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CST’s Deepen Understanding series continues with our DEIAB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility, Belonging) Client Executive Eve Mannix! In part three of “Understanding Employees’ Experiences through Data,” Eve explains what organizations should measure on their DEIAB journey.
What should an organization measure?
The first thing that comes to my mind is the DEIAB Assessment tool that we developed to help clients assess where their organization is on the journey. It gives teams a full look at where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they are headed. The key stages range from pre-launch, where you have not started yet, and move to developing, performing, and transforming where we are all headed. I love this assessment because it is so comprehensive. It starts with DEIAB foundational elements.
We ask every client to do the DEIAB foundation rubric because oftentimes there are even organizations that are a little bit further ahead. Those organizations go ahead and look at our DEIAB foundational assessment and tell us what they did and what they missed, which is usually a really important step. And they often respond, “No wonder we haven't been able to move forward in XY&Z because our foundation has a hole in it.” The DEIAB Assessment tool is provided to our clients because it creates insight. The tool is amazing because you take a snapshot in time of where you are in your journey today, but then you can reassess using the exact same tool in a year and see your progress.
Once organizations reach levels of performing or transforming with their DEIAB work, they should be able to measure equity in processes such as compensation, performance reviews and hiring.
Two key and essential metrics are representation at all levels of the organization and experience with inclusion and belonging, which can be measured with employee survey data. At Culture Shift Team, we do this with our Inclusion Climate Survey. This can also be part of a broader employee engagement survey, and it is actually for me less about the questions and more about what demographics are you capturing.
You can have a question like, “I feel like I belong here,” but if you do not have demographic data points to look for meaningful differences, then you only hear and lift the voice of the majority identity group. How are you asking for data points to look for differences between majority and underrepresented groups: disability, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age or generation of the person? How are you analyzing the data? These are key demographic questions that are really important and can feel a little uncomfortable to put on surveys. And that is why a lot of organizations do not. We find that when organizations prioritize the demographics, then you can actually pull the data that is helpful to know where to put resources in your organization.
Stay tuned for Part IV of “Understanding Employees' Experiences through Data” where Eve will share helpful tips on how an organization can get started with DEIAB data.
