GEN Certification: Discovering the Equity Trim Tabs
When Ford needed to improve quality in the 1980s, they plotted defect rates on charts that were visible to everyone in their factories. In today's automotive marketplace, Tesla has refocused the measurement spotlight on a new metric that matters: Delivery Performance—the percentage of fulfilled deliveries that meet the customer-promised delivery date. Any employee can log on to Tesla's KPI dashboard, at any time, to see the company's progress toward its 90 percent Delivery Performance goal. Digital dashboards that track business-critical function data provide a clear, quantifiable standard for employees to aspire to.
Employers, however, have never had such a measurable standard for equity in the US workplace. This has left them to take “best guesses” in an area that already feels fraught with complexity. Maybe moving networking events to work hours will get more women to participate, but without measurement, who knows? Maybe stating that leadership supports Black employees is enough to make them feel included, but without measurement, who knows?
Employees and employers both want clear benchmarks that go beyond good intentions. The LEED certification gave businesses this clarity around environmental stewardship by outlining the exact steps they need to take for certification. Our DEI-focused organization, GEN, wanted businesses to have this kind of playbook for workplace equity.
Seeing the impact other standards have made, we partnered with the University of Washington to create the first standardized certification for intersectional equity in US businesses: the GEN Certification.
Creating this certification meant finding the equity trim tabs. We found hundreds. We refer to them as “cultural levers” that can be adjusted to design bias out and equity in. Like the wall holder for the hotel key card, these simple redesigns take resistance out of the equation. As Fuller would say, we're “getting the low pressure to do things…getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don't work and aren't true,” making it easier for everyone to make decisions based on merit, rather than bias.
Over years, we beta tested these cultural levers, certified companies, and tracked their progress. We found out what works and what doesn't. Those findings form the blueprint for this book.
Is This Book for Me?
This is not a women's empowerment book (though women may feel empowered after reading it) or a book on racist behaviors in the workplace. This is a book about designing workplace environments that counter the impact of bias to become truly merit-based. It acknowledges that we all have bias but does not exhort individuals to just try harder to prevent themselves from being influenced by it. Instead, it shifts the challenge from the employee to “be better” to the organization, to do better, and provides concrete steps and design elements that businesses can use to meet it.
While the solutions presented in this book will not rid the workplace of sexist or racist individuals, they will provide systemic designs that are more likely to discourage those perspectives and minimize their impact. Inclusion, Inc offers a “trim tab” approach: simple, purposeful redesigns that amplify the effects of process optimizations, turning them into agents of transformational change.
We all come to the workplace with varying levels of DEI understanding and experience. This book is meant for anyone who wants to build, and work in, inclusive workplace systems. If you identify with any of the following groups, this book is for you!
Business Leaders: Expectations on managers and executives to champion DEI continue to rise. Many are finding themselves overwhelmed by the amount of complicated, highly nuanced information surrounding diversity and inclusion in the workplace. This book distills the profusion of DEI research and theory into accessible, actionable takeaways for identifying flawed processes and creating inclusive cultures.
HR Professionals and DEI Leaders: HR leaders are now expected to understand DEI in ways they haven't before. This book will serve as a basic reference for understanding DEI concepts and provide a roadmap for streamlining DEI initiatives. Not only will HR professionals be introduced to new knowledge, they'll be given language to advocate for implementing inclusive practices in their organizations.
Underestimated Employees: This book is also for anyone who has had to leave behind who they are to function successfully where they work. For individuals who have felt that their only two options as employees were to assimilate or leave, this book breaks down the systemic barriers they've faced, gives language to their experiences, and provides evidence-backed solutions for which they can advocate.
Allies: Supporters of equity in principle often ask, “What can I do?” Anyone looking to improve their understanding of DEI concepts can use this book to become better allies and advocate for effective solutions.
Job Seekers: Job candidates want clear benchmarks to know if a potential employer has gone beyond talk to meaningful action. Anyone who wants to know if an employer is truly inclusive can use Inclusion, Inc as a “checklist” to assess whether an employer has gone beyond recruiting to authentic inclusion.
Beyond Good Intentions to Meaningful Impact
The methods in this book can take business culture to the next level.
Beyond Recruiting: While representation matters, companies need to do more than just recruit. If employees continue to be recruited into organizations that do not have the mechanisms in place to reduce the impact of bias, both the company and the employees lose out. For example, in the tech sector, the highest percentage of women who leave their employer exit at midcareer—the point at which it is most expensive for the company to replace them.15 Inclusion, Inc addresses the pain points that cause underestimated employees to leave, saving employers the costs of attrition and turnover.
Beyond the Binary: Simply looking at gender as the difference between women and men does not give a complete picture of gender equity. In addition, simply looking at DEI in terms of race and gender ignores the intersections of many other facets of individual identity. Understanding these intersections is essential to ensuring that efforts to foster equity benefit everyone, not just the dominant group. Inclusion, Inc offers solutions that address inequities faced by communities of color, those who do not identify with the binary definitions of gender, caretakers, minimum wage workers, those who have a disability, those who may experience ageism, and workers of underrepresented nationalities and religions.
Beyond Compliance: Not being harassed or blatantly discriminated against is not a high bar for employee experience. Inclusion, Inc is driven by the knowledge that too many people aren't being given equal opportunities to demonstrate their talents. Underestimated individuals don't want to be tolerated—they want to be valued and appreciated on the same level as their peers.
DEI can be confusing for employers and employees alike. This book provides clarity so that employees can understand and recognize the facets of a truly inclusive workplace. It also provides businesses with an answer to “What can we do that works?” in the form of workplace design elements they can adopt immediately to become equity-centered, better serving employees, consumers, and society.
A Quick Guide to the Rest of This Book
This book has three goals, pursued in three parts.
The first, tackled in part 1, is to convince you that the trim-tab hypothesis is true. I want you to believe that shifting our perspective on DEI is important, that we need to leave old ways behind and focus on changing mechanics, not mindsets. This part will define who we're changing the workplace for, what will happen to them (and all of us) if we don't change course, and what it looks like to debias processes rather than people.