She then works with her DE&I leader, recruiting, and HR, to hold her frontline managers accountable to building progressively more diverse teams. A similar approach is applied to create tailored goals for engineering, product, marketing, and other departments that have unique available markets of talent and challenges.

Praise for the Rooney Rule
The industry has mixed feelings about the Rooney Rule. That said, every single DE&I leader I spoke with is using some variation of it. They recognize it as an incomplete strategy for recruiting underrepresented talent—but everyone cited it as a useful starting point.

What’s the magic of the Rooney Rule? It’s a measurable and reasonable starting point. It’s built on the core principle that any hiring team that’s serious about diversity should be able to interview at least one underrepresented person before extending an offer to a candidate. Based on my conversations, the rule should be used as an entry point to more sophisticated approaches to building a diverse slate. Once you get hiring managers to commit to it, measure it obsessively, and suggest adjustments to those who don’t hit the goal—agreeing to more innovative recruiting initiatives becomes natural.

As I hope you can tell, I learned an incredible amount from the perspectives of the leaders I spoke to.
I’d like to stress that none of the above should be considered universal best practices. Each has costs, and benefits, and might work better for some companies than others. That said, they are an amalgam of approaches to tough problems from some of the smartest people I know.

Albrey Brown is the head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Airtable. You can follow and reach out to him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Donald Trump’s presidency is in its last gasps, but photographs taken during Wednesday’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol will remain a visceral reminder of how hard he tried to fight reality.

Leah Millis, a senior photographer for Reuters, was one of the journalists capturing events on the ground. She took over 1,000 photos that day, including a striking shot of the Capitol’s exterior. At dusk, a police flash-bang munition went off, casting a warm orange glow on the facade and silhouetting rioters with unfurled Trump flags on the platform below—the same platform used for inaugurations. At that moment, Millis clicked her shutter. How she got the shot was no easy feat.

Millis started her day at around 11 a.m. ET on the east side of the Capitol, where protesters gathered in the morning. But after receiving a message that rioters were attempting to breach the west side a few hours later, she ran to document the scene, afraid that police would block it off and she wouldn’t get access. “I saw immediately that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people streaming up from the Mall and they were forcing their way, like they were pushing against the police,” she says.

A thin line of police was trying to hold the massive crowd. “The first thing I did was put down my bag and I took out my helmet and my gas mask and put it on,” she says. “I’ve been covering protests for a while and I knew what was going on at that point.” She spent the remainder of the day on that side of the building; had rioters breached the west side, she says she would have gone in with them.

Millis recalls hearing the crowd “chanting some kind of encouragement and realized they were probably breaking into the doors.” She climbed onto some of the scaffolding that’s set up for Inauguration Day to see what was going on. “That’s when I saw them battling with the police for an extended period of time,” she says. “It wasn’t until a different force showed up that they started firing flash-bangs and tear gas to actually disperse the crowd. And that’s what that photo is. The flash-bang going off.”

Millis and her team at Reuters do a lot of preplanning so they can be as safe as possible at rallies and protests. They all have bulletproof vests. She also has a ballistic helmet and gas mask that Millis says she’s “gotten really good at putting on and taking off really quickly.” On Wednesday, she carried two tourniquets instead of one as well as a trauma kit that’s typically used in combat zones. She says she’s also careful about what she wears—making sure to wear colorful long-sleeve shirts and avoid black so as not to be inaccurately associated with other groups. “You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself,” she says, noting that wearing two cameras is attention enough, especially with so much anti-media sentiment out there.

The level of safety precaution has increased over a tumultuous year, but Wednesday’s events were unlike any Millis has covered before. Police didn’t make a show of force like they did at racial justice protests over the summer. (Millis covered those protests, as well as past Trump rallies.) “I’ve seen clashes with U.S. police before [but] something that struck me was these clashes were continuous and sustained,” she says. It was “full-on fighting. . . . I’ve never seen that [be] allowed to happen for as long as it did.”

As for getting the shot? “In the moment, it’s instincts,” she says. “You have experience and you try to not get hurt.” Rioters were so furiously intent on getting inside the building, Millis says they paid her little attention. No one posed. “I was kind of lucky to go under the radar.”

