Culture Amp, the people and culture platform, is bringing Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) best practices to more SME businesses and employees in the UK by making the D&I segment of the Culture Amp platform available at no charge.
The new D&I Starter Kit provides a proven template to help companies of all sizes collect insightful feedback from employees, better understand emerging voices of diverse and under-represented groups inside the organisation, and enable businesses to create positive change for diversity through meaningful and measurable actions.
The introduction of the kit coincides with the launch of Culture Amp’s 2019 Workplace Diversity, Inclusion & Intersectionality Report which analysed the opinion of nearly 35,000 respondents worldwide and found there is a significant data deficit in respect of in-company D&I policies. There is also little consistency at a global geographical level in how data around race, ethnicity, parenting status or disability are collected or measured.
For example, European based-organisations dealing with varying language, terminology, and regulatory issues are less likely to be gathering the same breadth and depth of diversity data as US-based companies which face important diversity and inclusion issues as well but their sample set is somewhat more culturally homogenous. Company leaders on both continents are becoming more and more focused every year to the importance of understanding ways they can help narrow the gap.
For example, global report findings show that while 70% of straight white men believe their views are reflected in company decision-making, only 52% of LGBT women agree. Additionally 54% of straight white women say they have an impact on decision making at the company compared to 69% of straight white men.
Understanding and acting on workforce diversity is rising up on corporate agendas because of factors including underlying demographic change: UK academic research suggests that ethnic minorities will comprise 35-40% of the UK population by 2061.
Culture Amp co-founder and CEO Didier Elzinga said, “Launching the Diversity & Inclusion Starter Kit is extremely important to us for two reasons. Firstly, it is not just a survey – it is a complete end-to-end toolkit to drive action, and secondly, it directly delivers against our mission to improve the world of work in ways that go beyond merely building a software company.”
Elzinga continued: “Making our tools and best practices freely available will help countless organisations to begin or continue on their journeys towards being a better and more inclusive workplace, and to helping them to put ‘culture first’.”
Christos Tsaprounis, Head of People and Culture, Autotrader comments:
Yvonne Agyei, Chief People Officer, GoCardless adds: “At GoCardless we view diversity as both a strength and an opportunity. Our ambition is to look beyond pure demographics and truly understand the depth of backgrounds and experiences our people contribute. Culture Amp helps us make sense of the data and where to best focus our efforts going forward.”
UK plc’s diversity & inclusion policies are overshadowed (or even driven by) “push” factors such as the 2010 Equality Act – but enacting such programmes remains challenging because first, these policies can require structural changes to organisations’ management and culture.
Secondly, many companies focus on “reasonable adjustments” to comply with equality legislation, rather than having a tailor-made D&I strategy. Lastly, assessing company D&I needs is difficult because ‘UK plc’ doesn’t gather deep data on race, ethnicity, parent status or disability, in the way that other countries (e.g. Australia) do.
However, Culture Amp’s general manager Nick Matthews says there is a rise in positive, “pull” factors inspiring meaningful and measurable D&I strategies, such as:
- Companies that regard D&I as important are more likely to collect D&I data and act on the findings (this aligns with recent LSE / Human Rights Commission research into this area) although only a minority – 36% – actually collects such data
- HR executives in forward-looking companies can now collect representation data (who is in the workforce) as well as employee experience data, to tailor D&I strategies to their organisation.
- Research by employee engagement data tools (like Culture Amp) align with different industry and government census data showing that younger employees are more likely to identify as LGBT. BAME employees have less faith in equal opportunity; and in many leading economies, the population is becoming more diverse overall, so diversity as an issue has to be tackled urgently.
- With D&I monitoring seen as a sensitive issue, diversity initiatives need to be championed by a particular executive or part of the business – allowing more companies to embed D&I across their operations.
- Companies are adopting a “small wins” approach to change (e.g. feature company’s role models,
user manuals , etc.) to gain momentum for change – teams that tailor diversity policy typically see between 4-8% uplift on outcomes in their areas of focus.
