Events

Click on the image below to get the full version of this infographic.

As always, we’d love your feedback at [email protected]!

In this webinar, Stacia Garr from RedThread Research, along with Janice Burns and Susie Lee from Degreed, discuss the biggest findings from the latest study on DEIB and Skills.

2020 and 2021 saw a significant increase in focus on DEIB that stemmed from change in expectations from investors, consumers, and employees. As a result, we can see orgs making marked investments in DEIB.

Skills can form an important part of the efforts to drive DEIB. This presentation covers important questions such as:

• Why do we need skills for DEIB?
• Which skills matter most?
• What should you do now?

This is followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A.

Watch Webinar

Topics discussed:
• • How are talent leaders across functions are collaborating with DEIB leaders to drive change?
  • What are leaders doing to make their workplaces more inclusive?  
  • How are orgs measuring and monitoring their progress, and what results are they seeing?
  • How could this focus on DEIB prepare organizations better for the future?

Our team has recently spent a lot of time trying to understand novel opportunities on which orgs can focus their DEIB efforts. Enter skills.

This infographic (click on the image below to get the full version) highlights key insights from our report, Creating A DEIB Culture: The Skills Every Employee Needs, through which we have tried to answer 3 questions as they relate to skills for DEIB:

• What skills contribute to DEIB, specifically in fostering diversity, enabling people to feel included, and building a culture of belonging in the workplace?
• How those skills might vary, depending on factors such as an employee’s level, role, diversity characteristics, etc.?
• What can orgs do to develop and leverage these skills, including specific approaches and modalities?

As always, we’d love your feedback at [email protected]!

Topics discussed:

 

• Introduction
• Agenda
• A little DEIB & History
• Why history matters
• Diversity data & metrics
• Inclusion data & metrics
• A leading indicator
• 2 ways to approach inclusion analytics
• Where to start: 8 steps of DEIB analytics
• What success metrics should be used measuring DEIB
• Self-ID campaigns
• What should we do if we don't have a lot of data
• What additional data sources should be consider
• Common pitfalls we should avoid
• Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic, the social justice pandemic, and now, the uneven, uncertain return to the office have all contributed in shifting our perspective on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). We all know that what gets measured is what gets done. As a result, people analytics (PA) is increasingly more involved in DEIB efforts than ever. Yet, many leaders struggle to bring together the 2 disciplines of people analytics and DEIB.

This infographic (click on the image below to get the full version) highlights key insights from our report, DEIB Analytics: A Guide to Why & How to Get Started, which includes an iterative, 8-step model that leaders can use to map out their DEIB analytics approach.

As always, we’d love your feedback at [email protected]!

 

Listen

DETAILS

Are we kidding ourselves when it comes to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB)? There’s been a LOT of talk about it, after all: is it being matched by any real action? Is the action that’s happening even being driven by leadership, or is it somehow something we’re getting ground-level folks to do, kind of for free, along with everything else we need off them in the COVID crisis? Are there any numbers, what do they tell us—and are they any good? What does DEIB success look like… and what can I do to move the needle here? These are good, maybe even critical questions, for society in 2021. But we don’t know the answers—which is why we’re inviting you to come along with us on a journey to find them together. Welcome to Season 2 of “‘Workplace Stories”’ from RedThread Research, which we have entitled, with some optimism, perhaps, ‘Integrating Inclusion,:’ a series of conversations on this core HR and HR tech issue. And like Season 1, along the way we think we’re going to be hearing maybe just one or two stories from people on the DEIB front line that will inspire, inform, and energize you, too, including from amazing guests like PTC’s Hallie Bregman and S&P Global’s Rachel Fichter. Because DEIB really is everyone’s problem—and everyone’s job. 

Resources

• Use these websites to get up to speed on where American business is with DEIB: 
  1. https://www.diversityinc.com/ 
  2. https://www.catalyst.org/ 
• Find out more about our podcast helpmate and facilitator Chris Pirie and his work here 
• Catch up on Season 1 of ‘Workplace Stories’ here 

 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

 

Season Sponsor

We'd like to thank the people at Workday for the exclusive sponsorship of this second Season of “Workplace Stories.” Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday.  It’s one agile system that enables you to grow and engage a more inclusive workforce—it’s your financial, HR, and planning system for a changing world.

Webinar

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar at the end of this Season, where you can meet the team (Dani, Stacia and Chris) and join in a conversation about the future of DEIB in the workplace. You can find out more information, register for the webinar, and access exclusive Season content, including transcripts, at www.redthreadresearch.com/podcast and thanks again to the team at Workday!

We hope you follow “Workplace Stories from RedThread Research” on your podcast hub of choice as we start to tell the Workplace Stories we think matter.

TRANSCRIPT

Five key quotes:

One of the things that we've noticed  since we started RedThread is there are a couple of things that go across everything, and DEIB is one of them: what I do as a learning manager, what I do as a performance manager really affects DEIB and the culture that you create.

It is absolutely a leadership priority. It's also a culture priority. And also, we've learned this word “systemic” this year; it’s gotta be a systems and operational model imperative as well to go fix.

Sophistication has increased. For instance, we're not just looking at pure representation data; we might be looking at representation data from an intersectional lens, so not just black employees, but black women employees. In addition, we're starting and we're seeing this in the DEIB and analytics study. We're starting to see kind of almost a hierarchy of the way that people are approaching these analytics.

For me, it's really a transformational thing, it’s like the digitization of business; it just completely shifts how we're going to have to do work and how we collaborate, and how we lead if we're a leader.

This is going to be the new way of doing work, and if my two girls are going to work in a place in an environment in a world that is inclusive of them and where they really, and truly, in any organization, have the opportunity to lead the same as anybody of a different gender, then the work has to happen now—the change has to happen now for it to be natural.

Stacia Garr:

Welcome to 'Workplace Stories' hosted by RedThread Research, where we look for the ‘red thread’ connecting the humans, ideas, stories, and data defining the near future of people and work practices. 

My name is Stacia Garr, and I'm the co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread Research, along with Dani Johnson, who is also a co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread and Chris Pirie of the Learning Futures Group. We're excited to welcome you to our podcast Season: this episode is part of our second Season called ‘Integrating Inclusion,’ in which we investigate your role in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) journey that we believe is a critical force in shaping the future of work. 

We talk to leaders, thinkers, writers, and practitioners about the current state of the art in DEIB, and we focus specifically on what people analytics, learning, leadership and business leaders can do to move the conversation forward—and why DEIB is everybody's business. 

Chris Pirie:

We'd like to thank the people at Workday for the exclusive sponsorship of this second Season of 'Workplace Stories.' Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and engage a more inclusive workforce—it’s your financial, HR, and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar at the end of this Season, where you can meet the team (Dani, Stacia and myself) and join in a conversation about the future of DEIB in the workplace. You can find out more information, register for the webinar and access exclusive Season content, including transcripts, at www.redthreadresearch.com/podcast and thanks again to the team at Workday!

Stacia Garr:

To launch this Season, Dani and I talked to our collaborator and podcast partner, Chris Pirie. We share our objectives and our aspirations for the Season, and introduce some of the research and people behind it.

Chris Pirie:

Hey, a lot's gone on in the last 18 months—on the planet and in our worlds and everybody's world. Your business seems to have definitely survived and possibly even thrived through this period of time, but a lot's gone on, even since we started podcasting together about nine months ago: how are you both doing, and what have been the highlights and major activities for each of you?

Stacia Garr:

It has been quite the last 15 months. I think for me, one of the highlights, at least professionally, and I don't say this lightly, has been doing the podcast with you, Chris; it’s been something we have wanted to do since the beginning of RedThread, and so getting a chance to do it with such a wonderful partner has been a highlight for me.

I think some of the other highlights have been the opportunity to help provide some clarity during a time of just incredible difficulty. I mean, difficulty certainly for us too, but just being able to write about how we should be thinking about, for instance, managers and how managers could—we had a report called Managing Better, thinking through how we can design for a work that is more responsive, both to the needs of the employees, as well as to the market. And then quite a bit on this critical topic of DEIB, as well as analytics. I think we've just had an opportunity to write and to advise on some really important things that feel like they matter now; they always matter, but during the pandemic, they've mattered more than ever. So that's been a wonderful thing.

Chris Pirie:

It might be confirmation bias on our side, but boy, the topic of work and how we work, and remote work and how we build back better, the work of the future; I mean, it's just been going crazy! Dani, how's your last 18 months been?

Dani Johnson:

Well, if we're talking about the last year 18 months, a lot has happened professionally, as Stacia mentioned for us and RedThread; RedThread is continuing to grow and we're hitting on some really interesting topics—obviously the pandemic threw us all into a completely different world and we've been able to learn a lot as well as answer some of the questions as Stacia mentioned.

Personally, my view of the world has radically changed; in the last 18 months, I've been married and had a child. And this is, I think, particularly poignant for the conversations that we'll be having, because my perspective on working mothers and the challenges that they face and the way the deck is sometimes stacked against them has completely—I mean, I knew it, but experiencing it is something completely different.

Chris Pirie:

Yeah, well said, absolutely. Maybe we could just refresh a little bit on the objectives and the scope and the aspirations of the podcast. Stacia, you called it “Workplace Stories,” and I know that was a carefully thought through name: how does it fit into the overall business model and the work that you do?

Stacia Garr:

I think as a research firm, it can be easy for us to get kind of caught up in the data and providing stories, but often they're small snippets of stories because there's only so much capacity for people to read them in the context of a broader report. And so the podcast”Workplace Stories” really is a chance for us to lift up some of those wonderful stories and really inspirational moments that we hear from people. Often we hear them in our interviews before we bring them on the podcast, but not always, and so this gives us a chance to do that. The other thing that we didn't mention in terms of a change with RedThread is that we've moved to a membership model, which is a great thing because it gives us much more freedom in terms of the research that we do and really to go after the hottest topics without having to necessarily find somebody to sponsor the work. But that does mean that more of our content is behind a paywall, and so the podcast also gives us a chance to really speak more broadly to folks, and to share some of the great things that we're able to see and do and learn with a much broader audience.

Chris Pirie:

Can you talk a little bit about the rationale for shifting your business model there? I think that was always your plan, right, but it's kind of a big step to ask people to subscribe? How's it going, and what was the rationale for that?

Stacia Garr:

Yeah, the rationale is that when we started RedThread, one of Dani and my core areas of focus and importance was around the independence of the work that we are doing high quality, unbiased research. And that has been the case since the beginning, but at the same time, we also know that there can be perceptions potentially around sponsorship: even though our sponsors were wonderful and always let us do our thing, we thought that moving to a membership model would allow us to just broaden that base of financial support for the work that we do because unfortunately, Dani and I are not independently wealthy, and we do have to pay our mortgages and the mortgages of the people who work for us. So it just broadens that base of support, but it has gone really well; I think that we since the beginning, we've been incredibly fortunate that we have wonderful folks who believe in the work that we do and are hungry for that high-quality insight that they know isn't influenced by us trying to sell a consulting project or sell a piece of technology on top of what we're doing. They just want the facts, honestly, as straightforwardly as possible. And that's what we try to do.

