Measuring Equity in Culture Change: Key Takeaways (Part 1)

This blog is the first in a two-part series. You can read the next part by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

This blog is based on content from “Accountability in Racial Equity: Measuring Culture Change,” a webinar hosted by Portland Means Progress and facilitated by Serilda Summers-McGee of Workplace Change. Thank you to both for making this event free to the public.

The longer I experience the professional world, the more I’ve come to realize that interactions are the building blocks of a company’s culture and, ultimately, its wellbeing. Innumerable interactions are continually taking place within an organization, and these compound to form policies, business decisions, and the employee experience. The collective employee experience is what primarily determines the company culture (or at least how we as individual employees perceive the company culture) since it reflects reality rather than aspiration. If interactions are the building blocks of culture, we must not forget the consequences of each interaction we are a part of when working on improving our culture. This includes our efforts to achieve racial equity and eradicate racism within our organizations.

Whether or not things “feel” equitable, fair, and respectful to employees has a high impact on company culture, productivity, mental health, and business outcomes. Individuals can experience racial equity (or a lack thereof) through each individual interaction they have with another employee, management, or both. For example, an email announcing a policy change to the whole company, a discussion about workload between two coworkers, or even firing someone are all interactions where we have the opportunity to either eradicate or perpetuate racism and racial inequity. Think about the impact of continual micro-aggressive comments a person of color may experience, regardless of the perpetrator’s intentions. When compounded day to week to month to year, the problem becomes anything but “micro.” You do not need to be a person of color to realize that “small” offenses add up and can have dire consequences in any kind of relationship.

Recently, I had the privilege to attend  Accountability in Racial Equity: Measuring Culture Change, a webinar hosted by Portland Means Progress and facilitated by Serilda Summers-McGee of Workplace Change (many thanks to them for making the event free). There, I had the opportunity to blend my interests in improving company culture and leading with racial equity. The information presented in this webinar further supported my understanding that the level of the interaction must not be forgotten when working on our company culture and authentically achieving equity. We must start small (first with increasing understanding and awareness of what culture and equity mean) if we want to uproot racism. We must look in every “crevice” and “dark corner” where racism may be lurking inside of our own hearts and in our business’s systems, procedures, policies, and values. With more understanding, we become more aware of the impact of our words, interactions, and decisions.

But understanding is only the first step. What I liked about this webinar was that it offered a set of principles and procedures to help us achieve measurable changes in equity and company culture. We must be measuring our efforts and impact with not only numerical data but also with community validation.

Here are some of my key takeaways from the webinar, including some of my own observations on measuring equity in culture change:

Key Takeaway #1: We Must Understand What Culture is if we Want to Improve It

Ultimately, company culture is based on interactions. As stated by Serilda Summers-McGee, “Organizational culture is the sum of each individual relationship each individual person has within your organization.”

To get more specific, the “underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization” determines the essence of these relationships (Gotham Culture, Organizational Culture Definition, and Characteristics, https://gothamculture.com/wp-content/uploads/Organizational_Culture_Download.pdf).

Finally, “an organization’s culture defines the proper way to behave within the organization.” This behavior playbook is formed through the spoken and unspoken “shared beliefs and values established by leaders and then communicated and reinforced through various methods, ultimately shaping employee perceptions, behavior, and understanding” (SHRM, Understanding and Developing Organizational Culture, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/understandinganddevelopingorganizationalculture.aspx). This thinking reflects more of a top-down view of company culture, but I believe the behavior playbook is more multi-directional than that. Nevertheless, the core principles are accurate.

Now that we understand the core principles of company culture, we can better measure it. If we look at the definitions, it tells us that we must be measuring beliefs, values, behavior, perceptions, awareness, and the essence of relationships between different individuals, departments, etc. This measurement is no easy feat, but it gives us somewhere to start. We must currently rely heavily on self-reported behaviors. This kind of measurement can be unreliable, but we can increase this reliability if we simultaneously work to decrease fear — the fear that often arises when forced with acknowledging our own racist beliefs and actions. We can do this by focusing on continuous improvement and compassionate accountability as the goals, rather than blaming and shaming.

Key Takeaway #2: We Must Lead With Equity

We must lead with equity when analyzing and improving our company culture, as systematic racism can be perpetuated at every interaction level (between multiple coworkers, between management and coworkers, between HR and coworkers, etc.). To call back to an earlier example, micro-aggressive interactions represent a small-scale type of racism that can have devastating impacts on employees and company culture when compounded. This is why we should look at how racism manifests at the granular level of the interaction.

Interactions also determine policy formation and what those policies are (think about all the interactions during company meetings, policy development, and information deployment).

To lead with equity means revealing the root causes of racism in our organization and society. To do this, Portland Means Progress and Summers-McGee offered the following questions to help:

• How does racism show up in our company, even if it’s unintentional?
• What is the root cause of barriers to success for people of color in our business?
• What are our business values? Is racial equity one of them?

They also shared 5 “racial equity principles” to help us lead with equity in measuring culture change:

1. Responsibility is shared – leadership and staff are both responsible for working together to identify, collect, and take action on the data *in a respectful process*
2. “Identify potential solutions with an eye to root cause to disrupt racially disproportionate outcomes.”
3. Alleviate the fear of data by cultivating trusting relationships.
4. Regardless of the outcome, we share data with complete transparency.
5. “Transform the usual punitive data culture to transparent culture.”

Key Takeaway #3: Make Sure You Have “Better-Off” Measures

Ding ding ding! This statement set off alarm bells because, as my background in Results-Based Accountability emphasizes, the better-off measures are the most important if we want to create meaningful change. Counting services and activities is crucial because it helps describe our reach and effort, but whether anyone is genuinely better-off as a result of these activities is the point. Therefore, that is what we should focus our data-collection capacity on.

The webinar outlined three essential better-off measures, categorized by type: learning, actions, and conditions. I’d like to reprint them here, as I’ve found this to be a more comprehensive list than what I’ve seen in the past. I especially like that the types of measures accompany the scope of their effect (short, intermediate, and long-term.) As the logic suggests, the long-term conditions are the most critical measures of the better-off measures:

Learning/Short-Term:

• Awareness
• Knowledge
• Attitudes
• Skills
• Motivations

Actions/ Intermediate-Term:

• Behavior
• Practice
• Decision-making
• Policy change
• Social action

Conditions/ Long-Term:

• Health
• Social
• Economic
• Civic
• Environmental

These measures can be applied both internally to measure culture and externally to measure customer experience and impact. Since this blog focuses on culture, I’ve put together an example of what one could measure for each category, looking at a mental health assistance program (simplified for brevity):

Short-Term/ Learning:

• How many employees are aware of the mental health assistance program?

Intermediate-Term/ Action:

• Of employees who might find the program valuable, how many are currently taking advantage?

Long-term/ Conditions:

• After completing the program/ therapy sessions, what percentage of employees rated their mental/emotional health condition improved?

(If we are leading with equity, we might also want to ensure the mental health assistance program is culturally sensitive, accessible, and appropriate.)

To apply an equity lens, our data must be disaggregated by race, gender, age, class, location, etc. to enable us to truly develop the range of strategies necessary to ensure that race and other factors do not predict one’s success within the company, while simultaneously improving outcomes for all.

Sign up for the Measurable Equity One Year Challenge

We are calling on government, non-profit and foundation leaders to join us in the Measurable Equity One Year Challenge. Each month, we will send out a prompt for consideration and action with your team.  Educational resources and video tutorials to support completion will be sent on the first day of the month. To learn more and get instructions to sign up, please visit https://clearimpact.com/solutions/racial-equity/#challenge.