Enabling action with DEI data

To support you in your own DEI efforts, we've put together this comprehensive guide to DEI reporting. The guide is designed to enable you to gain insights into your diversity metrics and build transparency, and accountability, across your organization. We hope this empowers you to turn data into action and gets us one step closer to the change we want to see. This is part 4 of 4. You can download the full guide below.

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How do you drive action with your data?

Share it. At ChartHop, we’re big believers in the power of transparency in driving accountability and change. Sharing some of this data might be uncomfortable - and that is ok. The more your team sees it, the more your team will be prompted to change. Before sharing the data, make sure you've build out the necessary visualizations to bring the data to life.

Sharing with leaders

When sharing with company leaders, you must address the data and changes needed to their individual teams as well as how they need to support company-wide initiatives. To drive action within their specific team:

• Make copies of the reports for their specific teams or show them how to filter the company-wide ChartHop report to only show their team.
• Explain which data is available, how it was gathered and how often it will update (using ChartHop, data will update on a daily basis).
• Show them how they can turn aggregated reports into action (i.e. In ChartHop they can click through the data points to see the individuals affected).

In this example, the manager can see aggregated one-on-one ratings over time across race/ethnicity. Here, they can see that the Hispanic or Latino group had a lower average rating in April. They can click through the report and delve deeper into the data to see who needs additional support.

Before your meeting, you should identify any areas that need immediate action and come with ideas on how they can be addressed. Together, you can develop a plan that leadership can then share with their team or with the wider organization. Be sure to set guidelines around how much the leader should share with their respective team as you don’t want some leaders sharing and and others not. After you've shared the initial data, set up periodic check-ins to track progress, help remove blockers, and share what's working across the leadership team. Furthermore, ensure leaders know that this data is not only helpful in understanding past decisions made, but can be actively used to make better, future decisions. Empower leaders to leverage this data when working through hiring plans, compensation reviews, promotion reviews, performance reviews, etc.

Sharing with employees

Here is some advice for sharing with employees:

1. Understand your data deeply.

Employees will undoubtedly have questions and you want to ensure you can answer as many as possible. To prepare, share the data with a couple of trusted colleagues before sharing widely and have them give you a list of questions that may come up. These conversations can get emotional - to avoid getting flustered, have a prepared response for questions you don't know the answer to (i.e. "Great question, we'll look into that and follow up.").

2. Define what data you’re going to share widely.

We suggest starting with Representation data. Over time, you can start sharing Compensation and Performance data. Ensure that any data you do share on the Compensation and Performance side does not single out individuals. Especially if you have work to do on the representation side, sharing average compensation or performance ratings for a small number of people can make it easy for individual data to get backed into.

3. Define what you’re looking to change - and the steps you’ll take to make the change happen.

When you first share the data, the biggest question is people's minds will be "what is the organization planning to do about it?". Ensure you come in to the meeting with a clear roadmap of the goals the company is trying to achieve and the steps you will all collectively take to get there. Most importantly, ensure your leadership takes responsibility for what the numbers look like today.

4. Define how you’re going to share it and how often

Once the data has been shared, employees will expect continuous updates. We suggest carving out a time during company-wide all hands meetings to talk through the data, the progress and what the team is actively working on. Using ChartHop, you can also create an org-wide DEI dashboard with specific reports that everyone can access. This report is automatically updated as the team changes, without any manual updates needed from the team.

The time to act is now

The Black community has endured centuries of discrimination and injustice and it is about time we collectively do something about it. Once you’re looking to create a more broad DEI program, you can look at additional dimensions and analyze gaps for: gender, age, social economic status, disabilities, nationality, sexual preference, Veteran status and more. ChartHop can help. You can also download the full guide below.

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