3 Ways To Find D&I Insights In Your Data

D&I is an ongoing initiative, not a one-off or annual task

Over the past few years, diversity and inclusion — or D&I — has been a hot topic in the business community. Now more than ever, organizations are putting a critical eye to their D&I initiatives. You’ve probably looked for ways to improve D&I at your company, or even led the charge on a program.

Diversity and inclusion are ongoing, long-term efforts. Have you ever found yourself wondering if your efforts are truly working? How does your organization compare to benchmarks across the industry? Are you reaching or at least making progress toward your goals? 

Here are three ways you can utilize your employee data to uncover D&I insights that can help you make positive changes for your organization. 

The first step toward a diverse and inclusive workplace is understanding how diverse your organization actually is and identifying opportunities by using the employee data you have. Meaning, you not only have to collect employee data, but you have to study and understand it as well. 

Start by establishing a baseline with your HR analytics. As part of that, you should be collecting data like demographics by department, role, and location. You can compare this employee data to industry standards, such as information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, to understand how your organization stacks up. 

You can also delve further into these diversity statistics — slicing and dicing the data for more insights. For example, look at race, age, and gender diversity by management level, department, and office and location. 

These different views will allow you to identify where your organization’s D&I strengths and weaknesses are. For instance, if you recognize a gap in diversity, you might re-evaluate things such as your hiring process. What steps in the hiring process could be inequitable or non-inclusive? Is the phrasing in the job posting revealing unconscious biases? Are you sourcing a diverse pool of candidates? What are you doing to make sure everyone feels included? These are ideas to consider as you navigate your D&I thinking and decision-making.

Collaboration tools can encourage teamwork, especially right now with more of the workforce working remotely. However, they also have valuable data on the back end that can support inclusive decision-making. 

Are most of the communication within your chat applications being done on a public channel or privately? Open communication is a great way to encourage collaboration, transparency, visibility, and more opportunities for recognition. And although private conversations have a time and place, they also run the risk of creating information silos and exclusive culture. 

The same can be true with your project management system. Who is working with whom? Bottlenecks or information silos can indicate a breakdown in knowledge sharing that could ultimately affect inclusion efforts. 

Your recognition software can also show who’s recognizing who. Do you only have top-down recognition, or are peers recognizing each other as well? Do certain people or departments tend to get recognized more often than others? 

This data will give you insight into how people are working together and who may be excluded. Then you can start breaking down barriers to inclusion. 

You have the data — now make it public to your employees! The transparency can feel uncomfortable, but data is enlightening for a reason — having access to the numbers will create more engagement with D&I initiatives among your leaders and employees. 

When your full leadership team has transparency into what’s really going on with D&I, they can be empowered to make well-informed decisions at all times. And when your employees know why individual data is collected, they’ll have trust that it’s being used to continuously improve the diversity and inclusion within your organization. 

What does transparency look like in practice? Take compensation as an example. Keeping salaries a secret can reinforce discrimination, but pay transparency unleashes a lot of positive benefits. Your leaders can ensure they’re paying your employees fairly, and employees will also find comfort in knowing expectations for their roles, which will help them be more engaged with their work. 

D&I is an ongoing initiative — not a one-off or annual task. You might have some trepidation about collecting D&I data. Collecting employee data can make employees suspicious or anxious, especially regarding race, gender, and other identifying demographic information.

By sharing your goals and outcomes, and following through on your word, you can ensure that your D&I initiatives are supported with data instead of gut feeling. That can fuel you to create a better, more diverse, and inclusive workplace for all.