About the author

Lilly Smith is an associate editor of Co.Design. She was previously the editor of Design Observer, and a contributing writer to AIGA Eye on Design.

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Each year, we gather predictions on the coming year in purpose from the Purpose Collaborative, our collective of purpose-driven firms advancing business and societal impacts for organizations around the world.

The world we’re entering in 2021 will be far different than we imagined a year ago. Yet we begin the year armed with lessons from 2020, as well as new challenges, new opportunities, new beginnings, and renewed hope.

For businesses, this has meant a growing movement to embrace purpose—a reason for being beyond profits, grounded in humanity—to do well and do good by solving some of the world’s biggest societal challenges. 2020 accelerated this movement by forcing companies to reprioritize; put their employees, customers, and communities above shareholders; and use their capabilities to respond to the pandemic with agility and empathy.

This year, their insights take on new meaning.

Where We’ve Been: Purpose and the Pandemic

Pre-pandemic, society grappled with an impending climate crisis, along with all the other pressing global-social challenges of today—from hunger and homelessness to healthcare and education.

While COVID-19 became the issue of 2020, it also highlighted and exacerbated underlying issues like inequality, the state of our prison systems, access to education and technology, and so much more. In the U.S., the killing of George Floyd—and too many others before and after him—reignited the ongoing movement for racial justice and equality.

This convergence of issues challenged companies to step up in unprecedented ways, as more citizens looked to the private sector to take action that stretched nongovernmental organizations and gridlocked governments couldn’t. “Over two-thirds of all philanthropic dollars donated to the pandemic came from the corporate sector,” says Brittany Hill, founder and CEO of Accelerist. “Purposeful companies realized, yet again, they can fill societal, governmental, and economic gaps in times of crisis.”

The organizations with an established purpose pre-pandemic responded swiftly to the events of 2020 and—most important—with empathy and humanity. “Purpose has served as an antidote to paralysis, helping companies stay focused and motivated in extremely adverse conditions,” says Fábio Milnitzky, CEO of iN. “When all else is uncertain . . . people turn to what they know is true and unchanging—purpose—as inspiration and direction for decision-making.”

Though awareness of the role of purpose in business has grown in recent years, purpose as a core business strategy had never been put to the test as it was at the height of the pandemic.

Where We’re Going: Purpose in 2021

The silver lining of 2020 is that the world is now entering an era of “shifting paradigms,” says Raphael Bemporad, founding partner of BBMG. “Brands are becoming increasingly ‘regenerative,’ evolving from ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient,’ with higher aspirations and a determination to challenge the status quo to improve the system for all.”

Harold Hamana, managing partner of Knight & Pawn, says, “Purpose will be at the core of every sensible organization adapting to a post-COVID world, taking into account the new reality of employees, their goals, and their redefined relationship with their communities.”

With this new paradigm, Purpose Collaborative members say the following trends will define purpose in 2021.

1: Authentic purpose measured in action, transparency, and accountability

To achieve its full potential—that is, driving both positive business and societal impacts—purpose must be authentic, “genuinely prioritizing what is right for the world over what is most profitable,” says Danielle Finck, founder and CEO of Elle Communications.

Companies today “have a responsibility to be more authentic. People are more in awe of what they can be instead of what they should be,” says Cory Grabow, partner and CEO at the Bruxton Group.

Post-pandemic, “‘authentic’ will tenaciously attach itself to corporate actions rather than corporate intentions,” says filmmaker Elliot Kotek, founder and CEO of the Nation of Artists. “Purpose will be measured by the trio of action, transparency, and accountability.”

Annie Longsworth, executive managing director at RF|Binder, notes, “Being authentic in purpose will mean companies leaning into this to guide decisions, allowing their purpose to be tested and challenged. Purpose must be used as a brand’s lens for decision-making, innovation, crisis response, engagement, growth plans, and opportunities.”

2: “Story-doing” becomes critical

With this increased focus on authenticity, storytelling will evolve into “story-doing,” as companies increasingly take action before they communicate about it. “We’ll hear stories about real risk-taking, about rolling up sleeves and jumping in to help,” says Laura Ferry, president of Good Company. “We will learn about the people who bravely stood up, helped others, or marched for a cause.”