Chris Pirie:

Got it. We had a lot of fun in the first Season, which was called “The Skills Obsession,” and we had some great conversations—I had a lot of fun anyway! Did you get feedback from your community? What was the feedback on that first set of episodes that we did in Season One?

Dani Johnson:

Yeah, so far it's been really, really positive. I'm surprised at how many people have commented and kind of come back to us and said, Hey, I really liked this. The other thing that I love is we talked to some really smart people that are doing some really interesting things. And the podcasts have allowed us to not just tell their stories, which we do in writing, but actually to sort of broadcast the passion that they have for the things that they're doing, which I think has been just really engaging to hear people's stories, especially when they're passionate about it.

Chris Pirie:

We're in the stage of this podcast Season, where we're sort of lining up the guests and we've got our wish list of people that we want to have on and we're reaching out to them. And I think it's a real responsibility when people say yes to help tell that story in the most interesting and engaging way. We were lucky enough to have some amazing people in Season One and who really were extremely honest and shared. One of the takeaways for me was just how hard it is to start to approach work through the skills lens, and people were just honest and shared a lot of great information with us.

Dani Johnson:

Yeah, I think that's another thing that sort of surprises me about the podcast. Generally, when we write, everything has to go through somebody's office of general counsel to make sure that the company is okay with it. But when people are speaking about their own personal experience and what they think, it gives us a little bit of freedom to explore that we don't have when we're writing.

Stacia Garr:

And I think also because we're focused on their story versus necessarily trying to make it a repeatable insight that somebody can copy, it allows us to talk more at a personal and human level about why this was important to you? What did you get out of this as a professional, as a human? And I think that insight and passion really change the conversation.

Chris Pirie:

Maybe we can just talk about the research—the broad spectrum of research that you have on your research agenda: people might not know how you pick your research agenda, so you might want to just refresh us there. And we're obviously going to come back around to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, but what's the general landscape of research looking like at RedThread right now?

Dani Johnson:

Yeah. A lot's going on: talent leaders, and just leaders in general, know that a lot is going on. And so we have lots and lots to pick from. Stacia and I spend—I don’t know how long—we do lots of reading: I do an hour of reading every day to sort of get a sense for what's going on out there, and what people care about and what people are struggling with the most, and that's how we pick our research agenda. So on our website we keep a running list of projects that we're doing, and the expected date that we'll be putting things out with respect to those projects, so that's kind of how we decide what goes into it. Some of the things that are on my list, and then I'll kick it over to Stacia, are coaching— we’re seeing sort of an uptick in the coaching discussion again—and then a lot on learning.So when the pandemic happened, the immediate reaction was everybody sort of clinched and went back to the things that they knew, which was LMS and online learning, but we're seeing that open up quite a bit. And so we want to talk about the new skills that L&D needs in order to accommodate the way that the organizations are learning, as well as what are some of the things that the organizations are doing to learn. We introduced a learning framework a couple of years ago, and that will be expanded this year to include everything, not just technology, to really help leaders understand the full breadth of possibilities that they have to teach people.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah, and on my side, I divide it into f three areas. One is broader focus on talent, so we're going to be doing some work on performance management, and as we think about performance management in the hybrid world, what does that look like? And particularly if we think about how some of the breakdowns amongst who is coming into the office and with what frequency—some of that could have some Diversity impacts. So we're looking at that from that angle. I’m hoping to get an update to our responsive managers dataset, because we did a really nice survey on that last October. It'd be fascinating to get some information as we start to return to work—excuse me, the workplace: we’ve all been working really hard!

So that's the talent side. The second kind of group is people analytics, so we just kicked off a study on the C-suite and people analytics, so what do we need the C-suite to know about what they should know about people from a data perspective. And then we're also doing a study on DEIB and analytics right now. And I know we'll reference that in this time, and then we're doing our people analytics technology study. So we've released a deep dive on employee engagement experience. We're working on one on organizational network analysis, and then another deep dive, with the final people analytics tech study coming out at the end of the year.

And then the final area is DEIB. So we've got the DEIB and analytics study that I mentioned, we did a DEIB tech study, a new one in January, and then we're also doing DEIB and skills right now.

Chris Pirie:

So it all feeds together around the sort of common theme of the future of work. Why did you pick DEIB as the topic for the second Season?

Stacia Garr:

Well, we know that DEIB is finally on the agenda of the CEO and boards like it never has been before. And there's a lot of push on HR to do something about it, which I think is wonderful; I think we've been saying we'd do something about it for years and years. But the challenge is that a lot of leaders don't know where to start within HR. They don't know, if I'm a learning leader, what is my responsibility? How do I do this? If I'm a people analytics leader, what do I do? Same thing for leadership. And so we wanted to raise up some of these great stories that we've heard as inspiration and motivation for people on this is what I could do, this is what so-and-so at this company did and to be able to potentially replicate that. I think right now, it just feels like there's a lot of pressure to do something and people aren't sure what they should do that will drive an impact. And with this Season, we're hoping we can accomplish that.

Chris Pirie:

Well, we've got eight conversations, give or take a one or two; it’s a massively complex topic. It's actually the cultural backdrop, the historical backdrop that we're living through—it’s a large part of the forces at work on this topic. Are we going to drill down on some specific areas? How are we going to break it down? How are we going to approach it?

Dani Johnson:

Yeah, we are. One of the things that we've noticed actually, since we started RedThread, is there are a couple of things that go across everything, and DEIB is one of them: what I do as a learning manager, what I do as a performance manager really affects DEIB and the culture that you create.

So we're going to focus on basically three areas. The first one is analytics, where analytics and DEIB cross. There tends to be a little bit of, I don't know if I would call it fear, but at least reticence, when it comes to deciding which metrics you use for DEIB. And as we have broadened the definition from just Diversity to Diversity and Inclusion to Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging, new metrics have sort of popped in. So analytics is definitely one we want to cover.

We also want to cover learning and development. Learning and development sort of has a pretty broad reach within organizations, and if we can get L&D leaders to think more broadly about their role past just DEIB training, then I think that they can have a real impact. The third one is leadership; so Stacia mentioned some great research we've done with respect to managers. We think leadership in general has a very, very big impact on the DEIB culture in organizations, and so helping them come to terms with what their responsibilities are and enabling them and empowering them in the organization is another important part of it.

Chris Pirie:

We talk as if we were sort of imagining what this Season might look like before. And I think there's an important thing to sort of get clear at the start: this is not just a primer on the topic of DEIB, is it, Stacia?

Stacia Garr:

No, it's not. The underlying assumption is that people generally understand what DEIB is, and that they understand that it's important—and imperative, in fact—for their organization. And so we're not going to be covering the basics. We are really going to be diving into, okay, if this is something we should be focused on, what can this type of role, this type of area of the organization focus on to make this become more of a reality?

Chris Pirie:

Got it. How do we all take action? How do we put this into systems, or put fixes into systems that can at least help and move us in the right direction on making a more diverse and inclusive workplace?

What if people do feel like they need a primer, are there are some particular resources that you would point to?

Stacia Garr:

I think going to a place like Diversity Inc. is a decent place to get started. Certainly if you're interested, particularly from the women in organizations perspective. Looking at Catalyst would be a wonderful place as well. Those would be solid places to start, but there is just a wealth of information out there in general.

Chris Pirie:

Can you just basically lay out for us, what is the research that you've done to date on the topic, and what are you planning to do in the future?

Stacia Garr:

Since we launched RedThread, a primary focus has been D&I technology: that was actually one of the first studies that we came out with when we launched the company and we updated that, like I said, in January, 2021. We are doing a study on DEIB and analytics, and another one on DEIB and skills—so really that one is about what are the skills necessary to create a culture of DEIB? And we're focused on skills broadly that we are likely already teaching our managers and leaders to understand which ones are most relevant. So those are some areas of focus at the moment. I would say though, that given our general bent, we look at pretty much everything we do with a DEIB lens. So there will likely be quite a bit more even potentially by the time that this podcast finishes running.

Chris Pirie:

Got it. Any sort of headline takeaways from the research that you've done so far that maybe is particularly thought-provoking and underlying some of the conversations we want to have?

Stacia Garr:

Well, one is we published the DEIB tech study, as I mentioned, at the beginning of the year. And we had just an incredible increase in the number of vendors who are now primarily what we call DEIB feature vendors, so they have it as an adjunct to something else that they do. My takeaway, or my question that I've been considering, is should there even be a DEIB tech 2023 study for instance, or will this become so mainstream that it really truly is just a feature of other technologies? And if that's the case, then that kind of leads us naturally to what we're talking about with this podcast, which is, okay, like if the tech's there, how do we integrate it? How do we connect it to all of our systems and practices?

So I think that is one thing I've been kind of noodling on—I don't think I've even told Dani that, so, Hey, Dani, maybe we won't do that study, but that's something I've been thinking about. So I think that's a big takeaway. I think one of the other things that I've been fascinated about in the DEIB and skills study, as well as the DEIB and analytics study, has been almost the transition of responsibility of certain aspects of DEIB to these different groups. So historically, learning, for instance, didn't do a lot of the work with DEIB—so like if you went to the unconscious bias training, it was usually the DEIB team or an ERG who put that together. And that had the benefit of one, it got done, but two, you had real subject matter experts doing that work. But it had the drawback of you didn't have the learning team’s expertise; you didn't have people who actually necessarily knew how to put together a course effectively, et cetera. We just have the same thing with people analytics, where we have problems with the data sets, et cetera, et cetera, where it wasn't kind of the central organization doing that work, but it was a separate team.

I am fascinated to see in our interviews that those groups are now kind of not even reclaiming, they are claiming that work. And the DEIB team is now the SMEs providing insights. And that feels like a very dramatic shift from where we were five years ago with this space.

Chris Pirie:

This makes me think about your work earlier, Dani (I associate you with this piece of work) around the learning organization and kind of learning maybe six or seven years ago; suddenly we realized that it's too important to just leave to one small team in HR—that it has to become everybody's business. And maybe that one small team in HR’s job is to help propagate and accelerate, nurture learning culture throughout the organization. This sounds like a very similar kind of shift that's going on. Surely DEIB has to be everybody's business, and the question is, what do I do in my particular role?

