What DEI Means in the Streaming Industry
One essential step toward bringing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to a new level in streaming, when it comes not just to opportunity but to transforming workplace culture, hiring, promotion, conditions, and compensation, is defining terms. This, in turn, means reaching a better understanding of what DEI means and whose job it is to recognize disparities and work to remedy them. (Spoiler alert: It’s everyone’s.) In this candid and revealing clip from Streaming Media NYC, two Global Chief DEI Officers—McCann Worldgroup’s Singleton Beato and Weber Shandwick’s Judith Harrison—along with ThinqShift Talent Champion Jennifer Randolph and LPG edu Founder Lori Greene discuss what DEI means today and how a deeper understanding of it can provide a working blueprint for action.
"Let's start by defining terms," proposes LPG edu's Greene, an adjunct instructor at NYU, Fordham, and Temple and former Global Education Manager at Netflix. "At Netflix, we used to call it an 'inclusion and diversity' strategy. Now we call it DEI. Singleton, when you say, 'I'm Chief Officer of DEI,' what does that mean?"
Equity Before Equality
"If we're just talking about the terms, diversity is just difference and that is a very broad term. It can mean a lot of things," says McCann's Beato. "And those things differ depending on where you are in the world and what your lived experiences and how you look at the world. So that's diversity. Equity is more about creating the unique opportunities that are needed for people who do not have an inherited advantage in society so that those people that don't have those advantages can get what they need uniquely in order to be at an equal level to their peer group."
When that happens, she explains, "You have equality. I tell people all the time, 'You can't even talk about equality until you solve for equity. That's the extra thing you've got to do for everybody to get on even playing field. And then, obviously, inclusion is when all different types of people from different types of backgrounds in culture come together in a way that inspires connection, belonging, and shared purpose."
"When I think about equity, I think about systems," comments Weber Shandwick's Harrison. "A lot of times when people look at DEI, they just think, 'What can I as an individual do?' And that is absolutely important, but equity really requires a systems approach to creating that sense of equal opportunity. So you look at things like promotion, pay audits, making sure that people are actually being promoted fairly or being paid fairly, that you've created systems that actually work for everyone. And the inclusion piece is also a matter of systems, but very much about individual contribution and effort."
From Inclusion to Belonging
Just as equity stands as a prerequisite to equality (and a step too many people tend to think they can skip), ThinqShift Talent Champion and Culture Whisperer Randolph insists that when it comes to reconstituting corporate culture to take concrete steps to embrace DEI, maybe we should be adding another letter to the acronym, because there's a critical goal beyond inclusion: Belonging.
"Belonging is an add-on that we've been using lately," says Randolph. "And I think this is where language is really important because with belonging, you look at people in terms of added value and not fit. Oftentimes you will hear, 'Well, that person is not a good fit,' and you need more definition in that. When you have a culture that's really embracing belonging, you are looking at added value and making sure that people feel comfortable so that they can do their best work."
Systemizing DEI: It's Everybody's Job
One of the frustrations of developing DEI initiatives on a global level in multinational organizations is how quickly those initiatives tend to land on the chopping block during layoffs and contraction, leaving behind little but soaring rhetoric and empty promises.
Greene reflects on the challenges her team faced in trying to bring more women into leadership roles at Netflix. "I did work on a team for a short while where DEI was part of our remit, and one of my colleagues went into Italy because production in Italy is all older white men. There were no women whatsoever, so she started the very first program ever in the country to train women to be directors and producers and started to make inroads. Then we were all laid off," she recalls. "What happens then? You have a big corporation like Netflix who's saying, 'We really want you to have more women. We are hiring you people to make these projects for us, and we want you to hire more women.' This happens all the time in DEI. You're running, running, running, running, and then all of a sudden you just stop," erasing any progress made at the organization and returning DEI efforts to square one.
"How do you systemize diversity or inclusion or equity so that you don't keep reinventing the wheel?" she asks.
Echoing Beato's point that "difference" and "diversity" mean different things in different countries and cultures, Randolph says, "I had a CEO when I first started in media and he asked me, 'Do we really need diversity?' And this is when it hit me that perspective is everything because he didn't grow up in America. He said, 'When I look around the room, I see diversity.' And he was talking about this conference room that had somebody from Italy, somebody from Germany, somebody from England. In his mind we had diversity represented, but he didn't see the fact that they were all white men."
When you start working with colleagues or organizations to develop diversity initiatives, she maintains, "You have to realize where people are coming from. You have to look at your business holistically and see where there are opportunities to make sure that you're building a baseline. We can all chase the metrics, but as you fundamentally look at the growth of your business, I think that's the opportunity to layer in systems there that speak to a level of diversity and opportunity."
"So true," affirms Harrison. "One of the things that we need to do from a systems perspective is layer inclusive behavior expectations into everybody's job description. Everybody. One of the things that has led to the very slow progress that has been made around DEI is the idea that, basically, it's DEI's problem or it's HR's problem. It's one little program or an initiative, and six months and we're done."
But we are most emphatically not done, she declares. "The idea is that it's not a program, it's not an initiative. It is a leadership imperative. It is a strategic imperative, and it has to be everybody's job, every day. And if organizations don't embrace that and inculcate that, then progress is just achingly slow. So I think that that is certainly a big part of it. And then to the other things I was talking about, like the pay audits and the promotion audits--you'd be amazed sometimes if you take a step back and see how quickly people are being promoted, how much people are being paid at a given level, who gets the best assignments, which then allows them to show what they can do, which then influences how quickly they're promoted."
Again, it's all about systems--systems that are in place, systems that need to be broken down, and systems that need to be replaced top to bottom with more inclusive ones. "All of that goes into creating the systems that we have that sometimes people prefer not to think about," she warns. "But if you don't think about it, you can't figure out what's wrong and change it."
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