What to remember when progress is glacial
Evolution to Embedding
The Covid 19 pandemic has accelerated how we look and support mental health in organisations. When I first started working in large organisations 20 years ago, the focus was on safety. Whether people got physically injured at work. I worked for the largest port management and stevedoring company in the world and while I worked there every month we had a fatality at one of our ports.
I often think about how drastically things have changed. The physical safety of workers still remains a priority in our workplaces but we don’t see the level of accidents and fatalities as we did 20 years ago. It’s a good thing we have come a long way.
I think the journey of building a safety culture in our organisations is similar to how we need to think about building a culture of inclusion, so we can support diversity and in turn innovation and performance.
Like the safety journey we have to start with data. In looking at safety, organisations started tracking all incidents, accidents and near misses, so they could understand what was happening, where the focus areas should be and how to address them. Organisations now have sophisticated systems and reporting for safety and in part it’s why dangerous industries like port management now have nowhere near the level of accidents and fatalities they once did.
In our D&I work we need to do the same. We need to start with data too, and we need to keep asking why and keep digging. At the moment many organisations are grappling to collect data about the identity of our people (which is a problem for another day) but I have an example of how you need to keep digging using gender data that every organisation has access to.
In one traditionally male dominated company I worked at we wanted to set some targets for our total workforce to increase the percentage of women. We started with our whole population and thought about what percentage increase year on year would be appropriate, while knowing we had gone backwards on this for the previous few years.
We asked questions like, if we increased our female population by 1% each year, how many women would we need to recruit? This was a very simple answer to get to…but it wasn’t the whole picture. What happens if we consider how many women we have recruited in the past and how many have voluntarily left the business?
My initial model using recruitment and termination data showed that we would likely go backwards. Not good news. Then we separated out the professional and degree qualified workforce “white collar” from the “blue collar” workforce that work in trades and construction roles.
When I modelled this population, and looked again, more than 70% of the recruitment we were doing was in the blue collar workforce, where there was only 4% women in our business and 4% in market we could recruit from. Projecting forward to the next 1-3 years, unless there was significant change in our business mix it would be nearly impossible to increase the percentage of women in our business. This needed a long term 20 strategy.
There are very few quick wins when working to build an inclusive culture. It takes a long time to make changes, like we saw in building a safety culture. Change is often slow but incremental changes and improvements build up over time.
Lisa xx
Don’t miss….
A revisit to our very first Podcast, dates you need in your
calendar and how to get on top of your data
Revisiting Ulysses
As the year draws to a close, we decided to sit down and reflect on some exciting conversations we’ve had on our ”A Dog Called Diversity” podcast and our very first episode, "A Boy Called Ulysses", is one you don’t want to miss.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
2022 Diversity Calendar
The most detailed list of diversity holidays and observances. Quite an amazing resource to start planning your 2022 events.
Keeping on Top of Data
David Green is the HR data guru and does this great newsletter each month called The Best HR and People Analytics Articles. Data is so important to D&I work and this is a great place to start learning.