Dani Johnson:

I actually think it's interesting that we're talking about this because for years and years, we've had a DEIB head or an ERG group that focused on DEIB. And that was how we got DEIB “done” within an organization. And it's become an important enough topic where the C-suite is now paying attention to it, and not just putting a chief officer in charge of DEIB, but also saying to everybody else, Hey, how are we going to actually boots on the ground, get this done?

Stacia Garr:

You know what I just saw though, to that point, is also some organizations are beginning to pay ERG leaders for their extra time: I saw that LinkedIn is doing that now, and Twitter is doing that now. And there's some debate. It's fascinating. There's some debate where some people are saying, well, is this like a good thing? Because like, people should want to do this work.

My perspective is like, this is work and this benefits the organization, so the organization should pay for it. It shouldn't be on the backs of just volunteers who are doing this. But I think all of that is pointing to the increased importance and willingness to invest in this that organizations are starting to truly show.

Dani Johnson:

I think that point's interesting—that people think there are enough noble people on the ground, and maybe there are, but enough noble people on the ground that will do this as a side-gig, an unpaid side-gig instead of actually investing in it and the organization. It makes me a little bit angry, actually.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. The thing that drives me the most crazy about that is that the people who are investing in this as a side gig are the people who have the lowest power in the organization.

Dani Johnson:

Yes!

Chris Pirie:

We know that culture has to come from leaders. We know that it can and should also come from the ground up as well. But boy, without a leadership directive, this is heavy, heavy lifting in any, in any organization, surely?

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. And by paying these ERG leaders, the leadership is saying, “This matters, this matters enough for us to put our money where our mouth is.” You know, I was struck by something, if you guys remember Matthew Daniel said in the last Season, which was something to the effect of there's unexpected biases, for instance, in our learning work. So if we're expecting people to take extra classes on their own time, there's an assumption that those people have that time, right? That they don't have to rush off and do childcare, or whatever it is. And if you think about that in this context, the paying of these people for their additional time that they're putting in the ERG is potentially addressing a bias that exists—which is that they should just magically find the time to do this. Actually you're now paying them to do it. So if they do have childcare needs, they've got a little bit extra money to pay for that childcare, whatever it is. But I just feel like we need to pay for this work to get done, because we're asking our, as I said, our lowest-power people to do this work. And that's unfair.

Dani Johnson:

I also think when the lowest-power people do it, there's not a lot of coordination and cooperation across the organization—and so having the CEO address it and making sure that it rolls down through everything, I'm hoping, facilitates a consistent strategy across the org.

Chris Pirie:

So maybe it's definitely leadership. I think we can all agree on that. It is absolutely a leadership priority. It's also a culture priority. And also, we've learned this word “systemic” this year; it’s gotta be a systems and operational model imperative as well to go fix.

Quick question on the audience: who is going to get the most out of this? I mean, I guarantee the people we're going to talk to are going to blow our minds, and so hopefully everyone will enjoy it. But as we designed it, what was the sort of audience that you had in mind?

Dani Johnson:

Leaders—of all sorts. We plan on talking to learning leaders and leader leaders and leader development leaders, and C-suite folks. We think that if we stand behind the idea that DEIB is everyone's job, then everybody should pay attention to this podcast.

Chris Pirie:

Well, I think we touched on this a little bit, but there's a plethora of tech and services startups that are starting to focus in this area, right: how do you see that market shaping up? I think you mentioned earlier that maybe it's some kind of additional features to existing products and services, or there's some new startups coming with a focus on this?

Stacia Garr:

A few things have happened since we last wrote about this. So when we published this study in 2021, we saw that the number of vendors who are in this space had increased by 136%. So it's a really pretty dramatic change in terms of folks who have joined. We have also seen an increase in the market size; we in 2019 said that the market size was about $100 million. Our projection for 2021 was that it's $313 million, with a compound annual growth rate of 59%. So it's really a lot of folks who are investing in this.

The biggest area that we saw change was in people analytics, and that's not necessarily surprising. We saw that in the people analytics study as well, that focusing on DEIB was a huge change. And so the amount of vendors who are providing a solution focused in this area has increased, but I think more importantly, the sophistication has increased. For instance, we're not just looking at pure representation data; we might be looking at representation data from an intersectional lens, so not just black employees, but black women employees. In addition, we're starting, and we're seeing this in the DEIB and analytics study, we're starting to see kind of almost a hierarchy of the way that people are approaching these analytics. So for instance, the representation data is foundational and that's good. But then looking at things like employee engagement, experience data by different demographic groups is kind of the first step in Inclusion. And then the second step in Inclusion is really a more sophisticated study of areas that you might have difficulties: so for instance, you might see that black women are not getting promoted at the same rates, and so for instance, you might use an organizational network analysis to understand are those people connected in the same ways that their other peers are connected or are there groups that are engaging in homophily, meaning that they primarily tend to just work with people who look like them?

So we're seeing people kind of moving beyond really this representation, even representation of Inclusion data, to much more sophisticated problem-solving through analytics. So that's one of the biggest shifts that we've seen since we published the study in 2019.

Chris Pirie:

Do the analytics tools include AI tools that are looking at, for example, sentiment on employee surveys and pulse surveys and things like that? That has to be a bit of a game changer, too, right?

Stacia Garr:

It absolutely is, because you're no longer limited to just the quantitative analysis that you could do just by demographics; you’re also now able to take the natural language processing, identify the themes that are coming in from comments, and then back them up against demographic information. And that is really changing things.

The other thing that natural language processing is enabling us to do is to understand a little bit more on the tales of feedback. So, okay, in general, we're not hearing this, but we heard this from just these types of people and it was consistent amongst those types of people, and so it's just enabling us to have a much finer understanding of the employee experience by different demographic groups.

Chris Pirie:

I'm super-looking forward to this project: we’ve got an amazing set of conversations lined up for people. And I know if our last two Seasons of work together are any indication, we're gonna learn a lot. How do people tune in, how do they subscribe? How can they follow your podcast?

Dani Johnson:

You can find all of the Seasons that we've done so far on our website. We have very active social media campaigns with respect to these, both Chris and RedThread Research. And then you can also find them on Spreaker, Apple, Spotify.

Chris Pirie:

Google podcasts—wherever you get your podcast! You just search for “Workplace Stories” by RedThread research. And it was very exciting, wasn’t it? When the first one popped up on your iPhone—it’s a really exciting moment. And then when people start to listen, it's great. Can people join in with the conversation—you know, podcasting is typically a sort of one-way street, so to speak, but I guess through your community, people can join them with a conversation, right?

Dani Johnson:

Absolutely, as Stacia mentioned, she's got two ongoing studies, and I'm about to start one on learning and DEIB. So please contact us, tell us your own stories and help us understand what you're facing and what you're doing.

Stacia Garr:
And also we post this on social media, every podcast, so if folks want to comment on particular episodes, we try to be as responsive as we can: we really think this is about fostering a dialogue and enabling people to learn. And we learn through conversation.

Chris Pirie:

One last question from me: I know that you are both super-passionate about this topic and you also, you're a relatively small, but perfectly formed organization. What are you doing in your work practice to help foster Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging?

Dani Johnson:

I think this one has sort of hit home to me this month, particularly. I have been aware of it and talked about it a lot, but there are opportunities to step in it all the time; we unconsciously offend people, we unconsciously don't take them into account. And I think what I've learned more than anything is ask: continue to ask and figure out how people want to be addressed and treated. And talk to people that are dealing with these challenges and see what you can learn from them; to continuously be more aware and more sort of cognizant of the way that you're addressing the topic.

Stacia Garr:

And then I would say, we do some things in terms of interviewing, hiring, I mean just basic hygiene stuff. So for instance, when we're hiring folks, behavioral interviews and structured questions are the best way to assess folks and the least likely to allow biases to creep in. So we use both of those approaches when we interview folks.

Also, we spend time asking ourselves, like, what is our bias on this? We particularly know this is top of mind because we just hired some folks, but we were talking about different candidates and I at one point said, well, I'm not sure if this person is a fit, but you guys check me. What's my bias here? What is it? Am I wrong, what is it—because I have a bias and I know it. And so we're trying to address that. I think also when it comes to some of our own work practices, like we've talked for instance, upon a round table, should we be turning on transcripts so people who have different listening limitations or whatever that they can follow along. So we're always having a conversation about what we should do. Like everybody, there's more we could do, and we're working on that. But it is certainly top of mind for us, as we are thinking about our organization and our team.

Chris Pirie:

For me, it's really a transformational thing, it’s like the digitization of business; It just completely shifts how we're going to have to do work and how we collaborate, and how we lead if we're a leader. And it's almost the opposite to everything that I was ever told about how to be a leader: the model of leadership that I was taught for many years, just like you, you're a leader, do all this stuff, was about being directive and confident, and knowing the answers and being smart. All those things that I subsequently learned in the last quarter of my career were not helpful and excluded a lot of people unintentionally, of course, but you exclude people, you don't leave space for people to talk; you hire people that fit the culture rather than challenge the culture and bring new perspectives.

And I did work on the topic a great deal at Microsoft. I was lucky enough to work with some of the teams that were set up to try and particularly at the time get gender and racial Diversity in the workforce. And it's so hard; it was so hard to get done. And people's instincts were to reduce it to a set of metrics that we can then compete against, right? How am I doing was what managers used to say, how am I doing on representation of women in my team? I saw the data being used in completely the wrong way.

And then I also saw this amazing, definitely at Microsoft, this amazing culture shift that went on where we stepped back and said, it's just not about metrics and it's not about being directive: it’s about mindset and openness and curiosity. And that obviously became much of my work over the last few years. And so that's why I'm passionate about this; I think it's a new way to organize work, or it's part of a new way to organize work. You can't do anything on your own—you have to collaborate. And if you're not inclusive and you're not open to diverse opinions, you will not do good work. Period.

Dani Johnson:

I like that.

Stacia Garr:

I think that latter point is a big part of why it matters to me: this is going to be the new way of doing work, and if my two girls are going to work in a place, in an environment, in a world that is inclusive of them and where they really, and truly, in any organization, have the opportunity to lead the same as anybody of a different gender, then the work has to happen now—the change has to happen now for it to be natural.

For me growing up, my mom went to law school at 40, after she had me, I was like 18 months old. She's crazy. She did that! And I think about the difficulties that she had as a woman lawyer with a young child at home, an older woman lawyer at that time. And yet at the same time, she infused in me an expectation that that is what you do: this is what you can do, and this is how the world should work, and that has strongly shaped my worldview. But for her, that wasn't reality; that was a reality that she in many ways constructed for me, and I don't want to have to construct that for my girls. I want that to be the reality. And I think that every mom, or every parent, doesn't matter what the color is of your skin or anything, that’s what you want—you want to look at your kids and be able to say you have an equal chance to succeed. And I think that we have an opportunity to help accelerate that happening in the world.

