Diversity initiatives have reached a turning point, from an era of trying to get to attention to now being considered over used. The progress is being made but much needs to be done for this to be achievable. There are still organizations that want to continue and sustain but don’t want to invest in a function, separate team or position. Diversity is the what and Inclusion is the how, they are not separate but to be addressed together.
In this blog post, we’ll explore effective methods to stablish diversity and inclusion within your organization.
67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities, and more than 50% of current employees want their workplace to do more to increase diversity.
Glassdoor
1. Deeply connect it to your business purpose and strategy
- Many organization fail at this step and this is where it all needs to be connected. It is crucial to set up the agenda of diversity and inclusion within your organization via its intersection to the mission. There needs to be a clear connection between any firm’s direction or value proposition to its clients and the need to invest in diversity. It has to be connected through discernible methods, identifiable leaders need to own it and cultural artifacts needs to be associated with this. By clarifying these intersections, organizations can identify areas for improvement, set tangible goals, and track progress.
- All initiatives or programs that elevate culture is only possible when strategic flow through is visible to everyone within the organization especially at the team management level. This structural clarity across layers allows for data-driven decision-making and the creation of targeted initiatives to foster a more inclusive work environment.
Primary research design and assessment: Diversity and inclusion is a social research initiative, every DI program starts with gathering feedback from existing social groups. There are are two primary methods of gathering inputs that will feed our actions and measure our progress.
2. Interviews and Focus Groups
- The process of interview design starts with the framework-functional, structural, behaviors and cultural elements need to be clear before engaging the questionnaire design. There are multiple ways to structure a discussion to gather the right inputs, tap into the temperature and get people to narrate micro stories. It is important that you provide the right environment and interviewer so they can safely share.
- Once the framework is articulated, the questions are cascaded through the rudiments of this framework. Needless to say, the questions need to be connected to the goals.
- To ensure that you are capturing the right wavelength, ensure respondents have similar type of experiences, background and length of service hence you need to select the participants carefully. You will want to capture differing experiences, but participants should also be similar enough so they feel comfortable sharing their views in the group. If there is an opportunity, use the demographics data to screen in/out people so your group has the demographic characteristics you want.
- The number of respondents within a group can vary depending on the depth and complexity of questions you have planned and also the number of groups you plan to tap into. A general rule is to plan two to three focus groups for each unique segment or considered population. It’s always best to have at least 2 representative groups for each combination to ensure that the perspectives and experiences you capture are statistically value for a larger population group. The avalanche effect is accurate where when a particular idea or opinion discussed by different people a few times, the more likely it is a larger opinion and feedback across many. It is entirely possible that one focus group can have different and sometimes opposite views from the other, depending on the population group. The more focus groups you can afford to conduct, the greater your chances of capturing discussions that accurately reflect the most common views of your population.
- Focus groups require a discussion guide to ensure that the meeting is productive and focused. It is a document that has an outlined script and list of carefully selected and sequenced open-ended questions that generate discussion. The discussion guide includes a verbal script for the beginning introduction, initiative purpose, safety rules, actual questions and closing statements. The flow is important to ensure different focus groups are systematically conducted in a similarly structured way, ensuring that there is validity of captured statements. This also includes the order of the questions of our initiative.
- In measuring within any organization, it is important to have questions that are open-ended, this allows for different teams with different operating managers to share their experiences and insights.
3. Surveys
Online assessments continue to be the best way of capturing feedback anonymously and quick. It provides users multiple benefits of participation, safety, intervention and engagement.
- Wording : The quantitative portion of the assessment needs to be designed with ease of understanding where everyone understand the stated question clearly without ambiguity. There needs to be simplicity, commonly shared references and succinctly worded questions
- Safety : The premise and data gathering should encourage honest and candid responses. An external consultant can greatly enable this premise whereby respondents are assured that their answers will not she shared with your organization.
- Scale: The quantitative portion of the assessment has to be carefully evaluated if its meant for future repeats. Besides this need to continue to measure on a similar scale, attention should be placed to the science of evaluation. Recent research has confirmed that the 5 point Likert scale is the most useful in social research and data gathering.
- Open ended questions: It is important to keep this to a limited number as the ability to analyze across different inputs will be difficult if done internally. An external consultant will easily be able to run thematic analysis to review the comments.
