The work of creating an inclusive Iowa workforce doesn’t end

Ottumwa seems as likely a place as any to seek out the American dream. The bustling county seat of just over 25,000 boasts a small water park, a classic Iowa main street and a community college. The river town is, in fact, so quintessentially American that a nearby town served as scene of one of the most famous artistic renderings of our nation — American Gothic. So when an employee of the local Walmart store submitted her application to advance from her front-line position to management, we can imagine what that step represented for her: an increase in pay, the opportunity to take on professional leadership and staff development, maybe an adjustment to the lifestyle her current position offered.

This was a step out on faith — the employee was seeking to beat the odds and become a member of a group of fewer than 10,000 people nationwide: Black women in retail management. Instead, she has become a member of an even smaller crowd — individuals for whom the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, has filed suit against their employer on allegations of discrimination. The suit alleges that the employee was not only denied a management position due to her status as a new mother, she was also provided an unsanitary storage closet as a lactation space while a white co-worker was offered a clean office space for the same purpose.

Our commitment level as a community to improving equity will show up year after year in the data — whether or not we choose to see it.

With much work still underway by Iowa companies seeking to diversify their teams in the wake of the “racial reckoning” of 2020, are there lessons to be learned from this case?

I contacted Kimberly Fitten of Reset Consulting for her thoughts on how companies in our area can approach the work of equity in a meaningful rather than a performative way. “There has been a lot of buzz around diversifying organizations,” I began. “What is missing from the conversation on a local level?”

“Do we really have a strategy? We do need a diverse workforce, and inclusion is what helps people stay. How you get there is not by creating the same old plan and putting together sentences that sound good, but by doing actual equity audits and by bringing in the voices in your organizational neighborhood — and I mean the people doing the actual work, not the people sitting around the table making decisions. Your task force should be a representation of the actual people at work. We really challenge organizations to question, ‘How do we handle feedback? What are we doing with the feedback? When we send out a survey, are we actually going to use results and listen to what they’re saying?’”

Kimberly went on to describe a common obstacle within the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI space — employees who feel that being honest about discrimination or bias in the workplace could limit their professional potential with an employer, or threaten their job security. “Creating a psychologically safe space doesn’t happen by using toxic positivity language like ‘We’re family, we all trust here.’ That’s not true, it takes a lot to trust people — especially when that person signs your paycheck.”

Inclusive ICR, a group of over 200 member organizations throughout the corridor, is launching a Diversity Index survey in early 2022. The Index tool is described as a “Tool for employers to examine their own diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and identify strengths, challenges, and opportunities, Collective results from the index also will provide data to track our region’s DEI progress and identify areas for improvement.”

While there is value in identifying current state, the work of creating an inclusive workforce cannot end with the end of a march, the end of a court case, or the end of an organizational self-examination. Companies that choose to participate in the index with a goal of real impact will have more work to do once the results are tallied, regardless of the result. For their part, Inclusive ICR is actively compiling a resource list to support participants in continued efforts.

One of the most important tools in measuring the outcomes of this work is data — specifically, demographics data around retention, promotion, compensation and engagement. Organizations that create a DEI role and hire a staff member to perform the work of improving equity but do not equip that person with relevant data regularly are setting that person up for failure. In recent Iowa history, there have been some highly publicized cases of highly paid but poorly empowered DEI professionals who have left within a matter of months. For some, this is perplexing — why can’t they just fix the problem? For those who consider the moral imperative of inclusion more important than the check, the resignations make perfect sense.

Time will tell how the EEOC case in Ottumwa will be resolved. Our commitment level as a community to improving equity will show up year after year in the data — whether or not we choose to see it. As Kimberly concluded her thoughts, “The work is about valuing the people that help you not only maintain your organization, but increase sustainable growth. It must be our objective to take the opportunities provided to make people want to stay here in Iowa. It’s necessary not just to check the box, but so that we can feel safe and valued in the work that we do.”

Organizations interested in taking part in the DEI Index can request more information here.

Sofia DeMartino is a Gazette editorial fellow. Comments: sofia.demartino@thegazette.com