And so that's my ‘why ‘really on all of our DEIB work is because as a parent looking at these kids, I want each of them to have a fair shake.

Chris Pirie:

Love it. Our work through our community may help—wouldn’t that be nice?

Dani Johnson:

I think it can.

Chris Pirie:

Well, listen, we're going to wrap up this episode; we’re going to provide a set of resources to help people get a primer, we’re going to share the guests that we have lined up in the Show Notes, and we're going to have a lot of fun over the next few months as we record these conversations. So thanks for your partnership, you two: congratulations on surviving and thriving through all of this, and let's go help people figure out what their role is making a more Inclusive and Diverse workplace.

Stacia Garr:

Thanks for listening to the “Workplace Stories” podcast, brought to you by RedThread Research. Share your thoughts or ideas for guests and topics by sending an email to [email protected], and consider sharing your favorite episode with a friend or colleague. As always thanks to our guests, our sponsors, and thank you, our listeners. 

Chris Pirie:

We'd like to thank the people at Workday for the exclusive sponsorship of the second Season of “Workplace Stories.” Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and engage a more inclusive workforce—it’s your financial, HR, and planning system for a changing world. 

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar at the end of this Season, where you can meet the team (Dani, Stacia and myself) and join in a conversation about the future of DEIB in the workplace. You can find out more information, register for the webinar, and access exclusive Season content, including transcripts, at www.redthreadresearch.com/podcast and thanks again to the team at Workday!

Introduction

As part of our ongoing research in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), a few months ago we launched a new study to identify and look at the skills that can advance DEIB in orgs today. In our first roundtable on this topic, we focused on understanding which skills are critical for fostering DEIB and how orgs can effectively develop them.

We recently held our second roundtable on the topic of DEIB and skills and invited members from the following groups to participate:

• Employees
• Managers
• Employee resource group (ERG) leaders
• Senior leaders

We aimed to understand the roles of different organizational groups in fostering DEIB and the specific skills each group needs to embed DEIB into the org’s culture.

Our roundtable discussions focused on 2 main questions:

• What are the roles and responsibilities of employees, managers, ERG leaders, and senior leaders in fostering a DEIB culture?
• What skills do each of these groups need to drive DEIB at work?

Mindmap of Second DEIB & Skills Roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations that transpired as part of this second roundtable.

Note: This is a live document. Click the window and use your cursor to explore it.

Key Takeaways

Highly engaging, the discussion produced different perspectives that helped us uncover several interesting insights. In general, the participants agreed that a lot of work needs to be done around identifying and intentionally developing skills for DEIB.

Participants agreed that a lot of work needs to be done around identifying and intentionally developing skills for DEIB.

A few key takeaways stand out from the discussion:

1. Managers need more than “managerial skills” to drive DEIB
2. Senior leaders should enable big-picture thinking
3. ERG leaders play a unique role in fostering DEIB
4. Clarity should be used for skills identification
5. Similar skills have different applications across job levels

The following sections offer an overview of each takeaway.

Managers need more than “managerial skills” to drive DEIB

Talking about the roles managers play in fostering DEIB and the skills they need to do that, participants highlighted several crucial responsibilities at the interpersonal and team levels.

• Managers should model appropriate behaviors, create psychological safety for their teams, set clear expectations, and take initiatives to seek out different perspectives. Some of the underpinning skills managers need to carry out these responsibilities include:
  • Self-awareness
  • Open-mindedness
  • Receptiveness
  • Willingness to learn
  • Active listening
• A number of manager skills required to drive DEIB aren’t considered essential or associated with being a manager. For example, one participant pointed out: While on the one hand managers are typically expected to “have all the answers”—they also need to be able to show a willingness to learn from others, and be open to diverse thoughts and ideas. Clear expectations must be set for the manager role and the work that needs to be done when it comes to DEIB.
• Additional training or continuing education programs for managers can help set the foundation for more nuanced DEIB skills. Participants pointed out that they see a lot of successful individual contributors promoted to the manager role because they’re able to produce effectively—but they may lack adequate people skills. As one participant explained:

“When it comes to DEIB, managers should get comfortable ‘writing with their nondominant hands’—as it forces them to think about the tendency to do things that are uncomfortable and helps reorient leaders to be able to improve DEIB.”

Senior leaders should enable big-picture thinking

Among all 4 groups, attendees listed the largest number of responsibilities for senior leaders. This long list (see the mindmap) indicates the crucial role senior leaders play in fostering DEIB across the org. At the core of it all, senior leaders are responsible for setting the tone, policies, and systems in place that foster a culture of DEIB. As one participant stated:

“Leaders are expected to lead DEIB efforts and model behaviors that reflect the org’s commitment to DEIB.”

For senior leaders, most of the necessary skills identified by participants focus on big-picture thinking, including:

• Change management. Senior leaders should champion DEIB values by steering the org through large-scale culture change
• The ability to influence people by effectively communicating the company’s DEIB goals with different audiences
• Learning agility. As leaders encounter complex DEIB challenges, the ability to apply the learnings from one situation to another becomes crucial
• Systems thinking.¹ When senior leaders engage in systems thinking, they’re more likely to think about DEIB more holistically, rather than implementing piecemeal strategies

Senior leaders: Dare to dream, challenge organizational, systemic, and policy disparities, and periodically reflect on what’s working—versus what’s not—in order to initiate change.

The discussion also highlighted the importance of senior leaders’ ability to empower others by giving people the “safe” space to speak up and bring together the appropriate groups of people to carry forward the org’s DEIB mission.

ERG leaders play a unique role in fostering DEIB

The discussion around ERG leaders’ responsibilities and the skills needed for DEIB resulted in some of the most novel insights from the roundtable. ERG leaders play a crucial role because of their unique position to:

• Represent the voices of the underrepresented groups in company conversations
• Communicate the contents of those meetings back to the group

This intermediary role demands a specific set of skills to drive DEIB. As one participant said:

“The role of ERG leaders in fostering a DEIB culture is to create an environment where people can openly express themselves and share ideas that add value to the company. They are responsible for communication between their members and senior leaders to ensure ideas are heard.

Some of the important skills identified for ERG leaders involve:

• Event planning
• Group facilitation
• The ability to translate the group's needs to business leaders
• The flexibility to work with diverse groups

In addition to bridging the gap between underrepresented groups and org management, ERG leaders also need to be a coach—someone who holds up a mirror to help others look intrinsically within themselves.

Participants also highlighted the importance of other skills that can complement the ERG leader role in disrupting and pushing the envelope within orgs:

• Persuasion
• Influence
• Persistence
• Advocacy skills, including promise-keeping, and protecting the identities and feelings of ERG members

As one participant emphasized and stated, ERG leaders should act as protectors while advocating for underrepresented groups:

“ERG leaders should protect the names of their group members—for example, being mindful when a group member wants to remain anonymous or may not be ready to take on a responsibility.”

Clarity should be used for skills identification

When it comes to identifying skills for DEIB, we had general agreement among roundtable participants that certain terms need more clarity and clearer definitions.

For example, “growth mindset” came up frequently as something that’s essential for DEIB. However, we found a lack of clarity about what exactly growth mindset really means, and whether it’s a skill or not. In addition, a few participants also expressed general apprehension that this term has become a buzzword and is overused in the context of DEIB. One participant explained:

“I have seen growth mindset come up in many instances—it is such a leadership term. Not clear what we mean by that—whether it’s an individual attribute or relative to the org culture.”

As the discussion unfolded, a few other skills—such as caring, vulnerability, optimism, resiliency, and humility—were highlighted as being necessary for DEIB. However, we lacked consensus on whether these terms should be categorized as general skills or skills only within the context of DEIB.

For example: One participant mentioned that optimism—on its own—could lead people to believe that things are already in a good state for everyone. But, when optimism is paired with eagerness to learn and evolve, that’s when it can be most effective for DEIB purposes.

Similar skills have different applications across job levels

Many skills required for fostering a DEIB culture were highlighted as crucial skills for all groups, including:

• Change management
• Critical thinking
• Self-awareness
• Active listening
• Emotional intelligence

While we observed similarities in DEIB skills across job levels, it was equally interesting to analyze and understand how these similarities were discussed during the roundtable in terms of their applications.

For example, change management applied to all 4 groups:

• Employees: focusing on an individual’s ability to deal with change that comes with innovation, ambiguity, and complexity associated with DEIB
• Managers: skills focusing on being receptive to new ways of thinking and modeling new behaviors to uphold the org’s DEIB values
• Senior leaders: skills focusing of being more operational—mainly focusing on org culture change and implementing large-scale behavior change to foster DEIB
• ERG leaders: focusing more on bottom-up change—being disruptive and pushing DEIB efforts up through the ranks to stick

By examining a similar skill across job levels, it became evident in our discussion that the relevance and application of a skill is dependent on contextual factors.

Defining DEIB skills in more granular terms could better inform an org’s skill training programs and improve diagnostic skills assessments.

A SPECIAL THANKS

We're extremely grateful to the attendees who enriched the conversation by sharing their thoughtful ideas and experiences. And, as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback at [email protected].

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
Wonderful. So thank you all so much for joining us today. For those of you whom I don't know, I'm Stacia Garr. I am co-founder of RedThread Research. And I'll tell you a little bit about us before we get started, but in the meantime, I want to give my co-host today, Priyanka Mehrotra chance to introduce herself Priyanka.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Thank you, Stacia. Hi everybody. I'm research lead at RedThread and along with Stacia, we've been working on DEIB and people analytics for over the last two years. And we're very excited to talk about this kind of study that we have going on right now. Welcome.

Stacia Garr:
And so for those of you who haven't been to a Q&A call or haven't been in a while, here's roughly how we do it. This is very conversational. Yes, obviously we have slides, but the point is to answer your questions, you know, find out what you're most interested in with the research and the like. We'll be communicating primarily through chat or through Q&A, both of those are enabled and we can see both of those. If you want to do Q&A, so everybody doesn't know your question, that's fine. If you want to share in chat, that's great as well. Like I said, we are recording this call. And so we will be posting this to the RedThread site after today. So that folks who are RedThread members will also be able to view it.

Stacia Garr:
So in speaking of RedThread and members, we are a human capital research membership focused on a range of topics, including people, analytics, learning, and skills, performance, DEIB and employee experience in HR technology. As Priyanka mentioned, this study that we're working on, and we're going to talk about today is a really nice culmination of a number of different areas that we've been doing research on. So we've been extremely excited to get to it. It feels like the study we've been trying to get to for at least three quarters. So we're excited to do that.

Defining DEIB

Stacia Garr:
So I'm going to begin with just a little bit of level setting. So for those of you who maybe haven't been following our work. We talk about this space collectively as DEIB. So I know a lot of organizations use just DEI. Some use just DIB.

