Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - Dr. Alexis Smith Washington, Oklahoma State University

What is your name? I am Lex Smith Washington. Alright, and what is your position here in the department of management? Well, I'm the associate professor of management and I'm also the senior inclusion officer for Spears. I started at Spears in 2012. I became an associate professor in 2019, which is also the year, I started to talk to our Dean about becoming a senior inclusion officer. Then with Spears, what courses do you teach, any diversity? Yeah, I teach the primary diversity equity and inclusion class for the management department, and for a long time it was the only diversity course at Spears. But, over these last few years, we have developed and grown additional diversity courses in marketing, hospitality and tourism management, and MSIS. So, there's a bunch of places where we're doing some of this work, but my class focuses more on human resources, so the particular rules, best practices, and policies, that you see organizations, large and small, use to not only manage diversity, but really create inclusive and equitable environments.

What do you think are the three main ways people can implement DEI in their everyday life. Yeah, I mean well everyday life, if you want D, E and I to be a part of your everyday life, that involves largely recognizing your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is probably the space in which you feel the most comfortable, where you kind of can predict what's going to happen, the people and places around you are all familiar. Now one of the thing that we know about human beings, is that we associate similarity with familiarity and comfort. So, we necessarily sort of deviate towards similarity and one of the ways that we can make our world more inclusive and diverse is by breaking out of that tendency. Deciding to try something new, try a different style of food, try a different event, and meet so many people. So in everyday life, it involves stepping out of your comfort zone, intentionally so that you can grow your understanding and your exposure to the world.

As you're stepping out of your comfort zone, once they've decided that they want to, what is the best way to educate themselves on all of this? Any conferences? articles?Yeah. Any of that? Well, actually, we're really living in interesting times, right? So the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and the racial awakening that I think this country in particular, and many others around the world, have been going through, has made it so that not only are these conversations more prevalent but we're also producing so much more. Not just research, but information, information sharing, podcasts, television shows, movies, and entire documentaries. So I think, there's never been an easier time to get familiar with DEI things.

I personally love podcasts. Okay I'm gonna say, what's your favorite podcast? I'm a podcast person, and I think my favorite one around diversity issues is called "Code Switch", and it's on NPR. I get it on my regular phone podcast streaming service, whatever you use, and what I like about it is that topics vary and change every single week and it's updated very regularly so it's not like you're reading a textbook from 10 years ago or 15 years ago trying to get current. You are actually currently taking in knowledge listening to conversations with experts who think about this, write about this, work on this every day, and that's more for like regular everyday engagement with diversity and conversations about inclusion and equity.

But if you want to take a more business oriented point of view or really focus on the idea of DEI in an organizational space, there's some really great podcasts available through Harvard. They have a gender, women at work podcast, they have a race at work podcast, and there's also some really interesting programming that comes right out of higher ed. Diverse issues and higher ed has not only a podcast, but daily articles that they publish on the topic. For my friends in practice, in the field, who work in HR, who work in organizations around personnel, I usually recommend Harvard Business Review, Wharton Business Review, all of those are really great places with people who are actively doing research on this every day and keeping people up to date.