Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Naficy Consulting Group, Inc. supports organizational goals of fostering Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), and Social Justice within its workforce. Our approach is data-driven; we measure how your employees see their lived experience working at your company. Our Lived Experience Survey is designed in close partnership with HR and Senior Leadership to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current culture. Through a combination of investigative tools, we gather both quantitative and qualitative data on the state of your company’s existing culture vis-a-vis DEI. We use:
- Confidential electronic surveys assess how employees experience work at your company and how the responses vary among specific demographic groups
- Targeted focus groups for richer insight
- Interviews with Senior Leadership and other key stakeholders
Based on our analysis of gathered data, we identify your organizational strengths and weaknesses, align the areas of greatest importance to your human resources, and start where we can make the biggest impact. The survey also provides a baseline measure for future benchmarking.
This Lived Experience Survey allows us to customize our solutions for your company as you seek to foster a corporate culture of inclusion and belonging. Solutions could include:
All our training and educational programs address the needs identified in the survey, making this investment valuable with positive, measurable outcomes.
Strong alignment among senior leadership team members is imperative in fostering an inclusive culture and is a best practice for ensuring the long-term sustainability of your efforts. The Alignment Training goes beyond regular training by exploring, discussing, and fomenting current leadership beliefs, awareness, and understanding of DEI topics, ensuring that all members of the team share a common, agreed-upon understanding and shared corporate goals. Leadership commitment is measured at the start of the program and at the end to gauge the success of our solutions. The learnings and feedback from the leadership session will guide us as to what additional support they may need and will inform us how to continue monitoring the health of the culture. Some of the learning objectives include:
- Educate the executives on DEI awareness and skills.
- Understand the brain, bias, and behavior and how to mitigate the impact of unconscious bias in decision making.
- Identify potential gaps in DEI vision or aim to create alignment.
- Create psychological safety within their teams or departments
- Commit to the importance of their role as leaders in creating a respectful and inclusive environment and consistently demonstrating inclusive behaviors.
Employees across the organization benefit from Instructor Led Training as well as e-learning. We offer a variety of e-learning solutions designed by best-in-class companies. Leaders and managers within the organization also benefit from Intercultural training to enhance communication and inclusion within the global marketplace.
We partner with leadership to tailor the training & development solutions as needed to achieve your desired organizational outcomes. Lack of awareness and long-held beliefs – conscious or unconscious – are difficult to change. When values and beliefs are deeply embedded, behaviors are too entrenched to change through cursory training programs. At Naficy Consulting, we believe training has an important role to play in creating an intentional culture of inclusion and a high-performing culture. However, we recognize that without a systemic and data-driven approach, diversity interventions often barely have the impact they are meant to. We are thus able to plan a series of thoughtful solutions that will help your leaders, managers, and colleagues get on board with creating your desired culture. The learnings and feedback from the leadership session guide us as to what additional support you may need and will inform us how to continue monitoring the health of your culture.
High Performing Teams create the future of the companies they work for. Therefore, when trust, psychological safety, appreciation, recognition, and camaraderie exist among all team members, chances are that team is a high- performing team. In addition, cultures that promote these teams are typically highly innovative and profitable.
Where are you on the continuum of inclusivity? Where do you aspire to be? And are you ready to start this journey? When we answer these questions, we will be able to form our path forward.
In order to ensure we address your most critical issues as well as standard issues that are best practices, we identify patterns that emerge from the lived experiences survey. This allows us to:
- Prioritization of DEI initiatives,
- Fine – tune the alignment training session for the leadership team
- Customize training or learning programs,
- Identify policies or systems that may not align with DEI goals,
- Establish accountability and transparency around shared goals.
- Determine a baseline benchmark for measuring organizational progress from a DEI perspective
To support the efforts of Employee or Business Resource Groups, we offer a variety of services such as webinars to increase awareness and facilitate discussions around the topics important to the organization, lunch and learns, and facilitator training for creating greater awareness as well as addressing themes identified through the lived experience survey.
We support Employee Resource Groups address topics including:
- Unconscious Bias
- Being an Authentic Ally/Collaborator
- Developing Resilience
- Facilitating Difficult Conversations
- Aligning ERG with Business Strategy
- Neuroscience of Inclusion
- Creating an anti-racist workplace
- Differences in gendered perspectives in the workplace
- Differences in race, orientation, and philosophies
- Intersectional initiatives surrounding company-wide perspectives
- Proposed areas of opportunity, inclusion, and equity
We also offer human-centered and data-driven training initiatives; these applications address areas within your organization that require the most refinement and can include:
- Unconscious bias training
- Bystander/Ally training
- Lunch and learns
- Organizational newsletter applications
- Application and recognition of cross-cultural events (heritage month, earth month, volunteerism month, and more)
Additionally, we offer services recognizing that the best way to incorporate DEI is from the top. That’s why we provide senior leadership alignment training. This purpose-built program operates in tandem with executive departments, providing leadership with the tools to incorporate DEI initiatives for themselves.
Building off of these applications, we also offer consultation services, including:
- Helping HR teams review unconcious bias
- Hiring practices
- Promotion practices
- Resource priority and allocation