Stacia Garr:
We decided to put them all together to be inclusive. Because we think that all of these concepts are important, but you can see here on this slide, our definitions for each of these areas, and how would we see them as being a little bit distinct from each other.

Why DEIB & Analytics

Stacia Garr:
Now, I mentioned that this study is kind of the culmination of a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and I should say and clarify that this is an active study under process. That's one of the things that we do with the Q&A calls is that we get started on some research and then we will conduct a number of ways to interact with folks. Sometimes it's a roundtable, as you may have seen. We've actually got one on this topic coming up on, correct me if I'm wrong, Priyanka, May 27th, I think is the date for that, but the Q&A calls are a chance to kind of engage on a different level to understand what people are thinking about and getting initial reactions to the work that we've been doing.

Stacia Garr:
But, so why are we doing this study? One is when we launched RedThread, we started off with a focus on DNI technology. This is what we called it. Now we're calling it to DEIB technology. And then very shortly after that, we did a study on people analytics technology, which many of you who are here may be familiar with. And within DEIB tech, there was an analytics component. And we were seeing on the people analytics tech focus on DEIB, but we hadn't really kind of brought these concepts together. And then when we went out and we looked at the literature, which Priyanka is going to talk about, we found that there weren't a lot of folks who are talking about how do DEIB and analytics work together. What's that partnership look like? What are the metrics we should be looking at and how should we be making those decisions?

Stacia Garr:
So we started to think about all of these things. So, you know, those were kind of the underlying concepts of why we started this journey.

Why are we studying it now?

Stacia Garr:
But then there is I think a question about like, why now, like, why didn't we do it three quarters ago if we've been studying this topic for a few years. And I think there are a few things. First is we've seen a greater expectation from consumers to take action. And so if we look at things like Edelman's Trust Barometer particularly after the social justice movements of last summer, consumers are expecting organizations to make steps, yes, on social justice, but on DNI more broadly. They also are expecting organizations not just to do that externally, but to do that internally, to get their own DNI house in order.

Stacia Garr:
So that's one, one reason. The second is obviously the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on diverse employees combined with the social justice movements that I just mentioned. So we've done quite a lot of work particularly focused on the impact of the pandemic on women. We have also written about the impact of the pandemic on people of color. And so we know that those populations have been some of those that have borne the brunt of this the most. And so there's some of the ones that if we look to come out of the pandemic, we need to be focusing on the most as well. And then the third reason, again, back to this, why now is we're seeing these new SEC human capital reporting guidelines that went into place last November really starting to come into to be a factor for organization.

Stacia Garr:
So analytics teams are being asked to provide more detail on human capital metrics and often that is including diversity data. And we expect that right now. And I was very intentional in that language. Right now it's a lot of representation data usually a bit beyond what they have to report for the EEOC, not necessarily a lot beyond that, but we expect that to change, particularly as investors start to increasingly understand the impact that we've seen in research of strong diversity and inclusion on organizations, on their financial outcomes. We think that there's going to be more investor pressure to provide more data and insights as it relates to the DEIB.

People Analytics for DEIB has arrived

Stacia Garr:
So those all get to kind of this, this why now all of this is reinforced by the study that we did on the DEIB tech that came out just at the beginning of this year, January of 2021.

Stacia Garr:
And the big finding from this study was that when we asked vendors, what problems our customers were trying to solve, that issue of DNI analytics and insights went to the top. It was number four in 2019. The last time we published that study and in 2021, it was number one, it was 19% increase in the importance of addressing this lack of DNI insights and analytics. So we know that this is been something that we've seen reflected in the data. We're seeing it in the popular press, and we as analysts have seen it as being incredibly important. So that's why we're doing this now. Priyanka.

Why it's so hard

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Interesting. So let's take a moment to understand why it's so hard to do this, and we're going to talk about what were studying in through this research, but just want you to take a moment to understand why it's been so hard and what have been some of the challenges that DEIB leaders, people analytics leaders, and organizations have been facing. And I mean, this often has to do with three things as they come to our mind, the first being that there's a Gulf between the DEIB leaders and people analytics leaders that tends to exist within organizations. And what we mean by that is that there are few things that go under this, one is that DEIB leaders and people, analytics leaders often not always, but often report to different departments or heads or senior leaders. So for example, DEIB might be reporting into CEOS a lot of the times.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And in fact, I recently came across a research that was conducted on about 500 senior diversity leaders out of which 40% have said that they were reporting into CEOs. And what we typically tend to see with people, analytics leaders on the other hand is that they're often either reporting to the CHRO or talent acquisition leaders, or talent management leaders, or even a centralized analytics team. So one of these, the gulf I was talking about is that the reporting structure might be different for them. The other has to do a little bit about the backgrounds that these two tend to come from. So again, not all, but years of DEIB teams often came from backgrounds such as social justice or diversity focus backgrounds. Whereas people analytics leaders often tend to come from data science, computer science, math, statistics background.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Additionally we often see the DEIB leaders, might find themselves focused on activities that may not have a lot to do with data. So for example, setting up employee resource groups or managing DEIB events or collaborating with local communities. Whereas we see analytics leaders really deeply ingrained in the data side of the organizational things that they're doing but only coming in as participants when it comes to DEIB and having little knowledge about all the curies and the approaches that go behind those initiatives as when it comes to DEIB. The second reason why we think this is so hard is that there tends to be a lack of clarity around data and how to use it. And this goes back to the point that Stacia was making, but, you know, up to now, we've been seeing a lot of use of DEIB data has been for reporting purposes.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And while we are starting to see a shift in how leaders are starting to think about this data, these are still early stages. And there are a lot of questions about, you know, what data they should be collecting, how they should be using it. What are the types of analysis that they should be running? And I think a related reason, which is our third reason under this, why it's so hard is that there's a lack of clarity around how DEIB leaders, DEIB tech venders fit into all this. So Stacia, mentioned our DEIB tech study that we ran, that we published earlier this year, and we saw an immense growth in the number of DEIB tech vendors that are coming up in the space. But along with it, we have questions and concerns from leaders. When they're asking me questions, such as when should we bring in these tech vendors, how should they fit into the broader strategies?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So all of these reasons kind of convoluted to making this practice of bringing DEIB and analytics together, something that's challenging for organizations in they're struggling to understand how would they get started on it and actually be successful on it. And these are the factors that actually fed into our thinking on what we should study when it comes to this topic.

What we are researching

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So if you go into the next slide, we'll just quickly talk about some of the overarching questions or teams that we're looking at through the study. So the first one that we're looking at is how should the DEIB and people analytics partner. So rethink this is sort of foundational to what organizations should be doing when it comes to this, because without a successful partnership, this work can not be done. The second area that we're looking to understand is what are the important data and metrics for DEIB?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So, like I said, there's a lack of clarity around what is it that they should be doing? What is foundational, what is table stakes? And then as organizations mature, what are some of the more novel and non-traditional things that organizations should be looking at. And then third is about the role of vendors and techs. So looking at, you know, one of the different types of technologies that organizations are using. What are the people analytics technologies? What are the DEIB technologies? When should they come in and work as a partner and in general, what is the role that vendors should play in all this? So those are some of the overarching teams or questions, if you will, that we are looking at to understand from this study.

What the literature says

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And what we did when we launched this study was we began with a literature review and which we published last month on our website.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And we did a very exhaustive, neutral journey, where we analyzed over 50 articles, business journals, academic papers, and we found a few key findings that kind of reaffirmed our thinking around this topic as well. And kind of solidified our questions that we thought we should be asking. So I just cover some of our key findings from our literature review. The first of course that we were expecting to find was, and we did find was the, the need for analytics and analytics for DEIB is more important than ever. And, you know, given all that we've experienced in 2020, COVID19, the social justice movements, it's no surprise that really starting to look at how we can use data and metrics and analysis to support this push for the DEIB that we're starting to see from organizations. And, you know, just for an example, if you look at some of the commitments and goals that all the big organizations have put out over the last year, whether it's Facebook or Target or Starbucks, they all have these lofty goals of reaching 20% to 30% increasing their representation by X percent in the next few years are tying diversity to performance reviews.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And then you look at those goals. It's very clear that none of this can be done without data and analytics without measuring where you are and where you're going and what needs to be done. So clearly people analytics is going to play an extremely critical part of doing anything related to DEIB moving forward. The second finding that we came across was the DEIB analytics is more than diversity metrics. So we found several articles that truly try to push the thinking beyond just looking at representation data, and thinking about inclusion, thinking about the different experiences that different groups of employees are having in the organization, thinking about belonging and what that means in the organizational context, thinking about the existing processes and how they can be made more equitable and working with people analytics leaders to really understand how can they use the existing data to think about some of these processes and kind of push forward their DEIB agenda on these things.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
The third finding that we came across was around using predictive analytics for DEIB to help plan for the future. And the articles that talked about this mainly spoke about using this and harnessing this power of predictive analytics to really avoid issues from becoming into potential problems in the future and planning for planning well ahead and avoiding certain challenges that may come up in the future. So for instance two examples come to my mind that we came across during this literature review. One was of Walmart using modeling and forecasting techniques to really answer questions around like, what could happen if we keep doing this, or how can we arrive at our desired goal much faster and using those insights from that data to really review the DEIB goals and connect regularly, to understand how, what is the progress that they're making towards them.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
The other example that we found was from International Paper, which uses predictive analytics to understand their expansion rate compatibility. And what that means is using data on past behavior, family dynamics cultural agility, global accuracy, to understand and forecast which employees would fare better in a global move if they were to be placed in international settings. So these were some of our top three findings. And I just want to touch on some really interesting ones as well. And this one was my favorite, which was around using quantitative data individual stories and experiences are an important piece of the puzzle and no work on when it comes to DEIB can be compete without taking those into account? No amount of statistics can capture what it feels like to be the only ruling on a team or to be the only black member on the team.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And so we think that qualitative data and quantitative data forms an extremely important part of doing analytics for DEIB. And finally, another key finding that we found of course, was around, you know, making sure that you're addressing issues of privacy and ethics. So aggregating data, sharing data with employees, being transparent about what is being collected and what is the purpose that that data is being used for. So, like I said, all of these findings kind of reaffirmed our thinking around what is it that we need to study in this area. And like Stacia mentioned, and our lit review confirmed it, that there's a lot written on how and why this needs to be done and very little on how organizations are actually doing it or what they should be thinking about. And that's what's was what our aim was when it came to launching the study. And that's what we've been trying to find out through our interviews. And I'll pass it on to Stacia to talk about some of our initial findings now.