Andy Schmidt, managing director of Pearl Consulting Europe, adds, “We are seeing a large increase of bold, long-term company commitments around transforming their organizations, value chains, even industries. While those long-term commitments are needed, consumers, employees, and investors expect for them to be backed up by short-term action. 2021 and the years ahead will belong to the businesses demonstrating short-term actions that bring their purpose and long-term commitments to life.”

3: Stakeholder capitalism demands a reset

The purpose of a corporation is no longer just to maximize profits for shareholders, but to serve and create value for all stakeholders. This movement, called “stakeholder capitalism” by global leaders including the World Economic Forum and Business Roundtable, refocuses short-term action and long-term vision to impact customers, employees, suppliers and partners, local communities, and the environment. Done smartly and authentically, this approach supports bottom-line growth.

“Six in ten people under age 30 want the post-pandemic recovery to prioritize ‘restructuring our economy so it deals better with challenges like inequality and climate change,'” according to a global study from BBMG. “Young people are looking for a reset rather than a return to the status quo,” Bemporad says.

The pandemic served as a pressure test for stakeholder capitalism, forcing companies to put human needs—from worker safety to customer support—before short-term profits. It has brought the importance of employees, customers, and communities into sharper focus, while inspiring new ways to address societal needs through business capabilities.

4: Corporate boards drawn into purpose strategy

The C-suite has been tasked with a new role as beacons of direction and hope amid turmoil. “The long-term impact of COVID-19 will present major challenges for CEOs, and they will need to rely heavily on core purpose to navigate what could be rough seas ahead,” Ferry says.

Governing boards will also play an increasingly important role in advocating for and advancing purpose within their organizations. “The acceleration needed for stakeholder capitalism requires more boards demanding social and environmental impact as a key business strategy for short- and long-term growth,” says Phillip Haid, founder and CEO of Public Inc.

“There is so much work to be done by governing boards to develop and foster an approach to business that works for all people, and not just for a select few,” says Carrie Fox, CEO of Mission Partners.

5: Employees as engines for change

With this, “purpose will be a larger part of the conversation about the new world of working virtually,” says Aaron Hurst, cofounder and CEO of Imperative. The rapid pace of business adaptation in 2020 has been remarkable, presenting new requirements and opportunities with more focus on employee welfare and culture.

While the C-suite must carry the mantle of purpose, it will not drive business and societal impacts if not developed, embedded, and activated by employees. “When the public sees a seven- or eight-figure-a-year CEO championing a cause or purposeful mission, it rings hollow and inauthentic with the public,” says Alan Chebot, owner of Parallax Productions.

Adds Jeff Blaylock, vice president of Kith, “A leader committing to purpose is a promise for change. Employees committed to purpose is an engine for change.”

6: Companies will collaborate at scale

The scale of the pandemic forced companies to work together to develop solutions and address critical needs. Organizations not only applied their own time, talents, innovations, and capabilities to respond to COVID-19 and the racial justice movement, but also worked alongside others to accelerate progress and supplement their own efforts. “2021 will be the year that industry competitors become industry allies,” says Melissa Orozco, founder and chief impact officer of Yulu PR.

While the most notable collaborations happened on the national or global level, “it was individual communities and small businesses banding together to help those who were less fortunate that made some of the biggest impacts,” Blaylock says.

Looking Ahead

We must never forget the events that defined 2020, or the lessons they taught us as business leaders, individuals, or as a society. We must continue lifting up the heroes—from the truck drivers delivering food at the height of the pandemic and our healthcare heroes to the millions of people of color and their allies who bravely marched for equality.”

2021 will be an even larger test for businesses around the world. Those that continue to embrace and embed purpose—or take the wise step to define and integrate a purpose—will define the next 12 months, and our collective future as a society.

The Purpose Collaborative is a global group of 40-plus firms and subject matter experts, represented by 400-plus professionals in 20-plus countries, all developing breakthrough work to help organizations accelerate their social purpose. Founded by Carol Cone, Purpose Collaborative members are hand-selected based on their unique capabilities and prominence in the field.