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If your organization is smart about performance management, workplace diversity will happen organically.
During the past few years, DEI programs have been rolled back in both private and public organizations, and the trend may well continue. For champions of workforce diversity, who feel their work is being undone, this is a difficult time. But there is promising news.
A growing body of evidence suggests that many management innovations designed to improve performance actually boost workforce diversity in the bargain — and do so without inviting the backlash that formal DEI programs can incur. That evidence has come together during the past seven years, which have seen unusually low unemployment.
In an effort to do more with fewer workers and to keep their workers engaged, smart executives across many industries have begun relying on tools of high-performance management that target different periods of the career cycle: recruitment (bringing in the best people at the start); skills training, mentoring, and work-life support (helping every recruit find the right path and thrive during employment); and retention during hard times (ensuring that if cutbacks are necessary, decisions are made on the basis of performance rather than function or tenure).
The animating idea of high-performance management is simple: If you can create a work environment in which all employees are valued, supported, and motivated in ways that allow them to do their best, you’ll get higher engagement from them and better business outcomes. Diversity isn’t the goal — but it is a natural by-product.
Our research on workplace diversity — conducted in the U.S. but relevant globally — confirms that notion. We’ve run statistical analyses of data from some 800 companies in a variety of industries. Many of the techniques that companies use to improve performance have a better record of fostering inclusion than do diversity trainings and grievance processes — popular DEI measures that tend to be counterproductive, as we detailed in HBR almost a decade ago, in “Why Diversity Programs Fail” (July–August 2016).1 That’s true not just for frontline jobs but for all sorts of positions, including management.
This remarkable development should inspire hope. If more companies start using certain high-performance management techniques, we can expect to see their diversity numbers improve — even as formal DEI programs are scaled back or eliminated. The key, however, is that these practices help firms attract, develop, and retain diverse talent only when they are used to manage all employees, not just the tiny percentage tagged as “high potential.”
In this article, moving from start to finish through the career cycle, we’ll focus on five companies that built performance-driven HR tools that had the unintended consequence of increasing diversity.