Initial findings: Building a strong DEIB & People Analytics partnership

Stacia Garr:
Great, thank you, Priyanka. And I know we've had some really good questions come in through chat, keep those coming. We will try and addresses questions once we get here into the question section. So some of the initial findings and I should clarify, we've done, what is it Priyanka about 15 interviews at this point on our way to roughly 30? So we're about halfway through our interviews. So these are very initial, so we're just going to share some of the things we have been hearing. So we've been grouping the research into two areas, the first being that DEIB and people analytics partnership, and then the second one being metrics. So focused on the partnership aspect first. The first point is around the importance of the data oriented diversity leader. So we've heard a real, and this isn't surprising, but I think it's just worth underscoring. We've heard a real difference in the interviews when people said I've got a diversity leader who really gets it, who gets the importance of this work, who supports what we do, who actively helps us think through the metrics and analytics that we should be focused on, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of been one, one story.

Stacia Garr:
The other story has been well, I'm the people analytics leader, and I know this is important. And I've, you know, done my best so far and figured out what I think is important, but I'm kind of worried, waiting on a diversity leader to get here, to help, or in some instances, this is what I've done. And we've just hired a diversity leader because as I'm sure many of you have seen, there's just been this incredible slew of hiring of DEIB leaders since last summer. And so it's actually notable how many folks are like, well, our DEIB leader just started in September or they just started in January and now we're finally starting to get traction. But the importance of that partnership in the diversity leader being data oriented was remarkable. Second, and I kind of just alluded to this a little bit, but people analytics leaders taking the lead on data. We are actually, so I think many of you may know we're doing this study, but we're also doing a study on DEIB and skills and the skills kind of side of that is the learning team.

Stacia Garr:
And what has been remarkably similar about these two studies is how the DEIB teams in the past have either been responsible for this work or they have or the work hasn't been done quite frankly. And now as DEIB has become increasingly main stream, these corporate functions. So in this instance, people analytics, but in the other study, learning these corporate functions are kind of taking back or taking over the aspects of this work that they have expertise in. So for for people analytics, it's, you know, we know how to do the data analysis. We know how to get common definitions for the data. We know how to do, you know, basic representation analysis. Like we know how to do all this stuff and because we're already doing it in all these other ways. And we have the, the source of truth dataset, ideally you know, we, we are the ones who should be doing it and then putting it into the dashboards that we're already providing to leaders.

Stacia Garr:
So this just makes sense for it to be part of this, this group. Of course though, there is a side of this, which is around selection of metrics around problem identification, hypothesis identification, and I'll get to that more on the next slide. But the big thing is just this idea that people analytics, this is firmly now in our remit, and we need to go with it. The third point, and this seems maybe obvious, but is the importance of the alignment between the two. So we've heard a lot of instances where there are either, you know, Priyanka set up the, the challenge that we see with reporting relationships. And so we're seeing when it's really effective, DEIB and people analytics reporting into the same leader is one instance if that doesn't happen, we're seeing kind of pretty formalized, dotted line relationships between people on each of the teams.

Stacia Garr:
So a DEIB team member who is, you know, sort of informally connected to the people analytics team or vice versa. The point being that there has to be a strong level of communication between the two, because DEIB is basically the, the subject matter expert when it comes to the sorts of data and analysis that let me rephrase come to the questions that should be answered. And then the people analytics team is the expert when it comes to the data and analysis that can be done. So there has to be that clear alignment. Moving, I'm sorry. Priyanka, did you have something to add there?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think I would just underscore the point on the alignment. I think what you said was exactly right, like having that either direct line or reporting into the same head or having that dotted line, what it does is it makes sure that both the leaders are aligned on priorities through those communications and constant check-ins, and they're aligned on priorities and goals that are connected to the overall business strategy. And I think that also gets to the point about there being trust between the two of them. And I remember you spoke about that, that the DEIB leader, as well as the people analytics leaders have to trust each other, that they know what they're doing and that this is the right data, or this is the right approach that they're going to be taking and work together as a partner on those priorities and goals.

Metrics that matter

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, great point. So if we move on to the, the metrics aspect, and I know that there, there are plenty of questions in here. And so we'll, we'll start to work our way through them now in terms of metrics, what we saw is that, and this is just consistent across pretty much every interview that we did. You need the foundation and that foundation is basic diversity representation metrics. And I say basic, but it's a little bit less than just basic because it also includes intersectionality. So meaning that you, aren't just looking at, what is the experience of black employees, or what is the experience of Hispanic employees, but you're looking at what's the experience of black women, for instance and, and that sort of basic representation data is something that everyone said you need to just get your hands on from the very beginning there was a question in here in the chat, and I'm going to go ahead and grab it now around approaches and measurement at a global scale, especially regarding ethnicity. And we actually have a really fascinating conversation yesterday with the global fortune 100 organization. And what they were saying to us is one, and this is something we've heard consistently. One that ethnicity is something that tends to primarily be measured here in the United States. There is some measurement of it in places like South Africa, in some Asia, but almost more of a country approach within Asia. And then some in Brazil, because she made the point that a lot of people in Brazil don't necessarily identify as Hispanic, though they do identify as Latino or Latinas. And so when then, but then obviously within Europe, there is no ethnicity data that's being collected. So we think, you know, the point is, is that they are, what she said was that they worked with kind of local representatives to make sure that they were getting the right information so that they could be culturally appropriate in all these different locations.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. the other component of this is we heard a lot in discussions about doing self ID campaigns. And so, you know, that because there's obviously sensitivity in terms of what information you can collect on ethnicity particularly in the EU, it wasn't as much focused on ethnicity there, but it could be focused on things like disability or on LGBTQ status or some of these other types of information that you might want to be collecting on folks in using as part of your kind of foundational diversity representation analysis. So we've heard that quite a bit. The government collection data often is, you know, initially collected by the companies, but, you know, not necessarily in all instances but yeah, looking at what's what's externally available and then also using that potentially to help inform your benchmarking strategy so that you can be comparing apples to apples. If you're looking at what external data is out there is an important thing to consider too.

Stacia Garr:
So diversity representation, metrics being foundational. Second looking at inclusion and equity. And so the way that I have been framing, this is almost like a model. Well, you know, that's part of what we do. So in an initial model is like diversity of representation is, is kind of step one. Step two is what we're calling kind of inclusion and equity one Datto, which is basically looking at things like engagement data by representation, information. So engagement and inclusion, potentially inclusion, indices and other belonging metrics that may be being captured and looking at those by by diversity representation numbers, and also including intersectionality, like I just mentioned. That's kind of inclusion one Datto, inclusion two Datto, which is what we're seeing some of the more sophisticated companies look at is saying, okay, we've identified for instance, that we have a problem with, or we we have, you know, variances with black women in this area.

Stacia Garr:
Why might that be happening, maybe black women in finance, just to pick something, why might that be happening? And then actually, and this is where it's really important to have that strong relationship with the DEI team and pulling in hypothesis on what may be happening. So sure it could be compensation, but maybe instead it's, you know time to promotion rates, which obviously also impacts compensation, but this is a slightly different issue. It might be the, that these people are being brought in from outside, maybe because there's been a diversity effort for the last few years and these people aren't getting they're from outside and they're not getting effectively connected into the network. So it's kind of an opportunity for the people analytics leader to work with the DEI leaders and increasingly the HR business partners to understand what could be happening here and how can we actually design a study to truly understand using some more sophisticated analytical approaches.

Stacia Garr:
So that's kind of the inclusion and equity two Datto approach that we're seeing. And then the third is the importance of understanding employee voice. And so this is, I would say it's kind of related to both inclusion, one Datto and two Datto, but it's a little bit different because it's not just employee engagement and experience, but it's, you know, what other things are employees feeling? So we've seen a rise in for instance, in harassment technology this come available particularly after me too. So are we looking at that and are we taking that seriously? And are we looking at other ways that employees might be not being heard in the organization? So this is kind of in the inclusion two Datto type of capability, but if we're looking at, for instance metadata that on who's going to what meetings are certain populations being included at the same, you know rate as others in terms of important meetings or are they being connected with others via Slack or Teams or whatever. So there's kind of all this more sophisticated analysis we can see are these people's voices literally being heard to the same extent as other groups, voices. Priyanka, did you have anything to add there?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, I think one interesting example that comes to my mind. I think we heard this from a couple of interviewees was using wellbeing data, and I think that might fall under inclusion 2.0, as well as we're starting to understand it is looking at wellbeing data for underrepresented groups and seeing how is that different and getting to that feeling of belonging and inclusion for those groups as well. And I think also what, another thing that we heard from a couple of interviewees, what guests to employ voice is quantitative data. So we heard about focus groups and collecting stories. I believe from one of the vendors that they're doing that, and that I think was a very interesting add to the data that organizations already have and, you know, like creating environments where underrepresented groups and people are comfortable enough to speak up and collecting that data. In addition to all the surveys and pulses and metadata that they might be already collecting.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great point. Great point. Okay. So that's the kind of presentation sections such as it was today. We're going to go to your questions and there've been a number of questions that have come in through chat. So I'm going to go to the chat questions first and then come back to the questions that were submitted in advance.

How do you get HR to use analytics to drive change?

Stacia Garr:
So one person asked about how other organizations are getting HR to use analytics, to drive change with DEIB strategies. And this question, I love it because it kind of hits on, on all the challenges, right? You have at least three different groups. So you mentioned we've got HR, we've got people analytics, and we've got DEIB strategies. And the magic fourth group that didn't get mentioned is legal because legal is in all of these conversations. So how are organizations actually, you know, making this happen?

Stacia Garr:
So I think we've heard a few things. One is it depends on the maturity of the organization and the maturity across all of those different groups. So does your organization, for instance, have a strong HRBP organization, which has strong connections to business leaders and does the organization have a strong DEI leader and what is their influence in the organization? How sophisticated and mature is the people analytics function in their ability to kind of imbibe and respond to requests when it comes to this. And then also, what is the risk profile of the general counsel? Are they, you know, we talked to one organization kind of more of a tech enabled organization. I would say tech enabled retail organization, where they said, we got to fix this, do what you need to do all the way to an organization where it's like, we don't want to share anything.

