Using data to hire and retain women of color is crucial for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Considering that post-pandemic, there is a need to actively work to not only hire but create a sense of belonging and inclusion so more diverse women stay, data is the way to go. Here are some things you should be looking for in your data to help create an impact on your organization’s recruitment and retention strategy:

Tailoring Onboarding Process:

The first ninety days of employment are when employers lose their diverse employees the most. What the companies should be focusing on the most is tailoring their onboarding processes. The easiest and most effective way to do it is to present new hires with distinctively tailored and customized items that can help them feel noticed within the organization. These could be a nameplate,  shirt, or any other company-branded item that is specific to the employee. Personalizing experiences can help create a sense of belonging.

The companies can have employees fill out questionnaires during the onboarding process that indicates their likes and preference. This can later help in offering them merchandise specific to their culture, gender, or particular conditions. When an employer does this, the new employee feels comfortable because they feel noticed, seen, and heard. Another crucial thing during the onboarding process is ensuring that everyone knows how to pronounce the new employee’s name correctly. They could be asked to enunciate their name in the first meeting, which can be recorded, and later shared with everyone else. Asking a new employee if they have a nickname or not just because their name may be difficult to others to pronounce is disrespectful. 

Finally, pair the new employee with a mentor or tenured employee who can help them during the initial days. This person can help them figure out online or digital workplace if the role is remote or work from home. The mentor would help acclimate them to the slack community, the Microsoft community protocols, and the other tech protocols specific to the team. In other settings or in the physical workplace, the mentor can identify facilities that the company provides that they can benefit from. The mentor can get help from ERGs here. These actions may help the new hire feel a personal connection and comfort with the person who is helping them figure out the new role and the company. 

Start With The Referral Rates:

The referral rates tell a lot about the companies that are interested in creating a more diverse workforce. Look at the referral pool of your current and past employees by demographics, gender, ethnicity, and race among other factors. Data still supports that nepotism is still prevalent in companies and network privilege still stands for white employees. Nearly 50% of all referrals are white; 60% of all of those are men, meaning nearly 30% of all referrals are white men. When a third of all referrals come from the same privileged background, the system can still be considered active against diverse representation.

Moreover, research has found that only 3% of referrals come from and are in favor of black employees. Look into your company’s data and it might present the same bleak picture. The chance of getting hired dramatically increases when the candidate is referred. Such is the case for white employees but not for their Black and Latino counterparts. The referrals are an excellent source of hiring talent. Ensure that you make the best use of it because they are an asset for diversity hiring and retention. Create a strong referral system for diverse employees with added advantages for those who refer strong candidates for the workforce. When you have a system in place, the data will show how easily will you be able to attract, hire, and retain women of color.

Establish Fair Performance Improvement Plan:

Most companies have unfair performance review problems with diverse employees. Only 29% of employees strongly agree that their performance reviews were just and fair. This gets worse when you start looking into the data specific to women of color. A study revealed that African Americans and women were less likely to get good ratings from reviewers from the opposite race. Another survey indicates that nearly 41% of African American women managers feel that they have to outperform their male counterparts to offset bias in the performance review process.

Performance reviews do not have to be a barrier in the diversity and inclusion process. In fact, if you look at the data and use this opportunity wisely, they can be one of the ways through which you can retain diverse talent in the long run. When used wisely and with the help of the data available, the performance review systems can help you optimize your diverse talent, enhance productivity in workflows, and discover & eliminate bias in managers’ performance reviews. They can also help you collect data and its effectiveness for DEI measures and initiatives in your organization that are otherwise very hard to track. Look into your current data set of hires, promotions, pay and compensation plans, and compare it with the data you get after a few months. In between, you ensure that there are DEI training and workshops against bias and discrimination for your managers. Furthermore, you should provide support to your diverse hires, especially those who have been recently onboarded. When you assess the data in a few months, it will help you look into performances and evaluate where your initiatives to retain diversity might be faltering and help catch bias in the managers as well. 

Track Diversity Recruitment In Management:

Most of the companies make this mistake that they only track the data from new hires especially those who are in entry-level positions. Nearly 20% of organizations are not tracking any diversity metrics in their recruitment or hiring practices. But, this is the biggest mistake you can make. If you use data and AI systems to hire and track the performance of diverse employees, it can assist in reducing bias and discrimination. A study found that 47% of organizations have implemented technology to help reduce unconscious bias in their recruiting and hiring. Although 53% of employers have not implemented such technology, one-third of them have plans to do so in the future.

