Diversity and Inclusion has the ability to transform an organisation. Gender-diverse companies are 25% more likely to see above-average profitability, with ethnic-diverse organisations 36% more likely.
What matters is how an organization harnesses diversity, and whether it’s willing to reshape its power structure. Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas
But research has shown that progress is slow and this will only prove to get worse post-pandemic. Out of 1,000 large organisations surveyed, the representation of ethnic minorities on UK and US executive teams stood at only 13% in 2019, a growth of just 7% from 2014.
Using an example, just to put this in context; without change, companies in the US and UK won’t achieve gender parity in leadership for at least 24 – 29 years.
The business case for diversity and inclusion gets more compelling by the day, but global events and the pace of change means organisations need to be more agile, responsive and fleet of foot.
Building a case for diversity and inclusion
There are three core elements when it comes to building the business case for diversity.
There is strong evidence that increased diversity in organisations leads to greater innovation.
Scott Page, Professor of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, has looked at the link between team diversity and innovation and used mathematical modelling and case studies to demonstrate how diverse employees can produce organisational strength.
His key finding was that when teams comprise people with different perspectives and backgrounds, namely education, experience or identity, their collective intelligence is greater than that of homogeneous teams, even when these homogeneous teams are judged to be more capable.
“Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not”. Katherine Phillips, Columbia Business School
Where there are differences, each member of the team is more likely to anticipate, explore and evaluate different viewpoints. There is likely to be more discussion before reaching a consensus, which will take more time, but will ultimately be more beneficial in the long run, in terms of breadth of thinking, new ideas and organisational innovation.
Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average diversity on their management teams reported innovation revenue that was 19 percentage points higher than that of companies with below-average leadership diversity.
In their study they looked at the impact of six different diversity characteristics and found that some seemed more impactful than others. The most significant gains came from changing the makeup of the leadership team, such as the national origin of executives, the range of industry backgrounds, gender balance, and career paths.
Debiasing job descriptions, embedding flex and nurturing skills-based hiring are some critical ways to improve D&I.
An organisation with more diversity and inclusion can also result in more engaged, motivated and productive employees.
Research by Opportunity Now and Shapiro Consulting showed that when leaders are perceived by their teams as being inclusive, 84% of employees reported feeling more motivated, while 81% indicated it had a positive impact on their productivity. Organisations with high employee engagement levels report 3.9 times the earnings per share (EPS) growth rate compared to organisations with lower engagement in their same industry.
Hiring for diversity and inclusion is a real stumbling block for so many organisations that are currently restricting diversity through their recruitment processes.
According to a study by Harvard Business Review, there are around 27 million ‘hidden’ workers in the US alone. Untapped talent that wants to work but failing at the first part of the process. The reason why? Outdated algorithms that fail to be inclusive, as well as poor job descriptions.
It is estimated that there are more than 27 million ‘hidden’ workers in the United States alone. (HBR)
Summary
When building a case, it’s important to keep transformation front of mind, because in order to be a truly diverse organisation, change has to happen at the core.
Traditionally, diversity and inclusion often starts at the end of the hiring process with organisations looking for ‘quick fix’ with job ad copywriting tools, and, although these may attract diverse candidates it may not get them to interview.
To drive innovation, created a more productive environment and to tap into wider talent pools, it’s key organisations look at their job architecture and job descriptions. Are they doing what they should be doing? Are they fit for purpose? Are they agile and ready for future ways of working?
To learn more about driving inclusion at the core to help build a business case, book a demo or download our resources on creating inclusive cultures.
One impact of the global pandemic was an acceleration in the adoption of new technologies. HR tech was no exception, with many companies using the last two years to create process efficiencies, update old systems to boost productivity or implement new tools to help with their post-Covid recovery.
However, this rapid increase has also brought its own challenges. A survey by PwC found that 82% of organisations experienced problems with the adoption of new HR technologies. They concluded that most of these problems "can be linked back to planning phases that miss getting all the right people in the room to answer the right questions for change at scale".
It’s clear that, without solid foundations in place, integrating multiple HR technologies and building a tech stack can bring about more problems than it solves. Something we see time and again, is that if jobs aren’t fixed at the core or foundation, then it creates bigger and more complex challenges further down the integration process. Essentially, a sequence of chain reactions.
One key area to start is with your job architecture, which refers to the infrastructure or hierarchy of jobs within an organisation. It is an evolution of what used to be called job classification, which has now evolved beyond simply classifying jobs and encompasses job levels, job titles, job grades, how employees progress through careers and how they are rewarded.
Having a well-designed, comprehensive, job architecture framework gives organisations the agility to respond quickly to changes happening in the global economy.
