Driving meaningful conversations for inclusion from your engagement data

This was an exciting week as I was fortunate to be part of the People Analytics and HR Data Conference as a speaker and roundtable facilitator, organised by Aventedge . I was fortunate to have my team mates from the Cochlear talent team – Zubeyde (Zoe) Korkmaz and Henrietta Orendain join me during the event. The conference also enabled me to meet a number of new contacts like Dr. Paul Hunter Ryan Swindells Dr Philip Gibbs Iain Calman Sravan Rajupalem Jeff O.  

For most of you who know me, use a lot of data and analytics in my work, but I wouldn’t dare claim to be someone from that area, so my contribution to this event was more a talent and DE&I perspective.

And the topic that I presented was – “Driving meaningful conversations for inclusion from your engagement data”.

“Understanding diversity includes knowing how diminished we all are when voices go unheard”

Preskill & Brookfield

My presentation focused on 4 parts; Building the Narrative, Driving the Conversation and Raising the Call to Action

Building the Narrative

To enable meaningful conversations on inclusion, we need the data from engagement surveys to build stories of how people experience inclusion at every angle you can break into e.g. by level, team, department, etc. So this, in other words is about ensuring that we measure what matters. And what are they?

• Parameters that define inclusion experience

There are two things you want to know from people in your organisation – to what degree do people experience inclusion (or exclusion) at your organisation AND to what degree do your leaders demonstrate inclusive leadership behaviours.

Some areas that you might want to cover in your survey:

• Speak up & Safety Culture – is it possible for people to openly raise difficult issues without the risk of being stereotyped as foolish or not seen a team player? is it ok for people to try new ways of doing things? are mistakes being treated as learning opportunities?
• Decision making – do leaders encourage diversity of thinking within their teams? Do people feel that their leaders value the diverse ideas and opinions that they bring to the table?
• Enterprise agility – do leaders enable different ways of thinking, work and communicating in their teams? Are people encouraged to seek new or improved solutions? Are people encouraged to seek opinions, advice and solutions beyond their existing teams/ traditional boundaries? Are people empowered to work flexibly so long as commitments are delivered (or exceeded)?
• Unconscious & Systemic Bias – to what degree is bias discussed or challenged openly when making decisions? Do leaders test their biases about people who are from different backgrounds? is there a perception that diverse people face barriers that prevent them from advancing their careers in your organisation?

There are many organisations providing inclusion competencies and frameworks out there, you may wish to check out the following:

• Inclusion competency model - Symmetra - talk to Victoria Park
• Inclusive leadership compass - talk to Rashida Lowe
• Inclusive Leader Talent Framework - Korn Ferry
• Six signature traits of inclusive leadership - Deloitte

• Capturing the demographics that matter

There are endless demography dimensions you can cover, but the critical ones should include; age, country, employment status, gender, sexual orientation, job family, region, team role, tenure, carer responsibility, work preference and band/level.

So how does demographics matter for inclusion? I have seen many situations where the overall rating for a competency is excellent, and one would be inclined to think that leaders for that organisation/ team are doing well, right? Well, I have seen pockets of their people population indicating experience of exclusion – it can be someone from the LGBTIQ group, maybe people of a certain age group, tenure, part-timers, women, and the possibilities stretch across all demographic groups. Regardless of whatever platform you use, please be mindful to select one that provides reporting down to the lowest possible meaningful denomination (e.g. 10 people minimum in a team), where you can pull out reports at your fingertips.

A key consideration is – how do you go about it, given data/privacy laws and to some extent, questions of integrity/confidentiality and how the data will be used? People asked this during the conference, so my answer is – please ensure that there’s some form of governance in place to ensure integrity/confidentiality and to have commitment from the highest levels (e.g. Executive Team or Board) to follow-up with remedy and action. People need to be assured that it’s a safe platform to voice out and that the input will translate into impact and real change.

• Benchmarks

It is important that you provide benchmarks in your reports; if possible, indicate progress (or regress) for the items over time (e.g. 2024 versus 2023), compare the team rating against a global/industry average (if applicable) and the top 5/bottom 5 items.

By ensuring that we set up the right component/ constructs to measure, we enable our leaders to look at inclusion strategically backed by data.

• Verbatim

“The deepest truth is found by means of a simple story."

Anthony De Mello

Verbatim provides context, substance, significance, circumstances, factors, definition, and/or explanation to the data.

For example, sometimes, we may have data that seem to contradict one another;  e.g. a team may have a high sense of belonging but low psychological safety OR a department has high psychological safety ratings but leaders are less receptive of ideas that are different.

In situations like these, you need context to piece together the reality within the team, and verbatim is a good starting point. Every organisation, team is unique and so are their stories which verbatim can be a good place to start.

