How To Ensure Your Company’s Anti-Racism Work Is Effective, Not Performative

Following the 2020 globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement, companies the world over jumped to express their support. This, for some, led to exposure for being institutionally racist—something that wasn’t merely embarrassing but detrimental. Leaders stepped down; jobs were lost, businesses folded—and rightly so. There was—and remains—much work to be done. Those that survived quickly reassessed, drafted anti-racism policies and hired Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) experts to help them become more inclusive. The sincere frankly assessed their own company cultures in order to weed out the racism and oppression. The insufficient just made social media posts. 

But one year on, even some of the most enthusiastic up-takers have lost momentum. “We’re certainly not getting as many training requests as we were last year,” observes DEI expert Dr. Joanna Abeyie, MBE. “There are definitely some leaders who saw anti-racism work as a tick-box exercise—something that, once done, didn’t need to be revisited again.” 

With 57% of Black and ‘ethnic minority’ professionals reporting that company efforts towards DEI had stalled just three months after the movement and an inquiry by the U.K. government finding that institutional racism “no longer exists,” many Black people, says Abeyie, have been left feeling forgotten. It begs the question: did Black lives only matter last summer? And how can you ensure your company’s anti-racism work is not merely performative, but effective?

These are the issues Dr. Abeyie’s diversity and inclusion consultancy practice, Blue Moon, aims to tackle. By assessing companies’ infrastructure and culture, it builds inclusive environments from the ground up by placing diverse talent, putting strategies in place to increase equity for all and analyzing existing pay and diversity. An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, she’s also an expert Advisor to UN Women UK and Co-Secretariat for the Creative Diversity All Party Parliamentary Group. 

For Dr. Abeyie, certain issues have cropped up repeatedly since the 2020 BLM movement. “Over the last year I’ve had discussions with several CEOs who are keen to make positive change but are nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing and causing offence,” she observes. As a result, she says, the onus is often put on staff to either come forward when they’ve experienced racism or act as a spokesperson for their entire race.

“With the explosion of emotion and demand for change around BLM, many people reacted in a knee-jerk way, which is too ephemeral. Leaders might have made a statement to staff, provided some training, created a library of diversity reading and, in some cases, run an ad campaign to reflect the issues. But whilst these are promising, if they were just temporary reactions that’s a problem.”

So what can a company do to ensure they don’t fall into this trap? 

“A longer lasting approach is to look at what you have introduced that challenges every behaviour, process, procedure or microaggression that keeps ‘ethnic minorities’ and your Black staff in a place of inequity.”  

Here are just some of the ways in which Dr. Abeyie believes you can ensure your company’s anti-racism work is actually impactful. 

Ask your staff—but through a mediary 

Seemingly, the quickest and easiest way to work out the impact of your anti-racism efforts is to ask your staff, but you’ll only garner useful feedback if you do so thoughtfully. “Questions such as ‘what is your experience of working here and how can we make it better?’ are a good place to start, but they need to be asked by someone external, objective and impartial,” Dr Abeyie explains. “That way, people can speak freely and without fear of any consequences.” It’s worth employing the same mentality to the questions themselves also, by asking this external mediary what the right ones are. 

Do your own research 

 No company can truly create effective change if its decision makers aren’t even aware of their own blind spots or the current vernacular surrounding such a sensitive topic. So how do you overcome this? “Do your homework,” says Dr. Abeyie. “Remove the burden from your under-represented staff by reading, listening and learning independently.” She suggests turning to field experts for their reflections on the progress made since last year, too. “What are reputable authors and academics saying? How are DEI experts and consultants discussing and challenging the efforts of the last 12 months? What have the latest reports on racial disparity taught us?” This information can then be used as a basis from which to explore ways you can create safe spaces for further discussion—“both open and facilitated”—in the workplace.  

Use these analytics to create a longterm plan

Many of the first responses that came following BLM, says Dr. Abeyie, were more concerned with pointing out in what ways they (companies or individuals) were not racist than actually focusing on longterm, impactful and structural change. “True diversity, equity and inclusion is a journey, not a destination.” 

She suggests taking the feedback from your staff and using it to create an action plan. “Unconscious bias has been written about frequently in regard to inequality, so instead of a leader’s gut feel, use analytics to get a clear idea of your EDI gaps, pay/promotion inequities and challenge bias everyday not just once a year. From there, you can create meaningful goals designed to develop a fair and equal organization and take sustained action towards a sound plan to achieve them. By tracking regularly, you’ll see whether an activity is succeeding or fizzling out.”

Read more