Stacia Garr:
No, data's going to anybody except for a very small few. And so all of that makes an impact on to your, this question, how do you get HR to use analytics to drive change? And so I think the key is figure out where your strengths are, where the maturity is. So if the maturity is for instance, with HR business partners and they have a strong, strong relationship with the business, you know, use your, hopefully you have at least a initially small people analytics team, if not kind of a more sophisticated one to start with providing that initial foundational data, you know, here's, here's where we have differences here's in the experiences of different groups. So start with that, that education and then working with HR business partners to understand what are the levers that we could pull in these different businesses to start to drive change, where is their appetite for this to do something different? Priyanka, do you have something to add?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, I think I would just add to that education piece that you mentioned, because I remember one of the interviews that we recently spoke to a very large company. They mentioned that they're working with their vendor as a partner to broadly educate senior leadership and HR teams to not just use the data, but also understand and interpret that data. So, one, I think the role of vendor can be crucial if the vendor is willing to work with you as a partner in education and educating them. I think the other one, which might contradict my point actually, was that one of the leaders that we spoke to mentioned that they had set in place a learning requirement for people, for senior leaders before they could get access to the data. And it kind of backfired because nobody wanted to take that learning, but what it help them understand was that they needed to approach it in a different way that this was not going to work. It was clear to them that they could not force this learning course on them before giving them access to the data or getting them to use analytics, but they needed to figure out a different approach. So that, that was kind of a failing when approach that they kind of worked through. So I think those two are some of the interesting examples that come to my mind.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And I think that the point is experimentation, you know, to what you just said, you know, that, that organization figured out that, you know, kind of a one hour long learning on how to use DEIB data didn't work. But so they said, okay, well, how can we actually use the dashboards and the data to teach? And how do we do it in a way that maybe we don't give everybody everything at once, but we roll it out in a way that kind of through the rollout process, we're actually educating people on what it is certainly that they need to know, but also how they might use it. And this is, I think also where either vendors or people analytics teams can really come in with potential suggestions that are embedded within the dashboards and in the offerings to help people say, okay, well, given this, what, what might I do? And those suggestions obviously should be based on the data.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Exactly.

Stacia Garr:
Okay. We're getting some more questions in here. That's great.

Which groups or identities to prioritize as they're all important

Stacia Garr:
So there was a question about, and we've kind of addressed this, but I want to come back to it, but there's its about understanding which groups or identities to prioritize as they're all important. I think that's, that's absolutely true. What we have seen organizations do though, is just kind of just similar to what we do with all people, analytics data, or really ideally, you know, our HR efforts is to say, okay, where's the business need here? Where's the need the greatest. And you know, that you can do once you have that representation data and you can kind of overlay what's important to the business in terms of business goals and strategy. And then where are the biggest gaps in that data? But using those two as initial ways to make a decision about what to prioritize, and then the overlay on that is who is going to be open to trying something new.

Stacia Garr:
So we've, you know, we heard, for instance in one of these organizations, they were talking about how most of their metrics are, you know, externally facing, and that's what leaders care about and any of the internal stuff that can actually maybe help you make decisions about actions to take, they were less interested. And so we asked that leader, we said, well, how do you find the interested leader? Like you've got great insights. How do you find the interested leader? And you know, some of it had to do with finding people who felt personally connected to DEIB and felt, you know, whether that was through their own experience or through someone that they loved. We can't tell you how many people, how many to be Frank, how many white men have said, I care about this because of the experience my wife has had, or I care about this because I'm a dad of two girls. Like, it's almost, it's remarkable how many times we've heard that. So find those people who have that connection. And then secondly hopefully people who have that connection to DEIB, but then also have influence over their peers. They're respected by their peers and using them giving them an opportunity to kind of shine and be the exemplar of the changes that are possible. Then that's the other way that I think about prioritizing.

Impact and accelerating the integration of DEIB & People Analytics

Stacia Garr:
Okay. another question here, does architect, the alignment of career planning, pathing and skills, capabilities, and experience have a role in this arena and impact on accelerating the integration of the DEIB and people analytics more broadly. So yes, yes. So I mentioned that we're doing a study on DEIB and skills. These two studies are running in parallel. That study is really trying to understand what are the skills that contribute to a culture of DEIB. So that's one component, but the other angle on skills and DEIB is using skills to potentially address any biases that may be happening. So under understanding of people's skill sets and what they want to achieve and using that to help us with people, better understanding career path opportunities, better understanding things like availability of opportunities to internal talent marketplace and that kind of thing. So I think that there is very clearly an overlap between particularly understanding skills, data, and leveling the playing field for diverse populations. So I think this a really important thing. We're seeing people just beginning to talk about this. But it's not I think its something that's going to have to be driven from the learning side of the house, because we're not, we're not really hearing anything on the people analytics side of the house on this, but we think it's an area of opportunity.

What are some of the challenges to building a partnership between DEIB & People Analytics?

Stacia Garr:
Okay. I'm going to turn to some of these questions that we received. We're going to go with this one first Priyanka about the challenges to building a partnership between DEIB and people analytics. Do you want to talk about that one?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, sure. So I think we already touched upon some of these things when we spoke about our initial findings. So I think one of the biggest challenges that we've heard, especially as it pertains to people, analytics leaders is when DEIB leaders don't believe in data or don't come from that data background and are not open to receiving that data or looking beyond data for reporting purposes. So I think that's one of the main challenges that we heard coming in from people analytics leaders. The other one has been about lack of our missing a data culture in your organization and resistance to changing that mindset of really going with the data and being open to experimenting on middle and trying to find out what is, what is it that they can do and what is it that can be done with this data?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And just a general lack of data literacy and awareness. And there are ways that we can, that organizations can work work on this. As we've talked about, the people analytic leaders tech can take a lead, the vendors can come into play as a partner in spreading that education broadly across the organization. But in general, I think so CDO is not believing in data and a lack of data culture in the organizations would be, I think the top two ones that we've heard. And I think connected one to that is lack of support from the leadership in general. And you know exactly to your point, what you said earlier, we've seen a lot of push come from people who are personally impacted by it, or see it around them have experienced it. But if that is missing at the top then there's a general lack of support for this kind of work that, that, that can be challenging in building this kind of partnership between DEIB and people analytics. What else would you add to this?

Stacia Garr:
We mentioned it a little bit earlier, but the issue of trust, I think in general is comes through. So maybe a little bit less with the relationship between DEIB and people analytics, but certainly with HR in the broader organization. Somebody we interviewed recently talked about how the HR organization didn't want DEIB and people analytics to release data broadly because they were afraid of getting called out or others knowing something that HR didn't and this idea of we have kind of an adversarial relationship. We own the data, we should know everything, and then we can control and communicate it. That is problematic. And you know, the mindset needs to shift to more of a more eyes on the data are better than fewer we're in this together. We're gonna figure out solutions together. We're going to distribute decision-making to make things better at scale, et cetera. And that mindset shift is very hard. And so that's not necessarily something just between DEIB and people analytics, but it requires a strong perspective between those leaders to then go, wow, and kind of push this broader agenda of, we need to share data so we can make change so we can measure what's happening. And people will know if we're making progress and if we're not, then we can make changes that will drive that progress.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that also speaks to something that we heard about fear of data being released without the context. And we heard a lot of people analytics leaders talk about how the other ones who take the lead when it comes to framing the data in the right context and putting that communication in that right frame before it's published externally or internally. And it's been interesting to see that it's the people analytics leaders who are taking the lead on this when it comes to communicating the data and putting that right context of DEIB to work.

What is the role of legal?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Cool. Let's move on to the next question. What is the role of legal? All of our folks, whether they're people analytics leaders or DEIB leaders sort of chuckle when we get to this question, because they're like, Oh, legal. So, you know, obviously the role of legal is to keep all of us out of trouble. You know, this is sensitive data, it's important to treat it with the due respect, et cetera. So I don't want to underscore that or, or undermine that, excuse me. That said what we also have heard is that there is great variance in what you can do based on the risk profile of your general counsel. And a lot of times what happens is the general counsel needs just education. You know, their job is to find the problems and there are always going to be concerns when it comes to DEIB data.

Stacia Garr:
And so the question is how can we work with general counsel to reduce the risk to a level that makes it acceptable and, or to make it clear that this level of risk is acceptable versus the risk of us not doing anything? So, and I think part of that is also helping them understand how others might get to this data. If the organization isn't controlling the message to some extent. So for instance, we had one interviewee who's general counsel said, I don't want you to publish anything, not nothing out there. And the people analytics leader went back and said, look with this set of data, we are, that we provide to the government. Employees can legally request the right to this data to have access to this data. So all it's going to take is a smart employee asking this question to get this information out, by contrast, we could share it and we could put some context around it. We could put clarity around what we're trying to do, and we could head that off. So there's this risk that already exists out there. And actually by releasing the data in this way, we are reducing that risk. The general council eventually agreed, right? So it's about thinking through sometimes very creatively. How do we work with legal to help them understand the appropriate level of risk Priyanka? What else did we hear?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think one of the best advice that we heard come out of our interviewees was don't look at legal as compliance. You get them as a partner. So like the way you partner with the DEIB, or if you're a DEIP leader the way you partner with people analytic. Work with legal as a partner, because they are the ones who are going to help you put the data, the right context, made sure that you're being able to continue sharing that data. And just in general, they're going to be helpful along the way. So I don't see them as putting barriers to the work that you do, but actually supporting you just by pushing you to be more clear about it, by being more intentional about it. And by thinking about it from all perspectives.

What is the role of vendors?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. That was a good, that was a great point. Yeah. Cool. I'm gonna keep us moving so we can get through a few more of these. So what's the role of vendors? So there were, I think there are a few, one is vendors can broadly educate folks about data. We've already talked about that. Second, depending on the vendor they can certainly enable self-service for the access to the data, which is, which is a powerful one. Third vendors can help get up to speed quickly for small teams. So particularly if it's a vendor that the people analytics team is already using and they have a DEIB offering. So think like what Visier offers or what Workday offers in the context or cruncher in the context of their overall offering. Those are, those are ways that they can that they can, they can support.

Stacia Garr:
That said, we have heard from a number of people, analytics leaders, deep frustration with some of these vendors, because they're like the DEIB leader just went to the vendor. Like they didn't even talk to us about what data we could offer or the capabilities we have. Like we were just completely cut out of the loop. And then when the data that they had was different than the data that we have, senior executives came and were frustrated and said, get it right, et cetera, et cetera, you can kind of see where that whole train goes. And so, you know, there's an opportunity that vendors can offer some really good things, but it's really important to make sure that you have that alignment and clarity on first the data set itself and what's going to be used. But then two, how it's going to be leveraged back in the organization is, are the insights, the vendors producing, going to be integrated into existing dashboards or reports that leaders are already getting, what's going to happen. You can't have the vendor out here as an island is the point. They can really help you, but they can't be an island over here when all your other data stuff is over here.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think the only thing I would add too, is that they can also help share data broadly where it's appropriate. So one of the questions that we had asked our venders in our people analytics tech survey last year was, do you share insights collected on employees for themselves to help them take actions on them. And majority of the vendors said that they do. So I think that's another place, another area where vendors can enable organizations to help employees gain value out of the data that is being collected on them. And I think more and more organizations are starting to do that, especially when it comes to things like their sense of belonging and inclusion to better understand, okay, where is it that they are lacking in what is it that they, maybe the kind of behaviors that they should be working on to enable that culture of belonging and help people feel like they're included part of the teams. So I think that is another rule that vendors can play in helping just sharing that data and providing that access to those insights that that organizations are collecting on employees.

