For those of you who have been in the HR space for a while, DE&I has been discussed for a long time, although it has received more attention in recent years. More recently, some organizations added “Belonging” to their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts. This is important because individuals and groups of individuals cannot feel isolated, lack the understanding of how they add value to the organization and their teams, and feel excluded. A pure “numbers game” of diversity will not ultimately be successful without cultural acceptance and inclusion, and organizational changes from the top down.
I recently saw a headline that earnings of black men, as a percentage of earnings of white men, are at the same place they were 50 years ago. Although I can’t say that I’m completely surprised, it took the wind out of my sails. For so many years, HR Analytics teams have brought awareness to progress on organizational diversity, but we still have a long way to go both in terms of gender and ethnic equality.
In this article we will discuss some KPIs and metrics that are helpful in tracking diversity, but meeting (and exceeding) diversity goals requires top down changes across the organization. I’ll touch on some of these today.
My experience in looking for jobs has been that you can always expect certain elements, such as a job description, a paragraph about why you should work for the company, and candidate requirements. Every job that I have applied for in my professional career has required a college degree, some required a bachelors, others a masters. At first glance, you might say that this sounds like a reasonable requirement. Because we are used to it, it’s second nature that a college degree would be required.
Did you know that the percentage of black Americans with a college degree is much lower than that of white americans? By requiring college degrees, we are excluding somewhere around 2/3rds of the black population from qualifying for these positions. How are we to meet diversity goals and practice general societal inclusion when we are excluding the majority of a target population from qualifying for a position?
Some organizations who are recognizing the fast transformation that their industry is (or will be) going through have started to think about ways to meet the demands of the future. Let’s use an energy company as an example. With more and more focus on greener production and fuels and some countries pledging to become carbon neutral, the energy sector is going through a massive transformation that will require up and re-skilling of parts of their existing workforce to obtain skills around carbon capture and other carbon-neutral functions.
Generally when organizations are looking for certain needs, they can either staff from within their existing workforce, hire for the need, or obtain a temporary contractor. The energy transformation means that the need for certain skills will start to decrease while the need for new skills will start to increase. As a company with an existing workforce, this presents a significant challenge, especially when the new skills are not yet readily available in the marketplace, requiring organizations to determine who within their current workforce they should re-skill and what the most effective means of that re-skilling will be.
There is a broader movement that is starting to focus more on skills and the types of skills that someone might be able to learn easily because their existing skills may be adjacent to a required skill for a job and there are technologies in the marketplace that help organizations with this.
Earlier I made the point that college degree requirements exclude most of the black population from qualifying for a position, even if they have similar (or better) hands-on experience than a candidate with a college degree. By shifting to a skill-based approach, some organizations have asked the question about whether college degrees should really be required for most positions. Other organizations have already taken the step to remove this requirement from most of their positions. Make no mistake – this is not a decision that a recruiter can make on their own, nor is it a decision that a manager is likely to make about their team on their own. It’s an organizational shift with the willingness to change something that’s been around forever and requires champions for change at the very top of the organization.
Bias has long been talked about as an issue in the recruiting process. Most bias is unintentional, but all of us have some level of bias, even if we don’t recognize it. Names, home addresses, educational background, and other attributes found on a candidate resume or job application can all trigger a bias that may either make us favor or disfavor an individual. What are the reasons for why a recruiter or hiring manager needs to see someones’ name when they are browsing an application? What can we do to accept that there is (unintentional) bias and reduce its impact? Some solutions allow masking of certain personal data with the focus on what matters for the job (skills, etc.) and studies are starting to trickle in to show that masking of certain data is helping diversify the recruiting funnel
Lastly, let’s cover some KPIs and metrics that are useful in tracking Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Remember that simply reporting on these metrics (or any metric) is not enough. How these metrics affect workflows, job requirements and organizational culture is the part that will move the needle.
- What is our current diversity and does our diversity meet business objectives?
This is a view into the organization, which is often broken down by various business segments and trended over time. If your organization has diversity targets, it’s helpful to understand how the organization has moved towards the target over time. What parts of the business have over or under performed? Talk to individuals and groups who have overperformed to understand what they have done to get to where they are and then find ways to apply this to other parts of the business.
Next, look at whether your diversity meets business objectives. This is not necessarily tied to overall diversity targets, but rather to specific business needs. An organization that delivers services, solutions, or policies to an ethnically and linguistically diverse population may need to track backgrounds of their own employees so that they can leverage employees with common cultural backgrounds to ensure business needs and community needs are met.
- What is the diversity of our candidate pool as compared to our hiring pool?
Understanding the makeup of your candidate and hiring pool is instrumental in organizational change. If your candidate pool lacks diversity, it should provoke questions around what may be contributing to this. Are parts of the job requirements excluding a more diverse set of candidates? What are you seeing on social channels about your company culture around diversity and inclusion? If you have a diverse set of candidates, but a non-diverse hiring pool, that should raise questions around what is contributing to the exclusion of diverse candidates for hire.
Data, analytics, and research can help shed light to some of the reasons, but we really have to look at ourselves in the mirror to truly understand contributing factors and be willing to change.
- What is the retention rate across our employee base (diversity and gender)?
Assessing retention rates across the employee base, both within the first 90 days, one year of employment, and overall retention rates can provide insight into advancement opportunities across the employee base as well as acceptance across the employee base. How engaged are various subsets of employees across the organization? Do parts of the organization have greater engagement and lower turnover for diverse team members? If so, explore the reasons for this and see how this can be applied across the organization as a whole.
- What is the advancement rate across our employee base (diversity and gender)?
Advancement and retention are related in that when employees are not provided a path to advance their skill sets and careers, as well as feel a sense of belonging and inclusion, they will move on. Understanding advancement rates of the employee base across the organization is helpful in understanding whether we are providing growth opportunities for all, or if we have room for improvement.
- What is the employee perception of diversity and inclusion at our organization? How does that differ across diversity and gender?
By means of anonymous surveys, questions that are carefully crafted, and ultimately showing follow through on how survey responses affect organizational culture, employers should ask their team members about their perception and whether the organization truly has an inclusive culture. The important part here is to ensure that team members feel safe to share their views in an anonymous fashion and that the organization takes the input seriously and uses it for change. If that is not done, then employees are less likely to complete the survey or share their true feelings.
As you can see, DEI & B cannot be successful until we are willing to look at ourselves in the mirror to uncover the honest truth about the organization and has to be a top-down led effort. Organizations that have struggled to hire, retain, or meet diversity goals have not been able to fully embrace what it takes to become an accepting diverse organization.