Also, during the conference, I had some good questions on how do we best leverage on verbatim:

• How do we ensure good governance of verbatim e.g. people use inappropriate language? Or how to differentiate between truth and untruths?
• are word clouds a good way to summarise verbatim from surveys?
• Are there some good software to recommend for processing verbatim?

I believe in simplicity, so I think it’s worthwhile to advise people to provide details which are relevant to illustrate the reality that they want HR to know, to be objective, focused and provide suggestions or solutions (but nothing more complicated than that). I am also inclined to position verbatim as a compass in telling where we need to do more exploration, take things with a pinch of salt.

I’d emphasise this– Data should be the starting point of the conversation on inclusion and belonging, not the outcome.

I also advised people to consider that if we use word clouds to summarise messages from verbatim, we may be defeating the entire purpose of verbatim. We may pick out 3 words from 21 different verbatim, but they may tell 21 different stories going separate directions or issues. And that doesn’t even factor in the part where 1 verbatim itself may be interpreted differently by 10 different people. Therefore, nothing beats real conversation because we need to remember – you can contextualise everything from a person’s work experience into 1 survey response. Let alone hundreds or thousands of people.

Driving the Conversation

This part is about challenging assumptions, biases and identifying inertia against change that may arise when leaders deliberate on the results of the inclusion data for your organisation.

“The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”

Nate Silver, statistician and author

As a consultant and in-house HR practitioner, I’ve heard of all these response from people leaders across all levels:

• This data can’t be right – this shows that leaders have a different perception of reality
• Your survey questions were confusing – they think people misunderstood the statements especially with statements that were negatively phrased for reverse scoring
• I don’t see any issues with the results – they think status quo is alright
• Majority of respondents in my team had no issues – it was only a minority that don’t fit in

I am inclined to think that it’s the role of people in HR to facilitate the reflection with leaders and be part of their exploration of the inclusion reality in these teams. Some questions that I start with include:

• What comes to mind when you see these results?
• What are the reasons some people have different experiences?
• What are the questions you need to ask when you engage with them?
• Why are you finding these results hard to accept?
• What could be causing some people to have different experiences?
• What are people from groups with concerns saying about their experience?

Raising the Call to Action

The next steps is dependent on where your organisation is at and it will depend if:

• Your organisation is right at the beginning of your DE&I journey

Expect different levels of readiness or varying appetite for inclusion from leaders; I’d prioritise leaders who are on board with your DE&I agenda to get quick wins. There may also be cultural and leadership challenges, therefore unless you have champions or sponsors at the Executive Team or board level, it’s important to be smart with resources to focus on hanging fruit.

The best approach would be to assess, build and sustain appetite for inclusion. To build, it’s important to educate to strengthen knowledge, continue to influence with conversation and lead with a call to action. Always think from a change management perspective,  take steps to do build momentum, change the culture and embed the target inclusion behaviours.

• Your organisation has leaders as champions of DE&I

Having leaders who can walk the talk, are curious, empathetic and committed to your DE&I agenda are critical to build and sustain momentum; it is far more impactful when people can see, feel and experience their leaders demonstrating the way forward.

There’s a huge momentum when leaders lead inclusively from the front by role modelling the aspired behaviour and culture, when people can see them demonstrate real curiosity about difference, when they courageously lead challenging conversations around DE&I and behave with humility, compassion, flexibility and agility.

• Your organisation is ready for the next step to advance the DE&I journey

So you’d have engaged and educated leaders on DE&I, you might be considering more advanced topics e.g. advocacy, gender, race, disability and neuro diversity and strengthening your inclusion culture.

People may start from different levels of readiness or knowledge or misconceptions, therefore we need to provide knowledge for inclusion 101 through training to bridge the gap, e.g. providing the business case for inclusion, etc. For those who have bias, we also need to enable conversations on bias, how it impacts the organisation and its people.

Ensure that you build evaluation into the plan, including the structured and informal check-ins consistently to get context.

• Tackle systemic issues

In some teams/ organisations, behaviour change isn’t enough – some of the bias is embedded into processes, systems, structure, policies (pay, flexibility, performance, hiring, etc.)

You’ll need to dive head on to tackle systemic issues, so pull in all the stops to get this right because you have one chance. Do try your best have the following:

• Executive or board sponsorship
• Impartiality – get a 3rd party consultant to provide a professional and neutral perspective
• Engagement with all stakeholders, enable co-ownership and transparency with everyone in the organisation
• Do it right, do what’s required – especially difficult and unpopular decisions
• It’s not about the past or who did what- it’s about the future you want to create for your organisation
• Focus on how the change will enable inclusion

“Diversity is having a seat at the table, inclusion is having a voice, and belonging is having that voice be heard.”

Liz Fosslien

Having the data delivered to you and leadership is only half the journey, therefore I’m reemphasising again that – Data should be the starting point of the conversation on inclusion and belonging, not the outcome.