News

To Understand Whether Your Company Is Inclusive, Map How Your Employees Interact

To Understand Whether Your Company Is Inclusive, Map How Your Employees Interact
by Bogdan Yamkovenko and Stephen Tavares

To gauge the impact of diversity and inclusion efforts, companies typically track metrics on the hiring, attrition, promotion, and composition of the current workforce. While such statistics are useful, they don’t provide a fully accurate picture. In reality, diversity and inclusion are not merely the number of nonwhite male employees you have. Rather, a truly inclusive organization contains a diverse cross-section of employees who actually interact with one another. So how do you measure this? A venerable management tool — organizational network analysis (ONA) — can result in powerful visual representations of the way inclusion actually plays out in your organization.

Recently, a large U.S.-based professional services firm we worked with unexpectedly learned the power of such pictures to map gender diversity. Using ONA, the company had originally been looking to identify influential experts in its workforce. To do this, it conducted a short, company-wide survey that was designed to collect network data. The survey, known as a name generator, involved several questions that provided information about a particular network relationship. For example, a decision-making network is identified by asking “Who do you go to most frequently to get help making an important decision?” And a trust network is identified by asking “Who in this organization do you believe has your back when things are tough?”

The people named were then asked to identify people they trust and go to for help with decisions. This allowed the company to see whether the relationships are mutual.

As the firm mapped this information, it made an unsettling discovery: Despite the company’s efforts to support diversity and inclusion, women employees were less likely to be involved in decision making and innovation than men. This finding suggested the company might be suffering the effects of unconscious bias among its staff, with employees subconsciously prioritizing the views and opinions of employees of the same gender as themselves.

Read full article on HBR.