USA 
United KingdomIda Byrd-Hill
Co-Founder, Automation Workz
Companies should embrace DEI not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is smart business strategy, argues Automation Workz boss Ida Byrd-Hill...
Ida Byrd-Hill
Co-Founder, Automation Workz
Companies should embrace DEI not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is smart business strategy, argues Automation Workz boss Ida Byrd-Hill...
Why is DEI the right thing to do?
Everybody wants to say it's the right thing to do, and I'm going to just challenge people, it's not the right thing to do. It's a profitable thing to do. America is becoming more and more diverse. I’ll tell you what I mean by that. In 2014 American public schools had 51% of its students were diverse students. So usually you'll see that 20 years later, as they become adults, that the society is becoming the same way.
And that's because you have a lot of interracial marriages and things of that sort, which means that white people, Caucasians, by 2040, will be the minority, and so they are kicking and screaming going out the door under the guise that you want us to not look at the data, but we look at data because, as I said, many of us are highly educated, educated at the finest universities, and we all want to have a level playing field. The problem is, because America has had a four hundred year history of slavery, you will never have a level playing field. It is very stressful to go into settings and you're judged negatively by the color of your skin and not the content of your character.
What is behind the pushback on DEI programs?
The only reason why DEI even took off after George Floyd's murder is because it that signalled that African Americans and Asian Americans are being harassed by public servants, who they pay. We pay taxes in America, but people want to act like diverse populations are poor and we're not poor. We make up half of the GDP for America, and that number is growing even faster
And so the white population, who has been pretty dominant and has kind of super imposed their culture on everyone else. Is continually trying to superimpose their culture when we're saying we're just not going to tolerate it any longer. But rather than be obnoxious, what we've been doing is we just spend our money in places that are welcoming to us.
The only reason why DEI came out as a department was because George Floyd highlighted the inequities that still happen in America. They tell African Americans, forget slavery. I can't forget 400 years of slavery when I'm still dealing with the attitudes and bias that created it
So, when a company says that I don't want to do DEI, what you're basically saying is that you're going to be obnoxious, and you want us to spend our money, to be obnoxious, because let's face it, we want a level playing field. We've always wanted a level playing field as diverse populations, but it's just not possible in America when you have the mainstream infrastructure which is totally biased in the decisions that they make, and the proof of it is you've seen lots of brands make commercial decisions that are totally highly offensive.
Can you give me an example of that?
Gucci. Gucci came out one point and had a turtleneck that looked like a Ku Klux Klan hood. Well, then you had Adidas that came out with a shoe, a tennis shoe, that looked like a slave shackle. So, you've had those happen with corporations over the years, and part of why that happened is because you didn't have ambassadors to markets that would educate you that that's highly offensive. You just went on and just did it without checking with anybody, because you just think, you know your opinion matters so much that you don't think that other people's opinions matters. And that's a problem.
The only reason why DEI came out as a department was really because with the George Floyd, it highlighted the inequities that still happen in America, because the way that America has run, they tell particularly African Americans, oh, forget slavery. I can't forget 400 years of slavery when I'm still dealing with the attitudes and bias that created slavery. It didn't change. It passed from one generation to the next, and now I have modern people who are in corporations, who are in charge of other people who've been ingrained by their parents, their grandparents, their great grandparents.
They have the same attitudes and biases that those people had that created slavery. So, that has not changed, and so DEI came about to hopefully rectify that. Now, did DEI come out, and what was it effective? I'm gonna be honest, it was not because we're not going to change people's unconscious biases by having unconscious bias in ours.
Do you think a lot of it wasn't sincere enough or wasn't done for the right reasons?
Done for the right reasons, but it should have been done differently to me at the end of the day, and this is just my personal opinion, because I'm a business person. Businesses are here to make money. That should really be their only goal is to make money.
But in making that money, you have to look at strategy, and you have to look at culture. Your internal culture defines what your strategy is going to be. You can't divorce the two.
I’ll give you a good example. If I want to go after the Hispanic market, I'm not Hispanic. So I hired a Hispanic ambassador to teach me about the Hispanic population, because it's not one population, it is multiple populations.
And what they do for one may be offensive for the other. You need to know that, and the only way you learn that is through ambassadors. If you don't have employees who are your ambassadors, you hire consultants of that market who will educate you about that market, and we do it all the time when we go international, just like when a company goes to China.
They're not going to go to China without a Chinese ambassador, a Chinese translator, you need somebody who knows the Chinese culture.
So why would it be any different when you're going into a market? Corporate America thinks it knows and it makes mistakes. They apologise and think is just business as usual, and it's not business as usual right now, because diverse markets make up 50% of the American GDP.
