Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement

Combining your Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement Surveys is even more important than ever.   Importantly when you most need to understand the drivers in your organisations culture this is where the benefits are combined.

Understanding the Facts as of Today

Initiating a continuous process for understanding the facts of what’s happening inside the organisation today. Examples include:

  • Gathering and analysing data to remove bias and increase opportunity, including demographic data, performance and compensation data, and feedback from customers.
  • Sharing information on the diversity of the company with employees

Building an Inspirational Strategy to Engage and Retain

Creating a business-focused vision and strategy for D&I that reflects the reality of today and the real potential of tomorrow. Examples include:

  • Identifying D&I as a priority for driving business results
  • Publicly communicating progress toward meeting goals

Developing Leadership and Engagement through Collaboration

Engaging leadership around an inspirational D&I strategy by articulating the business case and establishing supportive governance, policies and procedures. Examples include:

  • Leaders communicating regularly about D&I as part of broader discussions about business priorities and results
  • Holding leaders accountable for D&I results
  • Placing oversight for D&I with Senior Leadership and the Board of Directors

Creating a Sustainable movement that drives Culture

Executing the D&I strategy across all elements of your business and talent ecosystem. Examples include:

  • Initiation of KPI’s that make everyone accountable for Culture and Engagement
  • Embedding a diversity lens into talent management, training, and supply chain operations and programmes
  • Embracing a broad definition of diversity that includes a focus on inclusion of all differences
  • Leveraging affinity networks to inform strategic priorities

Designing for Balance

When you structure a survey you need to balance the questionnaire with questions approaching it from both positive and negative.  The major reason for alternating item wording is to minimize extreme response bias and acquiescent bias.

ADVANTAGE OF ALTERNATING

There are two major reasons for alternating item wording.

Reducing Acquiescent Bias: This is what happens when users generally go on auto-pilot and agree to all statements. In a 5-point scale these would be all 4’s and 5’s.

Reducing Extreme Response Bias: Participants who provide all high or all low ratings (all 5’s or all 1’s on a 5 point scale). This is somewhat related to the acquiescent bias except respondents basically pick the most extreme rating and provide it to many or all items.

By including a mix of both positive and negative items, respondents are forced to consider the question and (hopefully) provide a more meaningful response which should reduce these biases.

NORMING EFFECTS

A General Survey structure is useless to an organisation as your Business results need to stand alone and be compared to your actual result.  An Australian or International norm doesn’t work for unique cultures as your business performance and the way you drive the Diversity and Engagement aspects is unique to your culture and where you want to take it.   The recommended approach and for a combined Diversity and Inclusion / Engagement Survey would be as follows.

QUESTIONS FOR THE DIVERSITY SURVEY

Spread across several key diversity and inclusion categories they ask a range of strategic and demographic questions. EG:

  • How does D&I contribute to delivery of business performance goals?
  • How are D&I considerations incorporated into business decisions on key topics such as customers, products, and location?
  • How are leaders held accountable for D&I results?
  • What mechanisms are in place to monitor and respond to what is working – and what is not?
  • How effectively do programmes create a more inclusive environment, and not only a more diverse one?

FOCAL POINTS FOR THE ENGAGEMENT SURVEY 

  • engagement
  • autonomy / empowerment
  • career progression
  • collaboration
  • communication
  • company leadership
  • pay and benefits
  • quality of product / service
  • recognition
  • resources
  • strategy alignment
  • supportive management
  • training and development

PROGRAM BUILD

Program development is normally 5-10 days of consultancy following the below framework. Depending on the depth of what you require our consultant would follow the following framework:

  • DESIGN
    • Review of existing any Diversity Tool and Employee Engagement Surveys
    • Complete Organisational Analysis against the mapping frameworks
  • BUILD
    • Design Survey Tool as a combined Tool collecting metrics for Diversity, Inclusion, Demographic and Employee Engagement Data
  • ANALYSE
    • Create Formal Report Structure complete with metrics and results from Analysis of Survey
  • IMPLEMENT
    • Reset the organisational data around Diversity, Inclusion and Employee Engagement Metrics
    • Debrief the Final Report
    • Train HR Team to use and interpret the report
    • Debrief the Pulse Survey Framework and Analysis
  • SUPPORT
    • Produce Final Organisational Report
    • Provide ongoing support for HR Team

 

The real benefits is the linkage to strategy, culture and improving performance aspects for the organisations and collating key strategic information to leverage Employee Engagement and Retention.

This is a big cost to any industry and getting ahead of the curve has pure bottom line strategic savings.  Also the long term savings of owning it and doing this internally is better substantive.

Once we’ve built your framework we transfer the skills and knowledge developed externally to your internal team to manage and drive the Cultural and Engagement facets against a centralised Career Development, Performance and Succession Planning system.    That means training your people understand and complete the analytical cycles and interpretation.  With this in mind the sensitivity of much of the content that comes from these surveys needs to be managed confidentially.  Our systems are loaded with the frameworks on our system for independence and anonymity.  This is an important factor most companies overlook.

Although the answer to that turns on the widely accepted advisability of the standard business case in favour of inclusion and diversity, in particular that there is merit in the employee profile of a workplace reflecting its customer demographics, some workplaces may come under pressure to abandon the strategy as a worthwhile pursuit.