Build transparent policies to improve DEI

Whenever an employee has a question about your procedures, they should be able to find clear, accessible, transparent information in your company policies. These should cover every aspect of the employee experience, from hiring to pay, holiday to family leave.

And it’s not just about writing the documents and leaving them to gather dust in the filing cabinet. To ensure consistency, you need to make sure all decision-makers are aware of your policies and their role in upholding them.

Your company policies provide the structure for equality in your organisation. To advance DEI in your organisation, start with the foundations for fairness.

Policies codify your approach

The key to improving DEI is in systemising your processes. Individual behaviour is hard to change without systems to guide things. Without clear, accessible instructions on how to make objective decisions, bias can run rampant.

When faced with a complex task, like hiring a new employee or deciding who to give a promotion to, our brain wants to make things easier for us. We fall back on mental shortcuts, or “heuristics”, to make decisions faster. But this is exactly how bias skews things. We might automatically nominate the person who “looks the part” (i.e. a member of the majority group) because that’s what we’re already used to. Your policies should provide a safety net to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Policies set the default for objective decision-making. They should provide accessible and easy-to-follow guidance across all of your people processes. This ensures consistency in treatment between different employee groups, no matter who’s involved.

Checklists are an excellent, cost-free tool to put this into practice. In his book The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande states that when carrying out complex tasks in high-pressure environments, it’s all too easy for experts to miss a step. Checklists break down every task into simple steps, giving managers easy guidance to ensure consistent treatment. If it works for pilots and surgeons, it’s sure to work for your team too! We recommend using checklists for your hiring process, pay review, performance reviews and more.

The science behind transparency

Transparency is the foundation of equality. Information empowers employees to succeed. When you’re clear and open about how decisions are made, employees will know exactly how they can get ahead. No one gets an unfair advantage because they have access to hidden information.

Opaque processes mean that decisions around pay, promotion, performance and more are blurry. This is especially damaging to minority groups. Women are less likely to nominate themselves for promotion if the criteria are ambiguous. And minority-group members are less likely to have access to senior sponsors who can help them navigate the unwritten rules.

But when employees have open access to information on how decisions are made, this builds trust. It sets the expectation that rules are followed consistently, no matter who’s involved in the decision-making. And it gives employees the power to challenge decisions if they believe they’re not being made fairly.

Transparency also builds a sense of accountability. Setting public guidance creates the expectation for everyone to follow the same order of operations. Studies have shown that when people know they will have to justify their decisions, they make more accurate, less biased judgements.

Instead of relying on individuals to check their own biases, put structures in place to guide them.

Inform the team

Whenever you update your company policies, it’s important to make sure the team is clued in. To act as an effective anchor, your policies need to be implemented systematically. Here’s how:

1. Publish your policies in a centralised workspace that employees can access
2. Nominate someone responsible for regularly refreshing each policy
3. Notify the whole team whenever changes are made
4. Run regular training sessions for those involved in implementing policies in their day-to-day work (e.g. invite hiring managers to a session on your Hiring Policy)
5. Invite feedback and questions from your employees

List of key policies to build

Your policies should cover all your people processes. In each document, outline who is involved in decision-making, the criteria that decisions are based on, the step-by-step process, the timeline of key dates and possible adjustments. You should have unique policies for each of these processes:

We also recommend having key policies that cover additional aspects of the employee experience. These include:

We know that building fair policies is a mammoth task. There’s a lot to cover — they affect your entire people operations. But Fair HQ is here to make it easier.

The Fair HQ platform provides templates for all of these policies and more. You can access checklists for each document to score your policies and improve your setup. And our library of recommendations helps you put each policy into practice.

Backing it up

The Behavioural Insights Team. (2021). ‘How to increase transparency of progression pay and reward’ in How to improve gender equality toolkit

Bohnet, I. (2016). What Works. Harvard University Press

Guwande, A. (2010). The checklist manifesto. New York: Picador.

Kruglanski, A. W., & Freund, T. (1983). The freezing and unfreezing of lay-inferences: Effects on impressional primacy, ethnic stereotyping, and numerical anchoring. Journal of experimental social psychology, 19(5), 448-468.