How do you counter that push back on DEI?
We have been given pushback over the years so you don't want to treat us fairly, then we won't spend our money. I give you a good example. I would never buy anything from Gucci ever. Because if you had the utter audacity to come out with a turtleneck that looked like a Ku Klux Klan hood, it says three things to me. First of all, you don't have any black employees that would have told you that's inappropriate behavior.
Number two, that also says to me, you don't have suppliers that hire consultants that would have caught your behavior and then you didn't even run a focus group to make sure it was okay before you roll it out to the general market.
Yeah, I'm not going to do business with you, because your strategy was not smart, and I don't deal with non-smart people. And your culture is not good, so I don't want to reinforce your culture with my money. I look at diversity in a bigger way, I look at diversity of thought, because there are 34 different cognitive thoughts that are diverse, and oftentimes we also offend people with that.
What DEI really should be about is being in the middle and understanding both sides and being able to build a message that resonates with both liberals and conservative, both ethnic and non ethnic, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic at the same time. That's called strategy
I’ll give you a good example, if you're running a corporation that's very liberal, and you have people who are conservative, you offend them every day with your liberalism. You don't think about it because you say you're liberal. But my thing is, you should listen to your employees no matter what the thought process is because you need to learn from them, because there is always a happy medium. The problem is, people go to the extremes. And you can't. You really shouldn't be doing business at the extremes. You should be doing business in the middle, understanding both sides of every lane.
What are they getting wrong with DEI programs?
What DEI really should be about is being in the middle and understanding both sides and being able to build a message that resonates with both liberals and conservative, both ethnic and non ethnic, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic at the same time. That's called strategy. But businesses don't do that.
At the end of the day, DEI should not have been about social justice. It shouldn't have been about ‘the right thing to do’. It should have been about, how do I make my company profitable?
They have gotten way into extremes and think that it's okay, and it's not okay, and I don't care who the president is, because it ain't okay for him either. Because at the end of the day, if he's extreme, I pay taxes to the government, and I need you to do things that represent me. And if not, you go through pushback, because that's my money at the end of the day. You're going to use my money to be obnoxious and offensive to me? You’re not going to use my money to exclude me.
What should DEI be about then?
At the end of the day, DEI should not have been about social justice. It shouldn't have been about ‘the right thing to do’. It should have been about, how do I make my company profitable?
Because I see that this actually bothers a lot of people, because you had so many protests that I need to be able to do something that makes my company profitable, but to resonate with the people that are fighting this problem because it wasn't just black people that were fighting. It wasn't just Asian people. That was the first protest in this country where white people outnumbered the people of color.
You had protests in affluent communities where the median income was $150,000 or more, and a lot of them had no black people that lived in their community. But whenever they portray it, they want to portray it as black people want preferential treatment, and groups want preferential treatment. That's not what that is. This is a issue that came to being that people now understand that it's an issue that is happening all across America, across multiple incomes.
Tell us how you audit HR departments?
We look at all of their branding, we look at their talent management system, we look at their handbooks, we look at all of the policies. We look at a whole host of things that they do and produce an audit report.
Now, one of our customers, which is Dr Bronner’s, we did an entire audit of their whole company. We produced a 225 page report. It was very insightful for them, some recommendations they use, and some they did not.
But one of the things that we did mention is that if you really are serious about culture, your HR department must grow because they're constrained. They can't do what they need to do. So you want them to do it but you haven't given them the resources to do it so that particular human resource department grew four times. They are humming. They're growing like a weed financially, and they learn some things about how they deal with their customers and their internal people, because it's not always about ethnic group, because you can have ethnic populations, but if they don't have any power to make any decisions, it's still offensive.
Or if you're not empowering them to move up the career chain and get promotions, it's still offensive. And so to me, every company needs a culture audit. And so once we produce the report with lots of data, their data looking at a lot of things that HR normally doesn't look at.
One of the matrixes that we always look at is revenue to employee. How productive are you on your own and in your industry?
Because that tells me what goes on in your company and so we educate HR on looking at themselves as a revenue generator and not just a clearer of paperwork, because you are responsible for the culture of a company. So, technically, since labor is the biggest expense, you're technically responsible for strategy, even if you don't do it, you're technically responsible for culture, even if you do not have a healthy culture.
So, it now becomes an education and coaching of the HR and executives on, how do you become more profitable, using your employees as ambassadors to markets where you want to expand. And that's really what DEI should have been about. But it kind of got sidetracked.
On one hand, businesses don't want to be bothered with the social justice, and I've seen their point. But just because you don't want to be bothered with the social justice doesn't mean you scrap it. It means you retool it.
