At the Vlerick Business School (VBS), there is a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee (DEI Committee)”. The Masters Office initiated the creation of the DEI Committee. The initial reason to set up the committee was to deal with inclusion-related incidents between students (instances of interpersonal discrimination/microaggressions/exclusionary behaviour between students). It was thus a reactive decision to an acute problem. The first task was to create Code of Conduct and the procedure to handle such incidents, as corrective measures. After the first half year the DEI committee’s aim moved from merely reactive to its own aim, focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion work more generally, devising the school’s mission on DEI, a strategy and action plan going beyond the master’s students. Currently, the strategy supports persons with disabilities, low-income students, LGBTQ students/staff and international students. These equity groups were suggested by community, citizens, or other external stakeholders. This institution has targets for access for specific equity groups.

The activities that the VBS has carried out (in the last two years) with regard to equal access/inclusion/diversity are: support and counselling for students and university staff; lectures, workshops, seminars for students, faculty and non-teaching staff; training courses for peer educators; public promotion (e.g. production of media content such as podcasts); improving physical accessibility; improving digital accessibility; and data collection/research/analytics of inequity within the institution and subsequent evidence-based interventions.

At this institution, the activities with the greatest impact were 1) the research, because it allows for more effective and relevant interventions based in evidence; and 2) the DEI track (the mandatory course for all students). It makes students work on projects to implement them. We communicated to the Diversity Managers Association in Belgium that we have an open call for projects, which allowed for different companies and organizations to tell us that they need people to help with a DEI project. Our students are then offered a sort of intern position. Students work on the project with a coach from the external organization (also sometimes internal – sometimes colleagues in the school act as coaches). Those projects have been some of our most important projects. For example, one of the projects on accessibility also gave us a chance to improve our campus for students with visual impairments. Therefore, the DEI track gives us an opportunity to have a lot of people work on DEI (around 300 people per year). It is a mutually beneficial exchange of information, knowledge and practice. Students get coached by professionals and get a chance to do a consulting project in the real world, while we learn from what other companies and professionals are doing on DEI. We list of all the projects per year with some of their insights and disseminate them. Some examples of projects are: the podcast project, the DEI calendar project, the cultural activities project, the accessibility for people with disability project, LGBTQ-related projects, neurodivergence-related projects thus creating a lot of connections and results/outputs. In addition to activities to support inclusion, VBS implements measures/activities to counter exclusionary and discriminatory practices through recommendations/guidelines.

The last innovative practise/tool introduced at BVS when it comes to ensuring inclusion, diversity and equal access was “The Game Changer Scholarship”: this is a ‘connect’ type of project, run together with the Sustainability Centre, the Advancement team, the Masters and Executive Educations teams, and it aims to bring in super diversity in our classrooms. Namely, we want to bring at the table students with radically different worldviews around sustainability, and who can bring significant contributions in this field. Our target students are thus coming from the Global South and doing NGO or community work on core sustainability topics, from education to climate crisis and conservation. Even when offered scholarships, these students cannot afford the cost of living for education in Belgium. Therefore, we get companies to sponsor these costs, but we offer these companies something in return. And because we are an educational institution, and DEI is a dimension we want to educate society on, we use games developed by our students in the DEI course to raise awareness in a fun but meaningful way. We offer these game kits plus a train-the-trainer session to companies in exchange for funding for a scholarship to bring in more students working in community projects and NGOs in the Global South. So, the proceeds of our services to these companies go into fundraising for this scholarship.

At VBS, the motivation for establishing the DEI Committee, was to implement corrective measures and to educate students and staff – given the increasing diversity in the school, to catch up on awareness of how to work with diversity and foster inclusion. There was a desire for trainings on best ways of engaging with each other in a diverse community. The factor crucial for the institutional leadership in deciding to establish a service for wider access/inclusion/diversity for students/staff was that one component of the school’s strategic plan is internationalization. For the past decade we have become more international and we will continue to become more international. With that, our diversity has been increasing (beyond just international students to other diversity categories as well), and went beyond our capacity to be able to fully benefit from this diversity within our institution. Initiating DEI work was therefore necessary to foster inclusion in this diversifying environment. This DEI Committee is a successful one for multiple reasons. One is the unwavering support from the top management. The DEI lead reports directly to the Dean and has quarterly meetings with her. The involvement from top management is very strong and very clear. Secondly, some team leads of various business units/ areas of the school are very involved change agents. For instance, the Masters Director and the Head of the Masters Programme, the lead Admissions Officer have been the champions and owners of several major DEI interventions. This is connected with how we are organised in our DEI initiatives: research shows that having one DEI office is insufficient for meaningful change within an institution. The way we work now is along the principles of Spark, Support, Connect. The DEI committee ‘sparks’ interest: we bring attention to a problem and ask the community whether they would like to do something about it. It is up to the community to take this up if they want to and in what way. This ensures our interventions are relevant. The DEI committee then ‘supports’ any initiatives that tackle the problem and do DEI work, such as with research. The DEI committee also ‘connects’ different initiatives and stakeholders (both internal and external) to create a network and foster knowledge exchange. Finally, but definitely a core reason for the success of this Committee, is the fact that all interventions are evidence-based – not just from existing academic research but also based in data and research conducted by our institution. For instance, we have yearly DEI satisfaction surveys for our students, equity and inclusion measures in our bi-yearly Great Place to Work survey, and analytics measures on dimensions of equity for both students and staff. A concrete example of how the last two mechanisms operate in practice: part of the first intervention requested by the Masters/MBA office was a mandatory awareness course that all students have to take. Research shows however that one-off DEI trainings are not effective beyond 2 weeks. Consequently, we designed a course comprising a self-paced component that starts at the very begining of the academic year and runs over 6 weeks. More importantly though, in this course students not only undergo DEI awareness training but also design a DEI intervention to tackle a real-life problem. They work on a project that starts from finding a problem, designing an intervention, implementing it and assessing it. This course has resulted in many successful projects that have been helpful for our institution, and as of last year, we are engaging our external network too. In other words, students work with DEI professionals from companies, coached by them for a month, on a project that is implemented in these companies. This creates a win for the students, for the companies, and for the expansion of knowledge and tools we generate on DEI topics in the school. But this is not just a way to work with students: our »Connect« principle means that even before we started offering this course to all the students, we ran a pilot with a group of staff and faculty. One of the participants in our staff and faculty course worked in admissions, and diagnosed that one of the problems we have is that we spend a lot on marketing to diversify but not proportional return on investment when it comes to diversity in the students that are admitted. This would imply that there are bottlenecks somewhere in the selection process. A first step was designing and implementing implicit bias training for this project, but as we know from research the limited impact this kind of training has in real life, we also found it important to have clearer data on possible biases. We then conducted a full research on these bottlenecks and presented our results and recommendations to the Admissions and Masters teams (different than the original bias trainings they had asked for – focusing on changes that have been shown to work from research, like standardisation of selection processes). This then led to a complete redesign of the admissions process created by the team leads of the Masters and Admissions offices (in extensive back-and-forth with all the masters’ directors to make explicit all their implicit evaluation criteria), resulting in a standardized behavioral anchor scales with descriptors (describing things such as what is excellent, what is poor, etc). The role of the DEI Committee in this was to spark (research) and support (evidence-based proposals of tools and ideas), but the full design and the real work was 100% of the project owners in the teams.

