We’re off to see one of our awesome clients today to talk through the results of their first survey focussed completely on their culture of inclusion. It got us thinking about the importance of data when it comes to any work on inclusion. At A New Normal, we’re positively geeky about data, and we recognised early on that we needed the support of a real specialist partner in this area. So when we have a client who wants to understand more about their culture of inclusion at work, we call on the support of our partners at great{with}talent who are specialists in this kind of work, having partnered with over 2000 companies worldwide on similar projects.
But why is data in general, and survey work in particular, so important to the work an organisation does around inclusion? There are lots of reasons, but here are our top three:
1. Baselining - In order to set any kind of direction when it comes to inclusion, you need to be able to baseline where you are now. Without a baseline, you have no way of measuring the progress you make. The danger of baselining without asking your people for input is that any assumptions you make will be based on the experiences of a very small group of people. And we all see things through our own lens (see our previous blogs on Unconscious Bias!). Having the output of a survey of this nature means you can look at the cold hard stats and make some really reasoned decisions about where to go next.
2. Engagement - Asking your people for their input is an absolutely crucial part of engagement on work around culture and inclusion. As long as you are prepared to act on it! It’s vital that you are prepared to feed back to your employees about the results of a survey, and more specifically – what you’re going to do about them!
3. Insight - Which brings us to our final point – having the data about what your people see as important gives you great insight on where you need to go. One of the many reasons we love working with great{with}talent is that they are experts when it comes to cutting the data. So rather than looking at only the majority voice of the company (which may not be the one you should be hearing), great{with}talent enable us to cut the data in different ways, and look at how the experiences of minority groups compare with those of the majority. This is really enlightening and helps to prioritise what can feel like an enormous to-do list for D&I teams.
We’re really excited about today’s meeting – it’s going to provide our client with a great opportunity to build on the input of their people and take the next vital steps in their work around a culture of inclusion.
If you think 2020 could be the year where your business makes a real shift in your culture, and you want to talk to us about how, please feel free to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
To find out more about how we’ve partnered with great{with}talent in the past, why not check out our case study here.
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