It has been noticed that more often than not recruiters prefer to hire those who have degrees from predominantly white institutions colleges instead of HBCUs, HSIs, Native Colleges, or community colleges even though their graduates might have valuable experience and skills. Such is the case for Black people or employees of color who often graduate from HBCUs, community colleges, and unprivileged backgrounds. Recruiters often fail in hiring them even though they have ample experience for the position. When you use data or AI to make decisions on who to hire, who to promote, and where are the lags, there are no chances for bias and discrimination to creep in. What’s more, is that tracking the data for your management and mid-management positions helps in evaluating the performances better and helps in promoting more employees to management positions. This could probably be neglected otherwise if the process is done manually and left on the HR teams to figure out. 

Check out : 5 Ways to Retain Women of Color in STEM Professionals.

Related Article: Hiring Should be the First Step in Retaining Diverse Talent

“People analytics play a crucial role in learning and development. When used right, they are the reason people and organizations prosper. For companies thriving to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion, analytics become even more important in L&D. They are the bridge companies need to help diverse employees level up with their white counterparts.”

They Help With Skill Development

Many organizations are always on the lookout for opportunities that can help close the skill gap especially for employees of color. Most of the time, diverse hires do not have a similar learning and growth curve as their white colleagues. Learning and development is a key enabler in identifying skills that can help with the personal and professional development of such candidates. The opportunities to use data to hone the skill of your employees are endless.

For starters, your company can take one skill and gauge its metrics across the departments and the employees. Likewise, this can be done by looking into the existing data and finding out the skills that are on the lower side of the curve. Honing in on one skill, keeping in mind that helping diverse employees should be your top priority, organizations can focus on trainings that are the most effective to develop it. This works especially better with knowledge-based skills for employees of color. If you are using your people analytics right, you would find that there will be gaps in white employees collaborating with the black ones for tasks, or BIPOC getting fewer coaching opportunities. This not only helps create coaching programs and better mentorship opportunities for people of color, but also helps design bias interventions, and better collaboration skills among white employees.

They Result In Better Employee Performance

One of the main goals why businesses need to use people analytics for learning and development is to increase the performance of employees. Most organizations test their employee performances set on a certain criterion. While it could be as general as “high, medium, and low”, often there are various descriptions and supporting analytics that encapsulate the performance of an individual across various aspects. This could include leadership, teamwork, communication, management, support, etc. If you pay attention to the datasets and for each employee, you will be able to chart out a deeper analysis of their performance.

Based on this data, various programs can be designed to improve the performance of employees and teams. Similar aptitude employees can be paired for better results. Not just this, but it is an excellent opportunity to check the status of your diversity hires. If in a certain team you see a low level of performance or results, the chances are that the manager isn’t in tune with his team. Among many other such issues, people analytics for L&D will help in finding out biases, discrimination, white superiority, and other barriers that employees of color have to face every day. When you have data, you can analyze it and look for further correlations. Moreover, you will also be able to get results from various trainings, programs, and mentorships. Based on these, you will gather great insights on how L&D can be of further benefit to your employees and company.

They Lead To Increased Turnover

One of the biggest problems for any company these days is the time and cost involved in replacing employees. This becomes even more difficult when you are focusing more and more on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives every day. L&D should be an integral part of the agenda of the companies intending to decrease the diversity turnover. Give your hires of color more opportunities to learn and grow through on-the-job trainings, workshops, mentoring, and education. It enhances their employee experiences and incentivizes their stay within your company. It is one of the ways through which you can create a sense of belonging.  

To effectively track the turnover crisis, you need to look into your data. Establish a relationship between various aspects of the employee lifecycle like onboarding, opportunities, engagement, and rewards, etc. and you will be able to find a real connection. Find out where the turnover is less and crisscross your data to see where the lags are at.  Using people analytics for the development of diverse employees can become one of the leading causes of increased retention.

They Can Help With Promotions

When there are constant learning opportunities within your company, you will notice your employees growing faster than ever. This will be evident through your data once you start implementing analytics for L&D. In turn, if you ensure a high promotion rate within the company, it will save a lot of costs to hire from the outside. Furthermore, an increase in the internal promotion rate also keeps employees motivated and engaged with all your initiatives because their commitment to the company and personal development will signal growth opportunities. Hence, resulting in more engagement and less turnover.

L&D efforts can help in increased mobility among employees of color. People analytics can help you measure and analyze those efforts. Always remember that the end goal is inclusion here. Diversity has already proven its importance for business development. In a long run, do not forget that you want to not only hire diverse candidates but retain them, and using people analytics for learning and development is one way to do that. While it is important to train your employees of color, it is equally significant to train their white counterparts in their ingrained biases, discrimination, and prejudice. Your diverse hires aren’t a cog in a wheel but one of the major reasons your business will grow leaps and bounds. Treat them as such!  

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How To Use People Analytics to Retain and Recruit Talent?

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The death of George Floyd in 2020 rocked society worldwide, leading organizations to reaffirm their dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the wake of these events. Building and scaling a successful worldwide program would be practically impossible without a shared baseline or established D&I set of international standards.