Workplaces are evolving at a rapid pace. Technology is causing many skills to become obsolete, whilst simultaneously creating huge demands for others. Employees are seeking out flexibility and career progression – and are willing to move jobs regularly to achieve these. So much so, Grant Thornton found that 21% of Americans accepted a new job during the last 12 months and of these, 40% are already looking for another job.
Without solid foundations in place, integrating multiple HR technologies and building a tech stack can bring about more problems than it solves
A job architecture creates agility, consistency and transparency. It underpins all of the key HR processes that top priorities for organisations right now so you can:
Reviewing your organisation's job architecture framework can feel like a daunting prospect. We've worked with organisations that have spent more than 18 months carrying out this task manually. If it takes this long, then by the time you've completed it, it's likely out-of-date. Maintenance and governance of a manual process creates additional challenges.
RoleMapper provides you with the tools to manage the complexity of cleansing, transforming and governing your jobs and job architecture. Powered by the most recent advances in AI and language technology, we give you the agility to create a structured, up-to-date catalogues of all roles across your organisation.
Most of us would like to think that we’re not biased most of the time. We consider ourselves to be objective, fair-minded individuals.
However, the truth is that all of us are influenced by our biases; conscious biases that we are aware of and also unconscious, hidden biases that we have operating at an unconscious level in our brains, influencing the decisions we make about individuals.
Recruitment biases can impact many aspects of the recruitment process, such as:
In his book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia noted that the brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously. The unconscious brain handles the rest.
Without our unconscious processes, we wouldn’t be able to do everyday things successfully. To process all of this information, our unconscious brain makes shortcuts. However, these unconscious shortcuts our brain takes can lead us to make subjective judgements about people if we’re not careful – this is known as unconscious bias.
A popular definition of unconscious bias provided by Cornish and Jones (2013) defines unconscious bias as ‘a bias that we are unaware of, which happens outside our control’. It is a bias that happens automatically and is triggered by our brain making quick judgements and assessments of people and situations, and is influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences.
Unconscious bias happens automatically and is triggered by our brain making quick judgements and assessments of people and situations, influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences.
These biases are important because, even though we may be unaware of them, they can have a significant impact on the decisions we make. In particular, the people decisions that are made within organisations (e.g. who is recruited into organisations, who gets promoted in organisations and also who leaves organisations). In recruitment there are different kinds of bias that can affect our decision-making.
This is when we create a hypothesis in our minds and look for ways to prove it. It is the innate tendency to seek-out confirmation of our preconceived beliefs. For example, when interviewing you may form a distinct opinion about a candidate based on a small piece of information such as the school or university they attended.
At an unconscious level, you may be looking for information that confirms your original hypothesis. You may also ignore information that contradicts your initial hypothesis.
The Halo or Horns effect are terms often used to describe specifically how confirmatory bias can manifest itself in interviews. The "halo" effect occurs when an interviewer allows one strong point about the candidate to overshadow or have an effect on everything else.
For instance, knowing they used to work at a particular company might be viewed more favourably. Everything the applicant says during the interview is seen in this light. ("Well, she left out an important part of the answer to that question, but, she must know it, she used to work at X company).
The "horns" effect is just the opposite, allowing one weak point to influence everything else.
There are many ways that we can be primed about other people. We will receive second hand, third hand information from others, and this can lead us to make certain judgements about people based on this information rather than making a decision based on the objective information available.
Often we put too much weight on information from others without really thinking about the circumstances under which that information was received. Could it be that the impression someone made on an individual based on one interaction 5 years ago?
In social psychology, a stereotype is a thought that can be adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things. These thoughts or beliefs may or may not accurately reflect reality.
We use our stereotypes to make quick assumptions about people when we meet someone for the first time from a particular social group.
For example, at an unconscious level we might think: “women with children will miss a lot of work”; “a male candidate will make a better leader than a female candidate.”
This refers to our unconscious tendency to favour those who remind us of ourselves. This can result in hiring managers or recruiters favouring an employee because they are similar to themselves, rather than because they are the best person for the job.
The contrast effect is where we are influenced by the context or by the contrast with other individuals. For example, you interview a number of candidates in a day, but then you interview three weak candidates in a row.
As a result, you may think that the fourth candidate is better than they actually are due to the comparison with the three weaker candidates. This is why it is important to assess candidates against competencies rather than compare with each other.
We tend to be quick to form first impressions of people, and we tend to hold on to these first impressions and give them a lot of weight even when we receive subsequent information that contradicts our first impression.
We can therefore be biased by the first impression that a candidate makes, rather than looking at all the information that we have about the candidate.
This is one of the most common forms of bias in the recruitment process, as it affects how we assess other people. When we do something well, we tend to think it’s down to our own merit and personality.
When we do something badly, we tend to believe that our failing is down to external factors, like other people who adversely affected us and prevented us from doing our best.
