How has the role of D&I leader changed, and how will it evolve?
By Jo Faragher on 5 April 2024
If someone asks what you do for a living and you respond, ‘I work in D&I’, you won’t be met with a blank face these days. In the past five to 10 years, diversity and inclusion has become such an integral part of many businesses – not to mention wider society – that the jobs market for roles in this area has matured and evolved to support the businesses who are hiring for them. The recently published d&i Leaders Global Benchmarking Report bears this out: 22% have been working in D&I between five and 10 years, while around a fifth have been working in D&I for more than 10 years.
Over that time job titles and function descriptions have taken on various permutations – from simple ‘D&I manager or director’ to ‘diversity, inclusion and belonging’, ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’, ‘inclusion and wellbeing’ and even ‘employee experience’. For organisations hiring into these roles, these titles are a reflection of what matters to them, whether that’s an intersection between a sense of inclusion and health, or the role having a more inclusive workforce can have on employee retention. d&i Leaders new sample Job Specification should provide a useful framework around which to add the additional skills and responsibilities your organisation requires.
So how does the market for D&I professionals look today? After the tragic murder of George Floyd in 2020, coupled with the impact of the pandemic, investment in D&I hiring escalated quickly. According to the job site Indeed, this has not abated, despite headlines to the contrary. Jobs in diversity, inclusion and belonging grew 124% between May and September 2023.
That said, d&i Leaders own report shows a stabilising in recruitment of professionals in this area – 69% of respondents said they did not expect their team to grow in the next 12 months, and almost three-quarters (72%) felt the size of their team was not enough to achieve everything they wanted. Salaries are looking healthier than ever, though. The proportion earning more than £100,000 has gone up substantially from 2022 (17%) to more than a third, and one in 10 earn more than £150,000 per year.
Routes into the role
Rachna Patel, vice president, international DEI and EMEA Total Rewards, at the Walt Disney Company believes her experiences chime with those of other D&I professionals. Diversity and inclusion was added to her existing reward role and has increased in scale and influence in the past five or six years. “Initially as my remit was EMEA and we had a small team with me and just one other but as the work evolved investment was made to increase the team size. I now look after everything outside the US excluding parks and have team members in other regions,” she says. Her team frequently partners not just with HR but other centres of excellence in Disney including talent acquisition, learning and development and the people insights group, which supports teams with data analysis.
Having worked in another key function – reward – means Patel has vital influence and credibility across the business. “This has helped so much in terms of having the knowledge of the business and speaking their language,” she adds. “Reward may be an unusual route into D&I, but I think it works because it’s about equity, how you pay people, and how they’re treated.” One of the core strategies she has developed since taking on the D&I function is to build an acceptance that you will never be a subject matter expert in every single aspect of the role. “There are so many dimensions and you can feel torn between communities,” she says. “I wear a lot of hats but know when I need to lean in and when not. You also need reflection time as the burden of this work is heavy, so you need that resilience and accept you can’t do everything. It’s also crucial to balance the commercial and data side that business leaders like to see with being human – getting leaders to understand that there is an emotional value to this work.”
Skills and knowledge
While so much of D&I focuses on culture and behaviours, it’s clear some of the ‘hard’ skills that professionals need to succeed have changed as the role has evolved.
Over the past four years of its publication, the d&i Leaders Global Benchmarking Report has shown a gradual shift from a focus on intricate legal knowledge and/or experience of strand-specific initiatives to a desire for professionals who can influence, analyse and activate across the organisation. Jonny Briggs, group head of talent acquisition, diversity and inclusion at insurance company Aviva, says this is something he’s observed. “I started in the D&I role five years ago and I now notice different people in the room. Before they would be strong technical people with a passion, but now it’s OK not to know everything in this space,” he explains.
He adds that D&I teams increasingly benefit from wider commercial knowledge, whether that’s using data to prioritise strategy, or who can learn from others in what is a fast-moving area. This could be employee resource groups, research or working with external partners. “We need more people who can navigate organisations, who are better at stakeholder management. Sometimes we see people move on from D&I roles because they’re unable to accept they can’t do everything, but you need to be strategic. It’s far less about technical knowledge now.”
