Insights from Day Health’s DE&I Learning Journey
For many, 2020 drove home the importance of taking intentional action to combat racism and inequities, especially within the healthcare system. While Day Health has been committed to health equity for many years, we have recently undertaken significant work to understand what it means to commit to antiracism -- both internally as a team and externally in our consulting work.
Many organizations are ready to take the next step but don’t know where to begin. Day Health wants to share our story of developing our roadmap to becoming a more inclusive, antiracist organization. Through ongoing exploration, we have begun to uncover areas where we need to grow and have developed a roadmap for change that will push us toward centering inclusion, health equity, and antiracism in our work. Our journey has revealed 3 initial takeaways that we believe other organizations may be able to learn from as they begin their journey.
THREE INITIAL TAKEAWAYS
Know where you're starting from. You may not be as far along in your DE&I journey as you would like to be, but you must recognize your current knowledge and capabilities to make real progress.
Making change is going to be uncomfortable. It's important to support your team through the discomfort and make space for people to learn and grow through it.
Culture is how values come to life. to embody your organization's values, you must take intentional, focused steps to build a culture that reflects those values.
GETTING STARTED
Our multi-step journey began with an intentional choice to engage in transformational DE&I work as a team, as we saw a need to look inward and to explore our collective and individual privileges versus disadvantages, unconscious biases, and gaps in our knowledge. As a learning organization, Day Health recognizes that we do not have all the answers. We strive to work toward equity within our firm and for our clients, but we know there is work to do to educate ourselves and strengthen our own team first.
To that end, we partnered with an experienced consulting group to help us grow as an inclusive team that can better support our clients in their work toward promoting health equity. Our partnership centered on the development of updated mission, vision, and values statements, and on creating organizational policies and norms that better reflect our values of inclusion and diversity. After a thorough search and a robust selection process, we selected DEI Ready as our partner for this work.
Over the course of our engagement, collaboration with our new partners and internal firm work challenged us and illustrated each of our three key takeaways.
1. Know where you're starting from.
Our engagement began with an assessment of Day Health’s readiness to engage with transformative anti-racism work, including a diagnostic survey of institutional culture and staff interviews. This step was crucial: entering the assessment, we were energized and eager to jump straight into “doing the work.” The assessment culminated in an in-person retreat, where assessment findings revealed gaps in our knowledge and capabilities. The retreat reminded us of the importance of assessing current state, rather than diving in headlong. It’s a careful discovery process we always undertake with our clients, and we needed to practice what we preach.
The retreat was an important milestone and pushed us to take an objective look at our current state, a difficult task made easier by our supportive partners. It was uncomfortable to have our gaps pointed out to us, even amid positive feedback that reflected progress we had already made. Without these insights, we would not have had a clear path to make improvements.
2. Making change is going to be uncomfortable.
Even with new clarity around our areas for growth, we needed to take space to process and explore the feedback as a group. This period of reflection included many uncomfortable moments as we dug into the feedback to understand the different perspectives of our teammates. We faced difficult conversations with honesty, compassion, and understanding. We uncovered misaligned expectations and perceptions of the progress we had made as a firm. This misalignment had been contributing to internal challenges that needed to be addressed.
Our exploration and the feedback from DEI Ready helped clarify the learning and growth work that lay ahead:
It was time to refresh our shared values and intentionally build a culture that reflected these values
Our systems and processes needed to adjust to keep pace with our growing team
We needed to co-create an understanding of what belonging and inclusion look like for our team.
After aligning on these primary areas of focus, we were prepared to begin taking action.
3. Culture is how values come to life
Our path forward starts with looking inward to refresh our values and foster team belonging, and to build policies and norms that support our values. To ensure sustained, organized action, we incorporated these areas of focus into our 2023 Strategic Plan, creating working groups to address values and culture, systems and processes, and employee experience. Each workgroup has been tasked with overseeing specific goals and objectives co-created by the broader team. We are currently working to develop strategies and tactics that detail how we will make progress in each area. Our 2023 Strategic Workstreams include:
Co-creating refreshed values and developing a system of accountability and feedback that allows us to ensure our culture and our actions reflect these shared values.
Enhancing and fortifying our employee life cycle by implementing systems and processes that improve the employee experience throughout the various stages:
Ensuring transparency on how and where we recruit and hire individuals to support access to equal opportunities and promote inclusion and antiracism.
Revising job descriptions for each role that include clear pathways to grow within the organization, and detail how each of us is expected to uphold our values at Day Health.
Creating a robust DE&I learning curriculum to expand our knowledge of how to foster inclusion and belonging on our team and building skills to rigorously promote health equity and antiracism in our client work.
We are further in our journey than when we began, but we still have a way to go. We are confident that our team’s wholehearted engagement with this process, combined with robust planning, will help us stay accountable as we continue our journey.
If we learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that we all must take intentional steps to combat disparities and inequities. If your organization is considering exploring how to become more inclusive, Day Health stands in solidarity. We hope that sharing our initial lessons learned will both support and inspire others as they discover and grow and that our collective work can lead to a more just healthcare system.
We look forward to sharing further developments as we continue our journey. If you would like to hear more about our experience, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via email at contact@dayhealthstrategies.com.