The Top Ten Fairness-Centered Diversity Best Practice Changes for Risk Management
By Billy Vaughn, PhD Diversity Executive Leadership Academy Blog (0) Comment
The Top Ten Fairness Centered Diversity Best Practice Changes for Risk Management
Most organizations are trying to improve engagement—but they’re solving the wrong problem. After working with leaders across multiple sectors, I’ve seen the same fairness blind spots repeat itself. That puts them in the cross hairs of the anti DEI culture wars and legal battles. This short video explains why and how to protect your organization.
According to a Gallup poll report, State of the Global Workplace 2025, employee disengagement cost employers and fell 2 points to 21% from the year before. It is estimated that 9.6 trillion can be added to the global economy if the workforce was fully engaged.
Workforce engagement is unevenly distributed across racial, ethnic, and gender lines, affecting not only individual well-being but also organizational performance and economic productivity. Research highlights that marginalized groups—particularly ethnic minorities and women—consistently report lower levels of workplace engagement due to systemic inequities, unconscious bias, cultural exclusion, and lack of inclusive leadership (see e.g., Karimova, L. (2025), Regulation of Social Mobility Mechanisms in UNIVERSUM Journal). The disparities are evident in job satisfaction, access to leadership roles, psychological safety, and retention rates.
But, how do we increased engagement across different cultural groups in the current anti DEI social and political environments? Diversity best practices designed to level the field for historically marginalized and excluded people remain essential. Unfortunately, recent rule changes require a pivot.
As diversity, equity, and inclusion programs face unprecedented legal, political, and cultural scrutiny, organizations can no longer rely on symbolic gestures or identity-based solutions to demonstrate progress. What leaders need now are diversity best practices that sustain progress and legally protect their organizations. This is accomplished with fairness-centered diversity best practices approaches that expand opportunity, remove documented barriers, and strengthen inclusion while reducing perceptions of unfairness or increasing legal exposure.
Grounded in Dr. Billy Vaughn’s Reimagining Fairness framework, the best practices outlined below reflect how high-performing organizations are evolving DEI into a defensible, trust-building, and results-driven discipline.
1. Explicit Leadership Commitment to Fairness
Senior leadership and the board issue a written, public commitment to fairness, inclusion, and equal access. The statement clearly affirms a shift away from identity-based practices while reaffirming the organization’s obligation to address the effects of historical exclusion and marginalization by identifying and removing systemic barriers to full access. Leadership accountability for fairness is embedded in governance and carried out in partnership with staff responsible for inclusion and equity.
2. Fairness Integrated Into Strategy, Not Siloed
Explicitly embed fairness and inclusion into the organization’s strategic planning, mission, and vision, so that it is linked to workforce effectiveness, service delivery, risk management, and organizational sustainability—not positioned as a stand-alone DEI initiative.
3. Fairness as a Core Operating Value
Rather than labeling “diversity” as a value, organizations define fairness driven by inclusion competence as a core talent management value. This framing resonates across political, legal, and cultural lines and reinforces trust that opportunities are earned, not allocated.
4. Data-Informed Barrier Analysis (Not Quotas)
Organizations track workforce, management, and leadership decision-making patterns to diagnose policy and process barriers that create institutional unfairness. Representation data is used as a signal, prompting inquiry into recruiting pipelines, promotion criteria, access to development, and decision rules that create unfair outcomes. The assumption is that any existing barriers, especially for those in the bottom rungs of the organizational hierarchy, result in everyone suffering in some form or another.
5. Universal Access to Development and Opportunity
Training, mentoring, leadership development, and stretch assignment opportunities are open to all employees, with eligibility based on role relevance, readiness, and business need. Programs may address documented disparities, but access rules remain neutral and transparent.
6. Fairness-Focused Orientation and Ongoing Learning
Inclusion competency drives fairness in organizations. All employees, including executives and board members, participate in inclusion competency training and continuing education that fosters:
- Understanding of how fairness differs from equality and equity, and how each serves a specific strategic purpose in managing talent.
- Understanding how individual and systemic bias operate, and how it undermines fairness.
- An ability to improve decision quality and outcomes inclusively.
Leaders model participation and continuous learning to reinforce credibility and encourage the workforce. The engagement of group(s) at the bottom of the hierarchy serves as the litmus test for fairness. If they are not experiencing fairness, then everyone’s fairness is more or less undermined. Those at the bottom simply suffer the most.
7. Inclusive Meetings, Events, and Workspaces Design
Meetings and organizational activities are designed to be accessible, collegial, and inclusive addressing physical access, communication norms, scheduling equity, and psychological safety. Inclusion is treated as an operational standard, not a courtesy.
8. Representation Without Tokenism
Organizations ensure diverse perspectives are present in speakers, panels, and decision-making forums, without assigning individuals the burden of “representing” an identity group. Expertise, lived experience, and professional credibility are balanced intentionally. If the organization is culturally diverse yet historically included and majority-group members make decisions, each decision is assessed for potential bias due to the lack of diverse input.
9. Transparent Talent Practices and Broad Outreach
Recruitment, hiring, and advancement practices emphasize:
- Clear job-related criteria
- Broad, inclusive outreach
- Neutral and consistent evaluation standards
- Consideration for economic and educational differences
Outreach expands opportunity; selection remains competency-based and defensible.
10. Fairness-Based Support Structures
Mentoring, scholarships, internships, and career pathways are structured to remove access barriers (e.g., lack of exposure, sponsorship, or information) rather than to grant preference. Support mechanisms are open, structured, and justified by documented need.
What’s Different From Traditional “Diversity Best Practices”
| Traditional Approach | Reimagining Fairness Approach |
|---|---|
| Demographic targets | Barrier identification |
| Identity-restricted programs | Open, role-based access |
| Symbolic representation | Operational inclusion |
| Optics-driven messaging | Transparency and trust-focused |
| DEI as advocacy | Fairness as talent governance |
The most effective diversity practices today are fairness practices. They withstand legal scrutiny, reduce backlash, and deliver real organizational value by expanding opportunities without creating new perceptions of unfairness.
This is the shift Reimagining Fairness calls for and the standard organizations must now meet.
About the author
Billy Vaughn, PhD is an organizational psychologist and inclusion competence expert. He is author of the book Reimagining Fairness: A Cultural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Competency Approach (2025).He founded the first diversity certification in 1998 and has trained thousands of professionals across industries and organization sizes. He has trained thousands of professionals, and his post-training evaluations are consistently high.