Reflections

Reflections on a Year of DEI Best Practices

When United Hospital Fund launched a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative in 2019, it became central to our mission of building an effective and equitable health care system in New York.

The initiative focuses on three principal areas: responsibility, accountability, and transparency; inclusion and collaboration; and employees feeling valued and respected. At a time when DEI practices are becoming highly politicized, UHF is committed to filtering out the rhetoric and staying the course.

Since joining UHF in September 2022, as the Vice President of Human Resources and Chief DEI Officer, I’ve seen our DEI efforts grow tremendously. I’m excited to continue to embed our health equity mission and values into our day-to-day work and culture. And UHF’s established DEI workgroup infrastructure has advanced DEI from “a thing we do” to “how we do things.”

As a cisgender, Afro-Latina wife and mother of two—and lifelong New Yorker—I bring my lived experience and authentic self to our work. Recognition of our intersectionality—who we are and how we choose to identify—is essential to appreciate the full spectrum of talent and expertise on UHF’s team. Practicing internally what we do so well externally supports our understanding of how to break down barriers of inequity within health care systems.

Research has demonstrated that implicit or unconscious biases can lead to inequitable decision-making in any workplace. More mundanely, sometimes people are just busy. We have lots of competing priorities and lots occupying our brains. Even if we care about DEI, it is not always top of mind as we go about our work. As a result, we might not always see how our decisions are relevant for DEI and so might inadvertently make inequitable decisions. As for DEI research, this site has been helpful to me.

At UHF, we recognize that DEI work is iterative and that embedding DEI best practices in all that we do takes time. In building a truly mission-driven organization, we are constantly reviewing where we can improve, integrate, sustain, and create synergy with our DEI practice to achieve our goals of an inclusive community in which staff feel valued and respected. Such an environment makes for a healthy culture in which people can do their best work.

DEI in Action

While we have initiated various strategies throughout our organization to advance DEI, we began by focusing on our most valued asset: our staff. We regularly solicit staff feedback, which has informed our DEI practice on numerous fronts.

UHF’s five discrete DEI staff workgroups are key partners and advisors on a number of processes and issues. For example, this past year we set a goal of updating our performance review process. To achieve our desired goal of streamlining an inclusive and equitable performance appraisal process, UHF’s Equitable Standards workgroup was instrumental in helping us make sweeping revisions to the process.

Also in the past year, applying a DEI focus  to review our internal policies and practices with staff input helped us implement a number of initiatives. A few highlights:

• Coordinating an ad hoc focus group of staff who volunteer to make recommendations in formulating our return-to-work policies
• Codifying our employee recognition program to celebrate milestones and boost morale
• Continuously improving our inclusionary hiring practices, e.g., leveraging AI technology to de-bias our recruiting of a diverse group of talent 
• Collaborating in partnership with CUNY to pilot a successful summer internship program
• Promoting mental health benefits and opening our multi-purpose wellness room

What’s Coming Up

Based on input and a survey designed by our DEI Strategies Workgroup, the next major employee initiative will be staff development. Through the pursuit of SMARTIE goals, staff development will increase the space to learn and gain insights into the root causes that create inequities in systems.

Our staff will have an opportunity to reflect on and reaffirm why the work we do matters.

In October, our Restorative Justice workgroup piloted a lunch-and-learn series of specialized workshops addressing DEI topics, such as our own implicit biases. We believe these “courageous conversations” will help all of us to advance health equity and gain a deeper understanding of the systems we are aiming to dismantle.

Lastly, to help ensure we stay on the right track of infusing DEI into our culture of mutual accountability and inclusion, we will create and distribute an inclusion survey, providing staff with an opportunity to share ideas and input on how to further advance DEI.

I’m proud of UHF’s leadership and staff for our DEI accomplishments in the past year. We’re committed to making even more progress in the year ahead.

To learn more about SMARTIE goals, please visit this site.