In the world of senior leadership, HR, and DEI, the quest for effective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies often leads professionals down a perplexing path of academic research and confusing business articles. This leads to a weak connection between what academic research prescribes to solve an organizational problem and what corporate professionals are doing to solve these issues in their own organizations.
Seramount offers our members research and resources based on the combined expertise of more than 25 researchers and subject-matter experts on staff. can help members bridge the gap that arises when doing their own research on DEI in the workspace. Seramount can offer clarity and solutions tailor-made for your specific organizational needs.
There are various business sources that are creating some confusion around HR and DEI topics, but Seramount offers tools to use the next time our members look through the headlines and see something that relates to an issue they need to solve in their organization.
The Challenge: Sorting Signal from the Noise
The writers of many articles are tasked to bring in readership with catchy titles and openings. However, they do HR and DEI professionals a disservice as they are frequently either articles that are filled with a single individual’s take on a topic or un-cited information provided through an interview with an individual or company about their limited experience with the topic.
The notoriety of the individual or company tends to make the article appear seemingly as generalizable information and a reliable source for an HR or DEI professional to use and apply in their own organization. As a result of reading loads and loads of articles written in a similar way or using similar titles, they appear to follow a pattern and consequently grow to appear more “valid,” as our brains respond well to repetition. This gives us the confidence to believe that what these articles are saying is true and will work at our companies; however, when dissected, we realize that we merely have read multiple articles in which a single individual or single company described their experience with the topic or issue we’re trying to resolve, often discounting decades of research that both academic researchers and think tanks have been developing to resolve those very issues.
There is research going back to the early 20th century citing the importance of psychological safety, transparency, and communication to employees to ensure engagement, motivation, and loyalty; however, current-day Forbes, Inc., and Medium articles describe how companies are struggling to keep their employees engaged and reduce turnover. A quick navigation to anonymous websites such as Glassdoor, Indeed, and Fishbowl and even the anonymous online sessions we run at here at Seramount with our Employee Voice Session technology show many employees feel left in the dark surrounding what is happening within their organizations. They don’t feel the current environment is psychologically safe to mention any type of dissent or confusion. Google’s Project Aristotle was a phenomenal real-world project displaying the power of psychological safety. It was guided by the well-respected Amy Edmonson, but when Project Aristotle was released to the public, corporate professionals were treating it like the newest and shiniest approach to helping their employees, when really the need for creating psychologically safe work environments had been around since the 1960s.
What Is Happening Here?
Academic research is written in such a way that it caters to those who conduct research themselves. N’s, statistical power, effect sizes, Cohen’s d ratings, and Pearson coefficients are not easily decipherable terms for someone without a statistical background. The academic writing format required for journal submissions does not cater to a casual reader and at times can be a difficult content structure to interpret. Because of this, if you do not have a consulting team such as Seramount to help summarize these articles, you are left with relying on business article sources that may or may not provide citations that you can reference and easily verify yourself. Potentially, the writers themselves might not be able to fully synthesize the journal article, so miscommunication may occur within their article, or they may revert to interviewing/quoting an individual who is well regarded in the business world, presenting those quotations as sage advice.
What Is the Solution?
Seramount is here to provide HR professionals and DEI readers a few key rules to remember when reading through their article feed to determine if an article is a useful source of information:
1. Look at the writer of the article and any background information they provide:
Are they a dedicated writer with expertise on the topic? Did they interview x number of individuals for the article?
2. Consider the amount of references:
Are the statements being made in the article calling back to what a single individual said, or are they referencing a survey or study from a reputable source that collected data from a considerable amount of individuals?
3. Look into the references:
Are there links to the references being made in the article? If there are none, this is a red flag. If there are links, click through each of them until you get to the original source. At times, these articles simply reference themselves and don’t cite the original source until you dig deeply. Once you get to the original source, compare what the actual survey or academic article found to what the news article states. A lot can get lost in translation when references are “telephoned” from one article to the next.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help:
Some of these articles might lead you to a mound of academic references that are difficult to interpret. This is where you should reach out to anyone internally who has an academic background or to people within your network and start a conversation on the topic and see where their searches have led them. To take it a step further, when developing a plan of action, reaching out to agencies such as ours can be a great help, whether that outreach consists of paid services or simply looking through articles and reports published by institutions that are working through these topics as their business mission.
5. Talk to your employees:
Did you talk to your employees about this? Did you ask them for their reactions and feedback? What did they say? Step 5 is quite arguably the most important piece here. Even if you want to ignore the other steps, take whatever information or solution you believe you have found and speak to your employees about it. Ideally, this would be in an anonymous, safe space such as what we provide with our Employee Voice Session technology (EVS). Either way, bringing your ideas and solutions to your employees first and obtaining their reactions and input will give you the best course of action before sinking any time, money, and resources into something being done at another company or something that is working for them. Your employees are unique, and your work culture is different through its various nuances, processes, and geographies. Give your employees a chance to be heard, and the solutions will most certainly come to you.
In summary, if you are unsure of the truth behind what you see online, Seramount’s experts are here to help synthesize information and offer informed solutions to keep your organization and its employees psychologically safe and in line with your DEI goals.
If you are interested in learning more about partnering with Seramount, please contact us.
