What you are paying for when you work with a Diversity & Inclusion practitioner?

The other day a co-facilitator told me she’d increased her rates because she was having to have two therapy sessions a week to process her work, or trauma that had been triggered from her work. The conversation had followed our session on Justice & Wellbeing where we talked extensively about how those of us with lived experience of oppression or trauma are constantly being asked to relive and expose that through our work, while simultaneously holding other people’s trauma and oppression through the consulting, training and coaching we provide to teams and individuals. 

Both these conversations led me to suddenly feel what was being held in my body after years of working non-stop on building a social enterprise centred around Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI). I’ve worked through childbirth, through a pandemic, through almost being hospitalised with Covid, through my partner’s redundancy, through my own internal collapse following reconciling with my own story of rape, and through the ongoing impact of coming out as gay as a married mother of two. And at the end of all this, in spite of the hundreds of teams and individuals I’ve personally supported to build a more equitable future, I find myself financially broke, living on debt and unable to give myself what I need in order to survive this. 

I’ve consistently undersold the work we do because our society doesn’t value the sheer strength, persistence and internal processing power it takes to create true change. Organisations negotiate fees with Diversity & Inclusion (DEI) consultants and cancel engagements in a way I’ve never seen in other industries. The sheer amount of people I work with who are asked to deliver free talks around trauma, and to exist vulnerably for the education of others, is astounding. So if you’re considering working on diversity & inclusion here’s four things you should know about compensation when you engage a consultant or speaker for this work.

We can’t and shouldn’t quantify our work in ‘day rates’

So many industries operate through the lens of time and skill-level. If you are a developer you will likely charge a day rate and that rate will be higher or lower depending on how long you’ve been a developer. But the complexities of human-centred change, particularly when you’re navigating deep layers of oppression and trauma, cannot be quantified in that way. A DEI facilitator may be running a day-long workshop with your team but there are no bounds to what that workshop unearths for them. Whether it’s needing time off following a personal trigger or investing days of mental capacity processing the complicated connections between the stories that people have shared and how that impacts the way they deliver their work in the future. A good DEI consultant will be continuing to do deep work related to your workshop even when the day itself has ended. 

In addition, while some DEI practitioners bring qualifications and years of delivering the work, others bring fresh perspectives and different types of lived experience. I often work with both younger and technically more ‘junior’ facilitators, as well as much more ‘senior’ facilitators, but both should be compensated equally. While a more ‘experienced’ facilitator might need to be compensated for their years of knowledge, a newer facilitator needs to be compensated for both the much needed perspective they will be bringing to systemic change and the deep unravelling they will be triggering with being so fresh to the work. 

We need to pay for people to heal

I’ve been in and out of therapy since becoming Director of People at FutureLearn. I’d never considered this as part of how I charge for my time but now I think about it, I need that therapy in order to be as whole and present as I can be for the work I do, and to process all of the wounds that are triggered through the work. We cannot drive systemic change when we ourselves are broken - each time we don’t invest in our own healing we make it harder to help others to heal. 

This is also important when you think about how to engage the DEI practitioners you are working with. I often say to clients that the hardest thing about doing this work is that we will be living out the organisational issues and biases through the shape of the engagement itself. I’ve worked with toxic organisations where they will consciously hide information from me that, if shared openly, would make my job much easier, but may have revealed too much about their culture and leadership for their liking. It’s these types of behaviours and defenses that open wounds for everyone involved in the process - the practitioner included. On the flip side, I’ve had clients that have welcomed me and connected with me openly. Actively choosing to behave in this way is conducive to the culture that they are working with me to create for their wider team. Moreover, it offers us all an opportunity to heal wounds and make amends for our historical behaviour.

Group workshop

There is no greater gift than love and validation

I’m often asked for measures of impact and return on investment for the work we do. Of course we can say plenty about the business value of hiring for diversity and making space for different people to grow with your company.  However, when we ran our workshop about “building space for belonging” the other day I realised there is so much about the power of love and validation that cannot be contained or quantified, it simply has to be felt and believed. 

The majority of people leave this belonging workshop feeling heard, seen and respected, which gives them huge power to change their lives and other people’s lives.  Even if just one person has a moment where they feel what it’s like to have their stories validated and they take that feeling and gift it to one more person outside of the workshop, you’ve already created a spiral of change that might not be easily tracked but will create resilience and empowerment, moving people to build a better world.

Do the work as you do the work

When an organisation embarks on a journey around diversity, equity and inclusion they need to ensure they consider the dynamics and systems they are upholding and fostering within the work itself. If you aren’t ready to pay your DEI practitioners a decent wage or make space for them to heal as part of that cost, then it’s highly likely that you aren’t yet prepared to do the real work. Throughout our journeys with diversity and inclusion we are offered moments where we can choose to embody what we are striving for, and how you choose to behave with DEI practitioners is an important part of that journey.