Share your Experience: Tell us about the DEI strategies that are working for your company, and challenges you've faced in creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace. We will highlight responses in a future issue of The Workplace Report. Please email responses to yogita.patel@wsj.com.

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives sometimes get a bad wrap for being narrow in scope and light on impact. Successful DEI programs that result in tangible shifts in an organization require accountability and measurement.

For this week’s column, I convened a panel of leaders to share what they consider best practices for results-focused corporate DEI efforts.

What DEI strategies have actually moved the needle at your organization?
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Pamela Fisher said that leadership accountability for performance across core DEI metrics–including global management level by gender and race/ethnicity, pay equity, and veteran and disability representation–has been an important strategy for the drugmaker.

For Myriam Vidalon, chief diversity, talent and culture officer at NielsenIQ, revamping performance management and succession planning to be data-driven, and therefore fairer and more objective, has proven to be the most effective DEI strategy.

“This is the first step in widening the pool and removing barriers for people who might not have natural sponsors. [The approach] removes biased remarks regarding the individuals’ confidence, presentation style and lack of readiness, and instead moves the conversation to actions needed to excel,” she said.

Maxine Williams, chief diversity officer at Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., said the company’s most impactful DEI strategy is consideration of diverse candidates for every role. “[The diverse slate approach] sets the expectation that hiring managers will consider candidates from underrepresented backgrounds when interviewing for open positions,” Ms. Williams said.

Since using this approach, Meta has increased the number of employees among underrepresented groups without increasing the time it takes to fill the positions, Ms. Williams said. The organization has increased the percentage of women in technical positions and the percentage of people of color in non-technical roles.

Kendra Mitchell, who heads the people function at women leader network Chief, captures sentiment among its 180 employees on a team level and within groups that have historically been marginalized and then develops a response, such as a targeted workshop.

NielsenIQ’s Ms. Vidalon agreed that many companies under-fund, under-staff or under-scope DEI work. “DEI impacts over 50% of your workforce in any given organization, so it makes sense that changes and ownership of DEI initiatives are built into core talent and employee experience practices. They should also be seen as part of how you operate an organization versus being planned and executed in a programmatic way,” she said.

Meta’s Ms. Williams said that mistakes are made when leaders and organizations focus solely on programs and ignore systems. “We need to do both. It’s important to address people’s individual experiences and identify trends–and then build systemic interventions which bring benefit to everyone,” she said.

Ms. Mitchell of Chief said that DEI programs fail when they only target individuals instead of identifying and dismantling systemic bias. “While asking trainees to recognize how their personal biases impact the workplace is necessary, it can be an incomplete approach when it overemphasizes the role of individuals and individual decisions,” she said.

One thing is clear: DEI strategy can’t be an afterthought. Ms. Williams put it best: “DEI progress doesn’t just happen because someone takes this work on as a part time gig–it’s a constant, multi-year journey that must be tied to the organization’s mission.”

For the most part, workers trust their organizations’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and the efforts towards achieving DEI goals, according to research from Deloitte. In August and September, Deloitte surveyed more than 1,500 U.S. workers, mainly respondents who identified as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, female and LGBTQIA+ to learn whether DEI initiatives inspired worker trust in their organizations.

The survey found that 80% of respondents are confident their organizations will achieve targeted DEI outcomes, and 80% believe their leaders are sincere in their commitment to achieve targeted outcomes.

While it is encouraging that self-identified members of diverse populations think their organizations are doing a solid job with DEI, Deloitte advised not to take the current state for granted.

🎥 WATCH: Author Michael Leiter tells the WSJ Jobs Summit that companies should be flexible in addressing burnout because a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works.

Talent transition: Alexis Ayala, 27, enjoyed the hustle of retail sales in his job at a cellphone shop in San Francisco before the pandemic. He had immigrated from Mexico as a toddler and, like his parents, didn’t go to college. When Covid-19 broke out and dried up his commissions, he found work hawking cable-TV plans but yearned for more.

In January, Mr. Ayala started as a business development associate at Okta Inc., which provides tools that allow secure access to business applications. Once hired, he learned the technology behind the company’s identity-verification products, plus skills like making PowerPoint presentations. By next year, he hopes to be promoted to account executive and make six figures selling software to corporate clients, well beyond the $80,000 he made in his best year of retail sales.

Rethinking experience and education: As many as 32 million Americans lack a four-year college degree but have the skills or experience to parlay into higher-income jobs, according to a 2022 study by Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social venture whose mission is to help more people without a college diploma onto higher-earning career paths. The key is spending the time and dollars on training, and spotting the potential in applicants who lack traditional criteria.

Okta said it removed college-degree requirements for a number of sales positions last year to cast a wider recruiting net. It also formed a new business development associate program that Mr. Ayala joined to bring in and develop such candidates. Like other bigger businesses, it is also seeking to further diversify its workforce, and hiring based on skills and potential, not a college degree, has helped.

Many employers from International Business Machines Corp. to CVS Health Corp. now say they are happy to help relatively inexperienced new hires get trained up in coding, cybersecurity and healthcare technology to fill positions.

Yelp Joins Apple, Citigroup, Other Companies Covering Travel Costs for Abortions (WSJ)

DEI Initiatives Are Futile Without Accountability (Harvard Business Review)

Diversity and Inclusion is a Global Challenge, and That’s What Makes It So Hard (Fortune)

Leaders: Stop Just Checking the Box on Diversity. Make an Impact. (Forbes)

How CIOs Can Embed DEI Into Succession Planning (Tech Republic)

Alexandra Levit is a business and workplace author and speaker. She is the weekly columnist anchoring The Workplace Report. Yogita Patel curated and edited this newsletter.

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