Executive Director at Workday, dedicating my career to helping leaders, teams, and organizations realize their maximum potential.
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When it comes to inclusion and belonging, it’s difficult to know what path to take to achieve our desired outcomes — whether it's more effective succession planning, more diverse recruiting or better sponsorship programs.
One of the most empowering ideas I have learned from leaders like my good friend Carin Taylor, Workday’s Chief Diversity Officer, is that setting goals is necessary, but not sufficient, especially when your outcomes are not matching your intentions. We need to shift our energy from goal setting to goal getting.
An analysis of people data a few years ago illustrates this idea with a practical example. My colleagues and I were binge-analyzing data when we discovered a difference in the sentiment of high-potential female engineers compared to high-potential male engineers in one of our key developer hubs. Drilling down into the workforce data for that office, we surprisingly uncovered a gap in whether men versus women believed that promotions were fair.
As our goal was to have no more than a 3% difference with regard to sentiment, across the intersectionality of gender, generation, geography or ethnic background, we needed to move into goal-getting mode.
While it might have been easy to simply look at this data and assume that female engineers in that office weren’t being fairly or equally promoted, we analyzed what was truly going on using a more scientific, four-part approach. We got to the root of the problem and then set out to effectively accomplish our goals. I believe these key considerations could help you to improve inclusion and belonging in your own organization.
Establish A Strategy
Leaders need to create a plan and commit to it, and then consider what is needed and align stakeholders.
For example, our overall strategy is to be a great place to work for all. We took this broader strategy and crafted a set of outcomes as a way to measure success. One measure of success is improved diversity of racial representation. An effective way to improve diverse representation is to value and elevate belonging, inclusion and equity so that everyone feels they can bring and include their best selves at work.
Track The Outcomes
Outcomes are the fundamental elements that indicate your strategy is working. Try to be specific about the outcomes you want as a result of your efforts; this should be a disciplined measurement.
When we track belonging, we aim for no more than a 3% difference, which is a practical measurement that considers general rater tendencies and other factors. If you simply measure aggregate average, you tend to regress to the mean. When you put an intersectionality lens on it — where you are looking at a combination of different elements of a person’s identity that could include race, ethnicity, gender, generation and more — the meaningful differences will surface.
Look At Underlying Indicators
Leaders should apply scientific measurement to understand where you are and where you should focus to achieve your desired outcomes.
At first, we looked at promotion velocity and discovered that the promotion rate of women was actually slightly better than that of men. But be cautious about ending your analysis here and assuming you don't have an issue to address — this is the time for looking beneath the data with human empathy. This is an outcome around equity and belonging. So we conducted human empathy sessions to review this at a deeper level. This additional analysis helped to uncover that perception was the problem, not promotion velocity.
You may want to consider running empathy sessions to ensure you are surfacing the true issue. When we ask people about their experiences, we have the opportunity to strengthen empirical data with their perspectives; the idea of hearing personal stories to get the context of where they’re coming from helps us to better understand indicators.
Take Data-Driven Action
Actions should be analytics-driven and based on what your data is showing you can improve. Take action in ways that change the employee experience, not people’s perceptions. If your people don’t believe they have opportunities, help them find mentors. If they don’t believe they are getting thoughtful, relevant gigs to grow their careers, help them update their skills profile so it will curate more personalized recommendations. Make sure they are invited to the right development opportunities and do what you can to improve their experience.
Wherever possible, engage employees directly in the process, with behavioral nudges that enable people to understand what actions they can take to help increase belonging, and try to curate those opportunities. For example, we invite employees to take part in employee experience journeys where we curate belonging and inclusion opportunities and activities.
Actions should be taken from both a people manager and a company perspective. We discovered that when a people leader provides a better experience, the sense of belonging is better. Talent and other functional organization leaders can be more deliberate in creating programs that can drive, say, equity in opportunities for mentorship or representation in succession planning. Make sure there is equity in your programs, from their availability and accessibility to the ability to complete them.
In our case, quick identification and action enabled our outcomes to meet our intentions, with Great Place to Work Institute naming us the best place to work in that country that year and a great place to work for women. (Note: Great Place to Work Institute’s CEO is now on Workday’s board of directors, so our firm can no longer appear on these lists.) As HR leaders, we have the expectation and desire to create a more inclusive workplace. If leaders are able to be intentional and empathetic — and remain open to tackling issues with a scientific and human approach — I have no doubt they will all be able to achieve the goals they set for themselves.
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