VBS is currently at the 5th reiteration of the structure of the committee. They have been changing the structure in response to the organizational needs, and depending on the priorities of their work. VBS started the committee on a volunteer base (both faculty and staff). As the committee started working on increasingly diverse tasks, we needed different teams to focus on different aspects of DEI. We were initially working on informal education and awareness, organizing the teams per month, per initiative. This approach didn’t have the desired impact. We then changed to being organized in functional units (e.g. executive education, masters, HR, etc). That structure was working, but then it was the volunteer basis that became the hardship. Then we asked for dedicated FTEs, which we received: team leads got 20% and 10%, and the other members get 10%. That didn’t work out either for the members, because it ended up being 10% on top of all their other duties and because of a mismatch of expectations and resources. We needed more people and more buy-in across the organisation. The current structure is as follows. The core team consists of three people. The leadership of the core team works in a co-lead structure: a lead and a co-chair. Every year the co-leads switch roles, where one is end responsible and the ‘front face’, while the other takes on a supportive role. This builds capacity to do everything we want to do while also alleviating the heavy (emotional) load that comes with DEI work. The rest of the members continue to be the ambassadors within different teams throughout the school in the various functional or decision-making units. These are on a volunteer basis and work on various projects relevant for their units. The core DEI team has frequent correspondence with the teams and offers support where needed and the larger team meets quarterly to exchange updates and give input on next priorities. The DEI team is also integrated now in our larger sustainability team, as one of the three pillars of our sustainability strategy. Diversity, inclusion and equality topics are mentioned on the university’s strategies, policies and work plans. At this institution, decisions regarding programme design and other activities are taken by various stakeholders. The DEI contributes most to the content of the decisions and plans, based on the feedback from the various teams throughout the school, and aligning with the wider Sustainability team. Decisions then have to be run by the Executive Committee. (The focus is on prioritizing the plans). The VBS is part of National and Global networks. The outcomes from these networks are mostly the exchange of information and resources and moral support.

The main challenges to establishing this service was to convince people why DEI is relevant and important. Throughout all levels of any institution (mirroring society), there are both champions of DEI, non-believers and un-engaged people. It is also a challenge to convince people that DEI is not about moral policing but about structural changes and cultural transformation. Finally, finding a way in which DEI is embedded in a meaningful way to colleagues’ work processes and team targets, and not just another extra task on top of their job. The main obstacles to ensuring the long-term sustainability of the service is the tiredness of the topic in society. The Executive Committee funds the DEI committee from the strategic fund of the school and the stability of this funding is almost completely stable (5 in 7). The work of this program is totally independent, without the need for unpaid volunteers.

VBS has a formal evaluation process of the service. Previous discussions were held on how to balance quantification of indicators of success (e.g. percentage of women, internationals, etc) with a focus on measuring processes and progress. We wanted to make it very clear that for us this is not a linear process. Sometimes things will fluctuate but this is not necessarily negative. Instead, as indicators we look at for example if there are more people following the training or asking about the topic. The process consists therefore in more qualitative indicators. The full evaluation report is first given to the Executive Committee and the various teams. A portion of the report also goes on the DEI intranet page, which is accessible to all staff members of school. From that, a part of it is disseminated in the form of a yearly report, which is made publicly available online to everyone. Equity gaps within university data are identified in so far as possible (e.g. within recruitment and promotions), but this mainly happens on the basis of gender ratios, since other data regarding ethnicity is unavailable (sometimes also nationality is used as an indicator but this says little about racialized status) Evaluation reports are only shared with the leadership bodies within the universities.