According to CHRO SA sponsor Workday
Achieving diversity goals has often been regarded as a target that businesses pursue in the context of compliance. But there are many organisations that have realised that, by making diversity and inclusion a priority, they could build better brands, create better products, and ultimately increase business performance. In this blog post, Workday’s Chief People Officer Ashely Goldsmith provides six steps that businesses can take to improve diversity and inclusion.
1 Focus on data because it’s difficult to improve on something that can’t be measured. Organizations can set up informative dashboards that readily highlight much richer data, such as patterns of attrition and promotion of women and underrepresented groups, and equip executives and people managers with the knowledge to pinpoint problems and initiate action plans.
2 Set diversity goals throughout departments and levels of the organisation. Goals like increasing the number of women in management by 10%, or increasing African applicants by 25%, can all be put into diversity scorecards and shared with people managers who can then work towards those targets and see how their teams’ diversity compares with other teams within the company.
3 Do a pay parity analysis to get a better understanding of the organisations pay parity, including variables such as stock and incentive, job role and years of experience.
4 Uncover recruiting gaps by looking into the various steps of the recruiting process in finding out where diversity has accelerated, or where it’s slowed down. If it turns out they’re attracting a wonderfully diverse applicant pool, but fewer black people or women are making it past the first phone screen with recruiters, they can look into the screening process to ensure that bias isn’t playing an unwanted role in those discussions.
5 Rethink succession planning to include dimensions such as age, gender, and ethnicity because experience has shown that the more diverse the leadership team is, the more successful a company will be at fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.
6 Conduct surveys to get employees’ feedback around job satisfaction, their teams, and their views of the overall workplace. This is because using analytics to understand any demographic differences in responses can be very enlightening if it reveals disparate sentiments within different populations.
