How do you empower employees to be data literate?

A quick and easy way to do this is to incorporate data literacy goals (and outcomes driven by them) into a certain percentage of the employee's annual goals. Eg. as open-ended as redesign this workflow to make it more data/AI driven or closed-ended like 10% of the KPI (say sales) should be linked to data initiatives.

Excite, Empower & WIIFM! ...Research shows that enterprises with high data literacy scores outperform their peers. Research also shows that many employers are willing to pay a premium (over 26% of the quoted remuneration) to employees with superb data skills. WIIFM - What's In It For Me... The key is to show folks what the world looks like after this skill is acquired. It's truly transformative. Show what can be done post skill attainment (critical thinking, hypothesis forming, arguing a point with analytical empowerment). Done right, you will only have advocates!

Data literacy won't mean the same for everyone. Make sure people, given their role and background can find themselves in whatever framework you put in place. For instance, a marketing analyst may require much more advanced tools that sales representative. Identify the different levels and communicate what's the next step for which type of role. This way, individuals follow along based on their baseline level and take action slightly differently to rely more on data when making business decisions.

Make sure to balance externally acquired data literacy resources with internal data literacy efforts, because the only way to make data literacy actionable is to have the right business context specific to your Organisation - a simple out of the box solution will not suffice. Internal resources don’t have to be boring either - the more creative and entertaining you get, the more memorable it will become. So be creative, and try what works best for your company culture!

So many apps available in company's SSO dashboard. At the end of the day, what matters is that an employee finds one of these resources truly useful. From my experience, what really works are integrations with the tools that data citizens use on a daily basis. For instance, if a knowledge worker is enabled on Tableau for data visualisation, show them how they can pull in new datasets from the enterprise data catalog directly from Tableau.

Start small! Don’t assume that everything has to be big or perfect to begin imbedding the literacy practices throughout your processes and projects. Additionally, be clear in your messaging! Use each and every opportunity to promote and educate everyone on the power of data. Soon enough, you’ll have more people buying into, and supporting your data practices using language they learned from the literacy program. One of the most important things though… take the leap! Often times just taking that first step helps create a snowball effect and things can really take off!

Integrate with tools and workflows that are widely used and popular in a particular function. Enable knowledge workers personally or in small groups with a leader bringing them together over data. SQL hackathons?

One way to improve data literacy (DL) in an organization is training and continuous incremental/modular training with guided hands-on practice. In one of my client organizations, the way we did this was to incentivise application of data concepts learnt by employees onto real "mini projects" that a data literacy coach (or someone from the CDO office responsible for DL) assigned on a monthly basis with weekly check-ins. At yet another client site, we gamified DL and added points to each employee completing a set of learning modules within a set time period that could be redeemed for cool swag. It helped build a stronger data governance program by having employees who became deeply data literate, engaged & won management awards too

I don't like that term "data literate" as it obfuscates the real issue. That data teams believe they are the only people who can work with data. That is not true. I see orgs using data literacy as a tick box exercise through some kind of training program. Most business teams have been using data points for decades to drive their business. They use the data they see and add it to their experiences and make a decision. The fact that now data folks believe everyone is illiterate is nonsense. Instead embed data teams into the fabric of the business functions to understand the processes and their language. Then work out where data can optimise their workflow and deliver better outcomes. That's far more powerful don't you think?

If you're not data 'literate' , are you 'illiterate'? Being mindful of how the message is worded to the business is just as important as the message itself. Keep an eye on unintentional negative connotations. I was recently suggested the term 'Data Fluency' instead