More equality in your organisation? Embrace all your data!
Wherever your organisation is located, the likelihood its culture is impacted by the latest societal events is quite strong. HR used to be the only department in charge of organisational culture, being the source of data on the workforce. However, organisational culture is evermore a cross-departmental matter: it’s a redefining of values based on data and changing mindsets.
Nevertheless, HR is still the motor in making the shift towards a more inclusive company culture. HR departments work together with IT departments, management, coaches, marketing departments and the complete workforce to ensure equality for all employees as a shared responsibility.
However, we need non-biased people data and analytics to start from: where do we see blind spots in our organisation with regard to equality? How can data become part of the change process towards a more equal organisation for all?
Approaching equality as a change process
Just as any other change, a cultural change in an organisation has the intention to improve the outcome for the business and employees alike. Therefore, it’s important to set clear goals and choose the right business case to attain a buy-in from all stakeholders. You will also need a well-planned and controlled change management process or road map and identify your core work group and resources. Likewise, communication throughout the process is a critical element, just like the monitoring of resistance and how to manage it. And finally, a change process is a continuous improvement that needs to be measured and optimised.
In a crucial matter such as equality, it’s important to introduce data and analytics in the beginning of this process. And we shouldn’t stop at merely introducing the data and basing our outcome on it. As we analyse the available data on retention, skills and capacities available, how to invest in other skills, satisfaction of the workforce and more, we also need to be aware of bias and its impact on the rest of the process.
Equality based on data
In order to make any type of decision, we normally rely on nearly 200 types of cognitive biases. Some of them serve us well to make decisions, because we just cannot always start off without a shred of information before making a new decision. But others don’t serve us less well in these decision-making moments, as we may base our choices on damaging believes about other people. This is why we need to avoid biased data impacting our HR data, and changing our organisational culture in the meanwhile. To avoid bias as much as possible, we need a clear definition of what equality means for our organisation.
Making a concept like equality tangible by defining exactly what it looks like for different stakeholders will most likely imply digging deeper into your organisation’s data and culture.
Big data goes beyond surveys
Around the world, biases that take away people’s possibilities to develop their job opportunities are becoming more visible. Greater equality is a priority for an increasingly higher number of companies and strategies are being implemented, depending on data that is verifiable, reliable, and ensures integrity.
Collecting and using data in an inclusive way generates greater revenues, and other positive, non-financial outcomes such as employee retention, and operational replicability and scalability. According to McKinsey, an increase in the level of gender equality alone will add $28 trillion to the global GDP by 2025. Therefore, it’s paramount to transcend traditional data collection methods like surveys, interviews, and focus groups. The collection of big data, based on non-biased input is crucial for identifying the needs and concerns of everybody in your company.
All data—turnover rates, salaries, employee demographics, lists of available positions, is useful. Not only to compare salaries to turnover rates and gender, but also to define why the diversity percentage in your organisation is what it is, or why management is mostly male,… What data can you extract from tools? Your IT department can help with data regarding availability and flexibility or the communication and marketing department assist you with insights in communication that’s appealing to what kind of audience and why.
Taking steps to a fairer organisation, based on non-biased data is a process which contains various insights and big changes. But the outcome can signify an enormous advantage for your company, for the economy and especially for the diverse talent in your organisation. How are you working on collecting non-biased data to make your company more inclusive? Let me know in the comments!