How People Analytics has the Power to Push DE&I Efforts Further

As part of a broader conversation about race across the U.S., scores of companies made major diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) commitments over the last 18 months. Many have encountered a disconnect between announcing DE&I goals and identifying the practical steps they can take to get there. And it’s not just whether they implement strategies — they also need to measure the success of those strategies to progress toward their goals. If they pursue those efforts without holding themselves accountable, companies risk poor execution, stalling their good intentions. 

By bringing a company’s DE&I data together from multiple sources and offering actionable insights through powerful visualizations, a people analytics solution can surface issues, encourage transparency and drive change, helping further DE&I efforts. I see 2022 being the year that businesses embrace people analytics as a way to measurably improve in many areas, including staying true to their DE&I efforts. Here’s how people analytics can help measure those outcomes, provide transparency for your team and enable action at every level.

Use Training as the First Step

Engaging your workforce in diversity training promotes an organization-wide understanding of key DE&I concepts and provides a starting point for real action. Training offers essential information and perspectives about diversity and fosters awareness around workplace biases while laying the groundwork to set measurable goals and benchmarks. But training isn’t the end of an organization’s work to advance DE&I initiatives; it’s the beginning. 

Creating measurable goals that reflect diversity training ideals will reinforce that training and give your employees a shared vision for progress within your organization. To support your promises with action, you have to know where you are as a company and where you want to go. By understanding and owning your DE&I data, you can uncover biases and create measurable steps to resolve gaps in hiring, retention, engagement, belonging and other areas.

Identify and Visualize Key DE&I Data

Knowing and owning your data starts with taking an honest look at your policies and practices to identify whether and how your current strategies perpetuate bias. You can use people analytics to pinpoint where implicit bias exists in your hiring processes, promotion choices and even your daily employee experience. By visualizing and analyzing this data, you can approach your DE&I goals with a clear snapshot of your current organization and surface insights to inform your actions. Start small by building dashboards in a people analytics platform and tracking that data over time. A dynamic organization chart will help you see your teams and visualize how they have changed over time. 

See More: Driving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Through Data

What data should you be looking at? Start with these three broad categories: representation, compensation, and performance. 

Representation. It matters who’s represented in your organization. Go deeper than simple blanket percentages for race, ethnicity or gender across your organization and consider additional views of representation. A people analytics platform can transform data sets into easy-to-understand visuals that promote action. This allows you to easily look at the breakdown within your new hire cohorts, in each department and across role types (think administrative, technical, internal and external). In addition, capture representation information for each office location, within cross-functional project teams, at each management layer and within individual contributor levels. 

Compensation. For every $1 paid to white men, Black men earn 88 cents. Meanwhile, Black women receive 76 cents by comparison, a recent PayScale surveyOpens a new window revealed. Add to that the lack of negotiating power that people of color work against during the hiring process, and you can see how differences in compensation are a significant driver of racial inequities. You don’t need to hire an analyst to help you find these numbers. You need a people analytics platform that easily surfaces what you’re seeking, empowering your leaders to see where you are as an organization and what you can do to move forward.

As you review your organization’s compensation data, ensure you’re going beyond just base compensation (fixed salary or hourly wage). Include variable compensation (bonuses and commission) and equity compensation (non-cash pay that includes options, stock units or ownership in the firm itself). The sum of those three will show you total compensation. Why is total compensation so significant? Because while companies, especially in the tech industry, increasingly create wealth through equity ownership, historically underrepresented groups aren’t equally included in that growthOpens a new window , according to our findings. 

Consider pay data within the context of your current team. If your average compensation for Black employees is lower than for other groups because more of your Black employees are in entry-level roles, the answer is to hire more Black professionals in higher-level positions. If, however, you examine average compensation at each hiring level and identify pay gaps, you’ll need to adjust compensation.

Performance. This category reflects both how the employee is performing and how the company supports its employees through data like reviews, employee engagement and turnover.

Performance reviews influence an employee’s mobility in a company, informing decisions about raises and promotions. But what if those reviews don’t tell the whole story because of bias? You can compare your review data across race, ethnicity, gender, and other attributes in a people analytics platform to spot disparities. From there, drill down deeper with attention to review categories (downward, upward, peer, self) and promotion data. You might find a particular member of management consistently giving harsher ratings to the same racial or ethnic group or not recommending promotions for equal work.

Engagement data, such as NPS and one-on-one ratings, will give you insight into how your employees feel about their workplace and colleagues. Couple those with a closer look at turnover rates and average tenure, and you’ll understand more about possible issues with company culture or hiring. Pairing that information with qualitative data, such as exit surveys, will give you even more insight.

Rely on Your Data To Enable Action 

How can you drive action with your data? Share it. 

Transparency drives accountability and change, but your organization won’t transform overnight. Start by sharing important insights with leaders, explaining the data about their teams and the changes needed. Then open the conversation to how you’ll rely on those leaders to support company-wide goals. Build out visualizations through a people analytics platform to help managers understand the data and steps for themselves, then help them share it with their teams.

Next, prepare to share data with your whole organization. Before you do that, consider these best practices:

• Understand your data deeply so you can answer their questions.
• Decide what data you’re going to share. Starting with representation data is safest, especially because sharing compensation or performance data could point out an individual if any groups are particularly small.
• Identify what you want to change and the steps you’ll take to do it so that employees have actionable takeaways.
• Make a plan for when and how often you’ll share updated data to create accountability for the objectives and goals you’ve announced. That could include creating an organization-wide DE&I dashboard that anyone can access within a people analytics platform.

It’s exciting to see companies with ambitious DE&I goals, but what excites me even more, is the way people analytics can provide momentum to this movement. Data can drive change when it’s accessible to executives, managers and employees and when it serves as the basis for measurable steps that offer accountability. 

How are you utilizing people analytics to power your DE&I efforts? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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