This extends to the tools D&I professionals draw on and the teams they collaborate with, adds Natalie Sigona, global director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Imperial Brands. “Data analysis is a good example – many years ago we didn’t have people who could generate DEI data insights, or who could link data and insights to DE&I outcomes. Now we have the opportunity of looking at data – though we know it takes time and trust for employees to share this – but where we can – we can look at (for example) talent acquisition data, learning data, self-identification where possible, and bring it all together,” she says.
Outside forces
Sarah Churchman OBE recently retired from a longstanding D&I role at consulting firm PwC. With a background as a HR director, she became chief inclusion and wellbeing officer in 2011 and then chief inclusion, community and wellbeing officer in 2018. During that time, she has pioneered the company’s pay gap reporting strategy across multiple strands and ensured that the work of her department has aligned closely with the wider goals of the business.
In a climate where news stories about war and identity politics can permeate the workplace, she believes an evolving role of the D&I lead is to help the business live its values in how it responds. She says: “An important role is to advise leadership on how we can bring the outside in. So if there’s something major happening such as the conflict in Gaza, how do we respond? Wellbeing was part of my purview, and the external environment often impacts our mental health, so I worked closely with comms and the CEO on that.”
Sigona feels the pandemic accelerated the way in which cultures have become more open and transparent, and forged a closer link between DE&I and other aspects of employee experience. “Covid changed the face of DE&I in that attitudes towards work changed – people can connect more over teams for example, instead of having to always meet face to face and it is more possible to do roles from anywhere in the world. People feel more comfortable asking for different ways of working (including reasonable adjustments), and I think we are all more open and understanding about mental health,” she says. At the same time, that openness has seen leadership styles become more authentic and inclusive – we are all much more understanding of people’s life situations. This more ‘human’ style of leadership is much more inspiring and impactful for DEI than traditional leadership of old, she adds.
Support from the business
Our report also highlighted a sense that D&I professionals were getting more indirect support from the business, in particular from line managers. Many comments from respondents reflected the fact that, despite being under pressure to meet goals themselves, managers ‘got’ the importance of D&I more than before, and understood how supporting D&I activities could help their teams’ engagement, wellbeing and retention. At the same time, a high proportion felt a greater sense of empowerment, with many citing their chief executive or chief people officer as the person who empowers them most.
For this reason, Ira Read, director of diversity and inclusion at The LEGO Group, believes that any organisation looking to hire an impactful D&I lead should indicate that the role sits within the leadership team and has a reporting line at the very top. “I think it’s essential that the D&I head sits as part of the leadership team. If it doesn’t, it can often be perceived as a floating function and will fail,” she says. In our report, just 10% report to the chief executive, but the majority report to a chief people officer or HR director. If a business was looking to set up a D&I function for the first time, Patel advocates they be given “a dedicated structure so you can give it the time and effort it needs”. Effective D&I efforts come from close collaboration not just with senior leaders but also those who work in the most junior roles, she adds.
Looking to the future
With elections happening in both the US and Europe during 2024, there is likely to be a lot of external ‘noise’ around organisations’ efforts to make workplaces more inclusive. For many, this may make it difficult to feel progress with what they’re doing.
But what is the ultimate goal? Sigona at Imperial Brands offers a fun analogy for her ambitions for the D&I function – that it becomes like the famous children’s character Nanny McPhee. McPhee told the family in the film ‘When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go’ – and this is her vision for D&I. “When we don’t need to talk about DEI as an additional topic – and need it to be managed by a central team – because it is just the way we do things – that is success. Making DEI part of our DNA is the way forward.”
From those organisations that are looking to build their first D&I function, to those who are considering expanding their reach, we hope the d&i Leaders exclusive new Job Specification template can be a guide. As others’ experiences show, every organisation is different and will interpret inclusion through a different lens, but we hope it will offer some ideas.
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d&i Leaders is a global community of senior diversity, inclusion and HR focused professionals, looking to collaborate, network and accelerate their workplace inclusion strategy.