As global head of culture, diversity, equity and inclusion at Wayfair, and the keynote speaker at Fairchild Media Group’s recent Diversity Forum, KeyAnna Schmiedl shared her expertise in establishing a global and actionable strategy for inclusivity. At Wayfair, she has assessed, inspired and developed a diverse and engaged team — something more and more companies are striving to do as they realize adding numbers for representation’s sake isn’t enough to do the job.
It’s critical, according to Schmiedl, a recipient of the Diversity Leader Award from Diversity Journal, for companies to not just look at the makeup of their organization but to examine the individual experiences people are having, as well as being honest about what is being done right and, even more importantly, what may be off the mark.
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From her perspective, the old work of DE&I was counting people, the midpoint was trying to game the system with initiatives like the Rooney Rule (a National Football League policy that called on teams to interview candidates of color for head coaching and senior operations posts).
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“But the new goal is aligning around thoughtful and humble communication, being honest with ourselves about what this work really looks like and committing to really doing it even though we are tired and there is a lot going on in the world,” she said. “It still matters and it’s easier when we’re all bought in.”
When Schmiedl joined Wayfair three years ago, she said flat out that she would not be setting recruiting or hiring goals.
Instead, she focused first on looking across the employee life cycle, from identifying potential job candidates to who is ultimately hired. Performance reviews, career development and retention issues were among the numerous elements that need closer looks for both their efficacy and equity.
“If DEI is going to be part of the fabric of Wayfair or the fabric of your organization, it can’t just be focused on the folks that are here or the folks that we are looking to bring in. It has to be a part of the business,” she said. “That means that every single person in the organization needs to be held accountable, too, and understand how they contribute to a culture of diversity.”
One thing Wayfair does at the earliest stage of the hiring pipeline is allow job candidates to opt into a cultural conversation with appointed ambassadors, where they’d be able to glean what the company culture is like for a trans person, for example, or someone who is neurodiverse or any other identity.
Schmiedl, who’s committed to thinking and acting holistically when it comes to this work, developed a DE&I maturity matrix at Wayfair to measure the stages of progress that lead to sustainable change. The tool is designed to arm people with the ability to quickly assess how the DE&I initiatives are going based on experiences with their respective leaders, managers and teams, Schmiedl said. Much of the culture work that still needs to be done by many organizations requires individuals analyzing their personal experiences and shared behaviors within the organization in order to help improve upon them.
“It’s one thing to say we have fair and equitable processes and procedures, it’s another thing to investigate the little words that we use to describe a person’s performance. When we did that at Wayfair, we found that there was bias in the words that we use with some groups versus others,” she said, noting how “confidence” was one that meant different things to different people, and had a much more adverse impact on the women in the workplace. “As soon as we called out that word, everyone in the organization knew about it. And soon as we did, we saw a change with women’s performance rankings outrank those of men. We made a difference. We changed the culture. We impacted equitable experience and career development and increased diverse representation.”
The challenges companies are facing today in driving equitable experience are rooted in histories that didn’t do that at all.
Looking at the history of DE&I work, like efforts to get more women into the workforce in the 1930s to then equal employment opportunity and affirmative action initiatives of the ’60s, Schmiedl said, “These are the origins of where our problems stem from today….The work then was focused primarily on diversity without spending time on developing a workforce culture that could sustain a thriving and diverse organization.”
Tying things to fashion, she noted how creatives like Dapper Dan have struggled to be recognized by an industry where the gatekeepers didn’t look like him. However, Schmiedl said, he went on to have “amazing influence by taking Black and Afrocentric culture and making it integral to how many dress and think about fashion currently.”
“That’s really the history of how we think about diversity,” she added. “A lot of times there are pioneers that we just didn’t acknowledge in their time. This is not specific to the fashion industry. This exists in the education, medicine, tech and so many other industries. Folks are making contributions all the time but just because we don’t have that same exact background we don’t necessarily appreciate them in the moment.”
The challenge in that history is figuring how to build “more thoughtful and inclusive environments and not stay stuck in these same cautious and careful ways that we have to our approaches,” Schmiedl said. Too many organizations have “very carefully thought out how to create and display diversity within their organizations,” versus enacting a more thoughtful approach that could involve speaking with managers honestly about where progress has been made and where there is work to be done. She also noted how having an employee be part of diversity panel without having the infrastructure that embraces a diverse and inclusive culture can seen by the participant as tokenism and lead to employee turnover.
Such scenarios make employees aware of the reality of their representation versus the representation that they want, Schmiedl said.
Now, above all, the aim for all industries when it comes to diversity, is to focus on equity — which is not the same as equality.
“Equality says treat everybody the same. Give them the same access, process and opportunity without taking into account the individual’s challenges and strengths. Equity takes into account those uniquenesses and building with each to create something that works for them,” she said.
Companies should instead be embracing the Platinum Rule.
“The Golden Rule says treat others as you would like to be treated, whereas the Platinum Rule calls for treating others as they would like to be treated,” Schmiedl said. “An equitable approach requires speaking with the individual and finding out more about them.”