What analytics are being used for DEIB?

Stacia Garr:
Yep. Great. Okay. Next question. We received, what are some of the types of analytics being used for DEIB? So we've, we talked about some of these particularly kind of the, the basic representation data the representation data applied to engagement or inclusion and belonging, indices, that's some of the more kind of common analysis that we're seeing we're increasingly seeing in terms of more novel approaches, we're increasingly seeing the use of ONA. So particularly to understand the strength of networks of diverse groups and how those might differ. So for instance, looking at maybe looking at the networks of women and how these differ from men, particularly by seniority and organizations, we actually wrote a study on that a couple of years ago on women networks and technology. We also see them using ONA to understand if there are kind of hidden stars in the organization.

Stacia Garr:
So people who senior leaders may not know could be high potentials or be making an outsize impact on the organization, but who are highly connected within their network kind of indicating that, that outsize impact and then using that to help with potential hypo identification practices and in putting people into leadership development programs and the like so there's, those are a couple of ways we've seen ONA. We're also seeing more use of natural language processing and used in this kind of gets at that qualitative data aspect that Priyanka mentioned at the very beginning from the lit review. So using that to identify themes within certainly within engagement or belonging in our inclusion indices but also using that when we are looking at performance reviews looking at to what extent are certain groups may be having certain types of themes or texts being written about them that others are not. So for an example of this might be again, kind of going back to some of the research we've seen in women versus men. Women's feedback often tends to be more about their behaviors. Whereas men's feedback often tends to be more about their actual outcomes for business impact. So those are the types of differences that you might be able to use NLPM. Priyanka, what else have we seen?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Something that was very interesting was tying wellbeing data DIN data. So seeing that, cutting it across, slicing it to see how different groups underrepresented groups, different cohorts might be fairing when it comes to wellbeing. I think the other thing that stuck with me that was pretty interesting and you've just heard that from one company was, they were, they were doing was counting high-fives on a watch on the watch with internal communications back from that they have to understand allyship and sponsorship amongst employees and managers and senior leaders. That was something interesting. That'd be hard as well.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so we we've actually seen that also. We saw it with high fives in this research, but also I've seen it with recognition platforms. So like a work human or an achievers Work Human themselves have actually done some analysis to see if there are differences by demographic background in terms of who recognizes whom and at what amount, cause I do like points or, you know, dollar amounts associated with recognition. And the theory there being that those recognitions are much less you put less thought into them than you do a performance review. So they may reveal biases that exist a bit more. And they do show differences by all the demographic groups that you might expect. So anyway, I see we've just got two minutes. So I just wanna see here. I want to go to the question that is in the chat, cause I think this is, this is a really good one.

Evidence of accountability via reward, accelerating progress or being effective in general

Stacia Garr:
And this is about, have we seen evidence of accountability via rewards, accelerating progress or being effective in general? So this is such a hot topic right now because we see all these organizations now coming out and saying, you've got to tie DEIB numbers to some sort of accountability metrics in order to get people's attention. There was when I first started doing research in this space and like 2013, that was like the thing, the thing that everyone was trying to get to and the 2013 version of myself would probably be cheering this hugely. The 2021 version of myself is not so sure. And particularly given some of the things we've heard in these interviews. The the reason for that is well, while tying metrics to accountability can be really powerful and it absolutely can.

Stacia Garr:
What it can also do is get people to focus on the wrong thing. And right now people are really worried as they should be that as they proliferate the DEIB data, that people will see it as a quota or a target, and that is illegal. And so there is a real concern about people misinterpreting what is trying to happen and kind of going after the wrong things. And the accountability makes that even more, more public. I think that if done well, accountability is a good thing. So if, for instance, you're tying to behaviors that we know drive certain types of outcomes. I think that the accountability can be a good thing. The devil is in the details on the measurement, of course. But I guess I would say my perspective is that it can be good, but use it with caution.

Stacia Garr:
I have not seen any holistic research studies that look at this. And even if we did, I would be concerned about like what correlation and causation researchy things. So that's it, if you want to talk more about it, I'd love to talk more about it. I think it's an important topic, but that's kind of my off the cuff.

Conclusion

Stacia Garr:
We're at time. So I'm just gonna real quick flip through to our last thing, which is next Q&A call. Maybe not relevant for folks here, but for anybody who maybe is watching the video, it is on learning content. So we did a study to understand how do we deliver the right content at the right place, right time, right person right modality, et cetera. And we're going to be discussing some of our early findings from that. That study will be coming out itself in mid-June. So that one will be further along than this study. So if you're interested, I'm sure it'll be really great. It'll be with Dani Johnson and Heather Gilmartin Adams. All right. Thank you to everybody so much for the time today. Thank you, Priyanka for your co-host on this session. And we look forward to seeing everybody again soon. Have a good rest of your day.

In March 2021, we launched a new study on DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) and skills. As part of our ongoing research, we recently gathered leaders for a research roundtable focused on this topic.

The focus of the discussion was to understand the skills critical for fostering DEIB and how orgs can effectively develop them.

Some of the specific questions we discussed include:

• What are the skills crucial for DEIB?
• How might we scientifically identify those critical skills?
• How can learning leaders make sure DEIB-critical skills are being developed?
• How can DEIB leaders make sure skills is a focus of their DEIB efforts?

Mindmap of DEIB & Skills Roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations that transpired as part of this roundtable.

Note: This is a live document. Click the window and use your cursor to explore.

Key Takeaways

Our extremely engaging conversation helped us understand how leaders are thinking about and approaching skills identification and development for the purpose of fostering DEIB. While several interesting insights were shared, we identified these 5 key takeaways:

1. Certain skills are crucial for DEIB at all levels
2. Skills need to be pragmatic and teachable
3. Employees can help determine which skills are important for DEIB
4. DEIB should be an organizational priority
5. Consistency is key to skills development

The following sections offer an overview of the major points for each key takeaway.

Certain skills are crucial for DEIB at all levels

General consensus among our leaders: Certain skills are needed by individuals irrespective of the levels they might be at within their org.

Skills—such as listening, empathy, and self-awareness—are consistently seen as foundational for building inclusive and equitable orgs. Such skills can be instrumental in enabling people to develop other skills as well. As 1 leader pointed out:

“People need comfort with differences. People cannot approach intermediate and advanced concepts if they cannot get past the innate challenge of difference (those who don't look, sound, or act like me). That applies to people of all levels.”

Because these skills are foundational, they should be embedded in all aspects of the talent lifecycle and the org’s culture, instead of creating separate trainings for them. This can help individuals apply those skills in the right context, when they need them.

While all agreed that certain skills are important for all individuals, participants also shared about the role of different levels in enabling these skills.

People leaders must play the role of cultivator for DEIB skills within their teams, while senior leaders need to create the conditions to enable skills development.

Leaders also need to create a vision and shared purpose, and manage their team’s energy and mental health. Managers, for their part, should create a psychologically safe environment for all.

Skills need to be pragmatic & teachable

Leaders agree that DEIB initiatives can’t be tokenistic: DEIB initiatives should focus on skills that are teachable and practical, and can be applied in the workplace. As such, leaders should be able to help managers understand, for instance, how they can:

• Create psychologically safe environments
• Bring in different perspectives

Some of the ways leaders can do this are by:

• Making skills into real actions, behaviors, and rituals by thinking about the everyday practices of inclusion that can be incorporated in meetings, for example, always reading the room during meetings (to gage attendees’ actions and reactions), and asking questions such as who’s in the room, who should be there, and who’s at the decision table; as 1 leader noted:

“That’s where inclusion is first experienced and where those practices can be embedded.”

• Developing exercises that can help create awareness, such as writing down any time someone says a questionable word and noting how often they use it

Employees can help determine which skills are important for DEIB

When it comes to identifying skills that are important for fostering DEIB, leaders were clear: Ask the employees.

In order to determine DEIB skills, orgs should have employees identify instances in which they felt included and what actions enabled them to experience it.

Some of the ways orgs can do that include:

• Surveys to ask employees about their perceptions
• 360 assessments for employee feedback
• Talking to employees (i.e., interviews, focus groups)
• Leveraging employee resource groups (ERGs)

Beside engaging the employees, another helpful way to identify DEIB skills is to leverage external perspective by, for example, having leaders talk with clients and customers. External thought leadership can also be a great source for clarity and knowledge around such skills.

Tech and data can help in identifying opportunities that drive these skills. For example, organizational network analysis (ONA) can be used to identify:

• People who might have DEIB skills
• Who they’re connected to
• Their areas of influence

Leaders also suggested using platforms like Glassdoor to understand why people leave the org and to look at data from exit interviews.

DEIB should be an organizational priority

When asked about how orgs can make sure that DEIB skills are included in employee development efforts, leaders believed that DEIB should be an organizational priority. Everybody needs to be responsible for driving it and be given the means to make it happen. As stated by 1 leader:

“Give individuals and teams the autonomy to DO DEIB, not just learn or talk about it.”

Which is why, as leaders shared, all skills learning should incorporate a DEIB lens. A shared example from the leaders: When orgs create learning to help people managers deliver better feedback, they should ensure that they talk about delivering feedback to different personas, age groups, races, etc.

Some of the ways orgs can ensure that skills learning as part of employee development is impactful include:

• Encouraging interaction and interpersonal dialogue to give feedback on skills learned (as opposed to it being a siloed experience)
• Creating conversations, sharing each other’s stories, and learning from one another across different levels (i.e., national vs local settings, manager to employee, peer to peer) instead of an “instructor” teaching the concepts.

Consistency is key to skills development

An essential part of the successful application of DEIB skills is consistency in practicing and making them an integral part of daily activities, rather than something to learn about once in a while. For example, constant driving of DEIB vocabulary into the org can help develop those skills as it promotes and encourages inclusive practices.

An essential part of the successful application of DEIB skills is consistency in practicing and making them an integral part of daily activities.

One leader shared this: Too often, development programs provide information with little / no follow-up and evaluation—or opportunities to practice and apply the lessons / new ways of thinking, doing, and being. Change in behavior and mindset requires continuous practice.

This consistent approach and practice can also help overcome one of the biggest challenges to the application of DEIB skills: It’s ultimately up to each individual to apply them. As 1 leader put it:

"The individual practice and application is where the change really takes place. Ultimately, this is very individualistic and how we shift culture.”

A SPECIAL THANKS

We're extremely grateful to the attendees who enriched the conversation by sharing their thoughtful ideas and experiences. And, as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback at [email protected].