Now is the Time for Business Leaders to Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion as We Rebuild from COVID-19

It is hard to believe that it’s been only two months since the coronavirus began to upend our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic is unique in that it is a shared experience for everyone - we all have had to deal with personal challenges across a broad spectrum from mental health issues to home schooling children for the first time to job loss and losing loved ones to the virus. 

We have also seen the pandemic disproportionately affect lower-income and communities of color, and we’ve witnessed words and acts of hatred permeate our neighborhoods and our public discourse. It is clear that bias is still a threat to our society. And it has become very clear that access to jobs and the benefits that come with them can ‘make or break’ individuals, families, and communities. 

The pandemic has hit the business community hard as well. While every company is dealing with the effects of the coronavirus differently, the one commonality I am hearing is a recognition that business has been irrevocably altered. And, although it can be hard to let go of the past, I think it is time for us to do just that - in order to think boldly and put into action the plans that will make our future what we want it to be.

As business leaders examine the elements of their business that have been, or must be, updated as a result of the coronavirus-- from supply chains to consumer trends to how and where work is done and beyond-- we need to apply the same rigor into understanding opportunities for reimaging diversity and inclusion as well so that we can not just maintain the progress we’ve made, but accelerate it. While many of us, including signatories of CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™, have pushed our organizations to do better on this issue, this moment has signaled to us that we still have a long way to go. And since many of us are planning to transform our businesses in the wake of the pandemic, there has been no better time to do this the right way and help our people, businesses, economy, and society as we do so. 

The shift to remote working at scale is one way that business leaders have adapted quickly to the challenges of this new environment, and a change we will likely see in some industries that outlasts the threat of the pandemic. The virus has proven the need to tech-enable workforces, and for those organizations like ours that have worked to deploy our remote capabilities to get us through COVID-19, we’ve seen how this setup has the potential to benefit the diversity and inclusion in our organizations:

For example, remote work gives businesses leeway to broaden talent pools to include candidates from new and different geographies and educational backgrounds. And, as the business community looks to fill jobs created by our accelerated need for digital capabilities, we can hire and train those recently unemployed with new skills -- as well as work with schools to shape curriculum for the jobs of the future and help guide minorities and women toward critical fields like STEM. Remote working also affords us a tremendous amount of flexibility that has the potential to ease burdens on those, particularly women, who may have felt they had to choose between their career and their responsibilities at home.

Given the newness of this situation, there are many unknowns about how people will behave in a long-term remote environment. But where there are unknowns, there are opportunities for us to listen and learn... Here are some of the questions I’m thinking about:

• How could biases change, for the better or for worse - both overall and for each underrepresented population?
• What might be easier from an inclusion perspective when working in a remote environment… and what could get harder?
• How do we get to know each other, understand our differences, and create trust without physical togetherness?

Even though these are open questions, now is the time to ask them. This is the opportunity to drive real change at scale and we can’t miss it.

At PwC, starting this week, I will be reaching out to all 55,000 of my PwC colleagues to understand what’s working, what’s not, and where the opportunities are for us right now. We are asking a series of questions about our people’s experience with inclusion in the time we’ve been dealing with the coronavirus, and we will break down the results by demographic so that we know how different populations are doing and what they need. I will also be meeting with representatives from our diverse groups to get more insight, and we will factor all of what we learn into how we transform our business going forward.

On the CEO Action front, I will be convening a task force of CEOs and thought leaders to address how we move on these diversity and inclusion challenges and opportunities with the urgency they deserve. In addition to bringing what I am learning from our survey and my conversations with people at PwC to the CEO Action network, the coalition is bringing together peer groups to discuss approaches to address diversity and inclusion with coronavirus recovery in mind. And the CEO Action signatories have added over fifty new COVID-19- related entries to our actions database to share how to help employees and communities during this unprecedented time and advance our collective thinking on the subject.

As we inevitably evolve our businesses, there is no playbook for how to do any of this. But, I challenge all of us to take the time to not only protect the progress we’ve made on diversity and inclusion, but to do what we can to accelerate the pace. Let’s commit to creating that playbook by letting go of past constructs and by making big, bold decisions that could drive real progress - and benefit our people, businesses and our economy in the meantime.