Take the Culture of Inclusion Stress Test

February 11, 2022
February 11, 2022 Jamie Notter

If you’re worried about your heart health, you may get a stress test—you exercise on a treadmill, and they track how your heart’s working. It helps doctors see if there is something going on with your heart that wouldn’t otherwise be producing noticeable symptoms.

For organizations that are doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work (or thinking about it), we created a similar test. It has 10 questions about how people at your organization might respond to various DE&I-related scenarios. It’s not measuring whether or not you’re doing DE&I correctly—it’s measuring whether your culture is adequately prepared for it.

Your culture has patterns inside it that directly impact the success of DE&I efforts, but these patterns are not the issues that diversity assessments examine. Those assessments look at what you are doing related to DE&I and how deep your DE&I efforts go. That’s critical to know, but sometimes doing the right things won’t get you the results you want because your culture isn’t ready for it.

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For example, many organizations have jumped into training over the past year and a half. There are a variety of topics and approaches within the category of “diversity training” (anti-racism, anti-harassment, unconscious bias, etc.), and they are all important, but a culture stress test will give you a sense ahead of time whether they are going to stick or not.

As we pointed out in this post, DE&I education requires a culture that embraces accountability, growth, and feedback. So do you have a culture of accountability, where the quality of decisions is actively evaluated and accountability conversations are part of regular interactions? Do you have a culture of feedback, where someone would be told if their behaviors, down the road, were different from what you learned in the training? If those things aren’t in place, your training efforts may not stick.

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We created this 10-question stress test in order to give you a sense of whether or not your culture is aligned with the DE&I work that you are doing or plan to do. It’s not a full assessment; it’s a quick test with only one data point (yours), but this is the purpose of a stress test—to point you in the right direction, not give you all the answers.

You can complete the confidential stress test here, and we will email you your results.

Jamie Notter

Jamie is a co-founder and culture strategist at PROPEL, where he helps leaders create amazing workplace cultures that drive greater performance and impact. He brings thirty years of experience to his work designing and managing culture, and has specialized along the way in areas like conflict resolution and generations. Jamie is the co-author of four popular business books, including the award-winning Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement, and his fall 2023 release, Culture Change Made Easy. He holds a Master’s in conflict resolution from George Mason and a certificate in Organization Development from Georgetown, where he serves as adjunct faculty.