Intending to resolve this issue, the ISO has just published ISO 30415:2021, an HRM standard that provides guidelines on what is required to establish and use the advantages of diverse and inclusive company culture.

A diverse and inclusive workplace reflects society, according to ISO 30415 Project Leader and Global HR Expert Lorelei Carobolante, who led Workgroup 8’s multinational team of experts from 14 countries. There is usually always an unsolved conflict and an impression of unfairness when we detect a gap between what society looks like and the work environment.

It is possible to identify and address workplace disparities by implementing the new HRM standard. As part of its mission, it is designed to assist organizations in achieving D&I goals and assessing their impact on individuals, communities, and society as a whole. As part of the ISO 30415 certification process, organizations can have their D&I initiatives independently and externally validated.

People worldwide have a hard time agreeing on what is acceptable when there is no clearly defined standard, says Cristina Schwenke, who worked on the development of ISO 30415. There is a lot more discord in your music. Your organization can use ISO 30415 to improve its diversity & inclusion efforts.

Assess Your Company’s Position

Regardless of where you are, how big your company is, or what industry you’re in, the new standard can help you improve diversity and inclusion. ISO 30415 was purposefully designed to be adopted by companies of any size. D&I steps advised by the Annex include a checklist for assessing the current status and comparing it to recommended actions, which should be reviewed with sample measures and possible outcomes to find the means to demonstrate their achievement. According to Carobolante, the document serves as a roadmap for putting the standard into practice at your firm.

Heather Bond-Shuhaibar states that this standard can be used as a self-assessment tool to evaluate where you’re falling short. In other words, We’re offering a toolkit. Use ISO 30415 to determine where your organization’s diversity and inclusion activities fall short of the baseline it sets and where there are areas for development.

Using D&I Standards to Assess Success

Human Resources Management (HRM) is outlined in ISO-30415 as a step-by-step guide. Actions, metrics, and results are all broken down into sub-clauses.

• Actions: What actions should you do to obtain your desired results?
• Metrics: If you want to know if your activities were successful, what metrics can you use?
• Results: Is there a certain D&I outcome that you are pursuing?

Consistent commitment from all levels of a business, especially those in charge, is required to foster an inclusive culture. Sensitive topics, cultural customs, and discriminatory conduct must all be considered when working with a diverse group of people. However, a diverse and inclusive society has many advantages and addresses some of the most basic human rights.

The standard provides a framework for incorporating evidence-based practices into existing human resource management policies, processes, and practices. It also supports evidence-based practice by giving prospective key outcomes to track progress toward your goals. As a registered expert of Workgroup 8 and a former professor at the University of Manchester in the UK, Helge Hoel stresses setting goals. We must proceed methodically. You can track the growth of your company by using the standard.

Make A Plan and Commit to Make a Difference

Ensuring a company’s long-term transformation involves iterative approaches that are closely monitored. According to the standard, the diversity and inclusion recommendations, examples, and possible outcomes outlined in ISO 30415 can all be tracked and improved over time. Learning how to promote an inclusive workplace culture, this criterion is vital for HR management, Carobolante explains. For that to happen, everyone in the organization must be committed, especially those at the top.

ISO 30415:2021 can be used by HR teams to strategically increase diversity and inclusion to create a more productive, healthful, and the inventive working environment if leadership commits to implementing, maintaining, and measuring actions indicated by the standard.

According to ISO 30415:2021, HRCI’s Certificate for Diversity and Inclusion in HR Management lays the framework for creating an office where all employees are valued and acknowledged for their valuable contributions to the company, may engage in work-related opportunities, and can pursue career paths that make the most of their abilities and knowledge while also receiving fair compensation.

Leaders of companies who demonstrate their commitment to diversity and inclusion by implementing the new standard ISO 30415 will have a strong awareness of the results of employees and external stakeholders. Actions, principles, and measures are included in the standard and their accompanying accountability and obligations, which are tailored to each workplace’s particular circumstances. As an ISO 30415 standard, it is intended to be scalable to the needs of all types of organizations across all sectors of the economy regardless of their size or type, their activity, their industry or sector or their growth phase, or the external influences and country-specific requirements of their respective countries.

According to Lewis, this standard aids firms in integrating diversity and inclusion throughout the entirety of the employment life cycle and their supply chain and partnerships with third parties. A continuous improvement approach is needed to achieve diversity and inclusion goals and support external validation processes.

Conclusion

By cultivating a diverse and inclusive corporate culture, individuals and teams may thrive and perform at their best in environments that foster successful collaboration and participation. People of various backgrounds, identities, and circumstances can gain access to work and develop the information, skills, and talents essential to their personal growth and well-being if organizations are more inclusive and equitable.

Get your ISO-30415:2021 Human Resources Management – Diversity & Inclusion Guide & Checklist