There’s no doubt, diversity is good for business and that is the widely accepted view of the vast majority of employers. Indeed, the data shows businesses are devoting more attention and resources to diversity initiatives than ever before – it is recognised as business critical, directly linked to the performance of the business. But is it working?
That is a question that many of our clients’ HR teams have been tasked with and the answer, from the work we’ve done with clients on this is … ‘it depends’. The mistake some have made is believing the job is done once they can see that their team is diverse. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. For a team to truly achieve its potential, leaders must strive to foster a culture that’s inclusive, not just diverse. So, diversity creates the potential for different opinions and ideas, but it’s inclusion that allows that potential to be realised.
The snag is, unlike diversity, inclusion is much more difficult to measure - how do you measure the degree to which employees are embraced and enabled to make meaningful contributions? So, while we can measure diversity by putting people in their respective ‘boxes’ and counting them that doesn’t tell you anything about inclusion. Inclusion is a much more nuanced, complex, concept which depends on how people feel and their perceptions of themselves and the business.
To help with that the CIPD has produced a 36-page long report called ‘Building Inclusive Workplaces – Assessing the Evidence’. Its central message to HR is that measuring inclusion, however you approach it, needs to be done in a ‘systematic and structured’ way, and they cite a wealth of evidence to back that up.
We agree, and that is the approach we have been taking with a number of our clients with help from Pinsent Masons’ D&I consultancy Brook Graham. Brook Graham’s approach is based on a framework geared to understanding the approach, culture, behaviours and lived experience of inclusion and which provides recommendations for action.
So how does it work? As you would expect, the model depends on data being fed into each of the five core elements so let’s hear more about that. Kate Dodd is Head of the Brook Graham Consultancy and earlier she joined my by video-link to discuss it. So where does the data come from?
Kate Dodd: “So, the data essentially comes from a number of different sources and it's qualitative and also quantitative. So, what that means is qualitative data is talking to people. It's understanding their lived experiences. So things like focus groups, interviews, some open text boxes on surveys etcetera, so allowing people to use their own words to describe their experiences within a business is what we consider to be qualitative data. Then, of course, we would also input quantitative data and that is things like diversity data. So not just the diversity within the business, but also, for example, the number of people who are preferring not to say. So, if you're being asked about, for example, where you are in terms of LGBT status, the number of people taking ‘prefer not to say’ in relation to that question will help you to understand how inclusive your business is in relation to LGBT safety within the business, essentially, and what businesses want to see is that decreasing year on year. The other types of things that you would look to include would be data from exit interviews, understanding also what you could find out from existing things like employee engagement surveys. Also, having a look at policies around the employee lifecycle, etcetera. So, all of those things will be used to gather the information that's needed to go into this dimensional assessment.”
Joe Glavina: “Presumably, Kate, when you’re working with clients on this, you’re working with HR? So HR should be leading this?”
Kate Dodd: “Well, yes, exactly. Brook Graham will usually work with HR, or lots of our clients have their own dedicated D&I team who we would work with then, essentially, it's a process of talking to people. So, the entire process would usually take probably six weeks, and it really just depends on how quickly those focus groups, one to ones, etcetera can be organised and then, of course, there's the process of then reviewing all of the data and pulling everything together in a report and then, of course, having that measured in the inclusion framework so that clients can really get a good understanding of where they sit on this framework and also they will get given an action plan with dates and priorities to understand what types of steps they may want to take to make their business more inclusive.”
Joe Glavina: “So what has the feedback been from clients who have been through this?”
Kate Dodd: “So, what we know from our clients who've been through this process is this level of understanding, self-awareness and understanding, is absolutely crucial to make progress, and the time when it is actually really, really helpful has been those businesses who are actually really good in some aspects of diversity and inclusion, so they're already moving along our maturity model but they've got stuck and they're really not making progress around gender, or they're not making progress around increasing diversity around race and ethnicity. They’ve got a bottleneck and they don't understand why, and this process has really helped to unlock that for some of our clients.”
It's worth saying that a number of the clients who have taken on that piece of work – measuring inclusion in their workplace – have combined it with a people and culture review. Earlier in the week Brook Graham’s Kieron O’Reilly talked to this programme about the benefits of conducting an organisational culture review and that programme is now available for viewing from the Out-Law website. That’s ‘Boards recognise value of ‘people and culture’ but lack skill set to deal with it, study shows’ and we’ve put a link to it in the transcript of this programme.
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