Workforce diversity diagnostics

Companies often use our diagnostic work to identify the barriers to progressing diverse talent. Our focus can be organisation-wide or specific to particular grades, departments or divisions. In doing so, we can unblock your talent pipeline and give you greater access to the best diverse talent available.

We’ll work with you to drill down into the data you have, consult with staff at a range of levels, and review your relevant policies. Your final report will outline where the barriers are to diverse groups. We’ll consider barriers that are systemic and also cultural. The report will also have recommendations for next steps and ways of measuring your progress.

An EW Group workforce diagnostic would involve close examination of your recruitment data, a study of job adverts and person specifications, and observation of your end-to-end recruitment process. At each stage we can determine where unconscious bias may be having an adverse impact on the progression of diverse candidates.

Recruitment diversity analysis

You may want to focus your diversity analysis on how to recruit and retain the best diverse talent. This will involve a deep dive into your processes of recruitment and career progression.

We’ll work with you to provide a detailed analysis of your end-to-end recruitment process, from writing job descriptions and advertising roles to interviews and candidate selection. Our consultants may, for example, observe and analyse key decision-making moments in the business, including board and senior management meetings.

We can also consult with you on updating your recruitment policy and procedures.

We can also customise our diagnostics to other specific diversity challenges. These might include:

• Unconscious bias
• Staff engagement and employee wellbeing
• Managing diversity
• Leadership commitment and visibility
• Flexible working
• CSR
• Customer insight
• External communications
• Supply chain diversity.

Getting under the skin: a study of your organisational culture

Our established diversity research principles allow us to throw new light on the experiences of different groups in your workforce. We can build up a picture of your company to use as your benchmark and the basis from which you can action plan on diversity. The recommendations in your diagnostic report can be used as diversity objectives, to be reported against both externally to your clients and stakeholders and internally to build staff engagement.

To build up a picture of your organisational culture, we may look at the following data:

• Flexible working requests (made and granted)
• Reasonable adjustment requests (made and granted)
• Data on retention of diverse groups
• Data on progression of diverse groups
• Performance appraisal ratings (by group)
• Any instances of bullying and harassment
• Retention of women after return from maternity leave
• The take-up of shared parental leave
• How ‘acting up’ opportunities or assignments are allocated, and to which groups.

Our approach will combine a robust analysis of your ‘hard data’ – policy documents and employee data relating to diversity – with a process of employee consultation to gather ‘soft data’. By speaking to a sample of employees from across the business, we will test our assumptions about your organisational culture and fill any gaps in existing employee data. These will take the form of structured, confidential small group and one-to-one conversations.

Diversity diagnostic reports

Our final diagnostic report will provide a detailed analysis of your company culture and your current state of diversity maturity. It will highlight leading practice and areas for development, as well as a timeline for recommendations. The report will take into account cultural barriers and process-driven barriers. It will also make recommendations for how to progress your diversity and inclusion agenda.

Your diversity diagnostic report will:

• Establish current areas of good practice
• Give an overall sense of what is working well
• Identify quick wins that can be implemented straight away with minimal resource
• Provide you with an action plan (e.g. for making your recruitment process more inclusive)
• Our analysis of how your work in this area will underpin wider cultural change across the organisation.

Equality, diversity and inclusion in your organisation – what do you want to know?

All our diagnostics are tailor-made. We will focus on the parts of your business you need to know more about. As a guide, here are a few examples of questions we might look to answer on your behalf during the diagnostic process:

• What good practice is there in the HR team that is increasing diversity disclosure rates?
• What other instances of good practice are evident in the recruitment process?
• Which parts of the talent management process are impacting negatively on diverse groups?
• What are the experiences of different socio-economic groups?
• How can you increase the overall number of applicants from diverse groups?
• What are the reasons for the attrition of diverse talent?
• Would name-blind recruitment strengthen your process?
• Are assumptions and unconscious bias evident, and if so how can we address this?
• Are application forms and guidance material meeting accessibility standards?
• Are there any quick wins to encourage diverse candidates to apply?
• How can we improve data collection among existing staff and candidates?
• How can we build our internal capacity and diversity maturity?
• How can we measure the impact and success of our diversity and inclusion initiatives?
• How can our work in this area underpin wider cultural change across the business?
• How can we future-proof the talent pipeline (e.g. for millennials)?