However, when it comes to other people, we tend to think the opposite. If someone else has done something well we consider them lucky, and if they’ve done something badly we tend to think it’s due to their personality or bad behaviour.
We will downplay situational factors when explaining behaviour and over-emphasise personal characteristics, for example “I know it’s been a bad sales environment, but I think his poor performance was solely down to lack of effort.”
In-group bias, refers to a preference for one's in-group - a social group with which you associate yourself - over the out-group, or social group with which you don’t identify. Simply put, it refers to favouritism toward one's own group.
The concept is also known as in-group out-group bias. According to the in-group bias theory, such behaviour can be attributed to competition, wherein two groups vie for limited resources, or to circumstances wherein groups feel the need to prove their superiority.
In recruitment, this bias can mean that, at an unconscious level, you may make decisions which favour people from your in-group over those in your out-group, This could include viewing their CV more positively, or glossing over negative parts of an interview.
This bias may also impact how you behave towards people. We have a tendency to use micro-affirmations (small positive behaviours towards people such as nodding in agreement, maintaining eye contact) towards people in our in-group, and micro-aggressions (e.g. interrupting, not acknowledging the point someone’s made) towards people in our out-group.
If debiasing recruitment is key to your D&I strategies, RoleMapper can help. Why not get in touch for a demo and see how we can help drive inclusion at its core.
Identifying what flex works for your organisation can be fraught with complexities.
A solution that, on the surface, looks to be a win-win solution for your people and your business may not be quite as it seems when you start to look more closely. How teams define flex and hybrid may differ across the organisation. Not only that, but ensuring a fair and level playing field for all, without creating two-tier flex, is crucial for increasing diverse hires.
Taking all this into consideration, what is the most effective way to implement flex or hybrid working strategies across the enterprise? How do you create fair flex that is inclusive to all?
Our Future of Work series has been designed to help you navigate and better understand this way of working, ensuring your organisation adopts the right ways of working for your business and gets you future fit for the new world of work.
Five Steps to the Four-day Week
Is this the silver bullet we've all been waiting for? Not for every organisation. There are advantages and disadvantages to this way of working. We explain why.
Flexible Working Definitions - supporting flexible working policies
Are you grappling with identifying how your organisation implements the best flexible working solution? This guide helps you understand and define the right flex for your organisation.
Support for a four-day working week was gaining momentum before the pandemic.
Various companies were trialling versions of this working pattern and noticing impressive benefits in terms of productivity and wellbeing. However, recent events have put flexible working front and centre of every major company’s thinking. Organisations are now looking at a variety of different ways to increase flexibility, both in terms of time(when employees work) and location(where employees work).
The impact of covid and associated lockdowns has led many companies to focus on employee wellbeing and productivity, which, more often than not, includes the serious consideration of switching to working four days each week instead of the usual five. But what do we mean by the term four-day week?
We’ve found that if you read between the headlines, a four-day working week often means different things to different people. There are also many challenges related to making this change, which includes:
In order to achieve this, organisations need to focus on a sequence of key steps to making the four-day week a success:
STEP 1: Define the Case for Change
Make sure that you define the business case and your drivers for making this change (as these may be different).
STEP 2: Clarify your Definitions
Define what your organisation means by a four-day week.
STEP 3: Track and Measure Impact
Consider how you are going to measure the impact of a change to a four-day week.
STEP 4: Decide on an Implementation Approach
STEP 5: Take a long term view
Ensure that your approach to introducing this new way of working is led by systematic role design.
RoleMapper’s Future of Work modules allow you to design, integrate and implement sustainable, consistent and fair hybrid and flexible working practices, at scale.
We give your organisation the tools to:
The pandemic has forced people to re-evaluate how they engage with work and there’s no turning back. 60% of employees say they want increased flexibility post lockdown, 80% of candidates will turn down a role with no flexible working options.
Right now, we are at a crunch point in the future of flexible and hybrid working. This is a great opportunity for People Leaders to focus on taking a more holistic approach to flexible working practices and diverse and inclusive working.
According to latest research, 60% of Black employees who are not happy with the amount of flexibility they have at their current jobs, will look for a new one in the coming year.
In addition, the results from the latest Future Forum Pulse Survey has also shown a very significant shift in attitudes since lockdown restrictions were lifted.
Mandated return-to-work policies are seriously impacting morale with knowledge workers who have little to no ability to set their own work hours; they are nearly three times more likely to look for a new job in the coming year, compared to those with scheduled flexible working.
For those organisations that are looking to take a flex and/or hybrid approach, we are seeing organisations experimenting with the 4-day working week and looking at job sharing to enable part-time working and career progression.
However, organisations do need to take a longer term and structured view to flex, in order to make this a long-term success, which means adopting a more strategic focus on flex and future of work strategies. This will give People Leaders a unique opportunity to fast track their flex and inclusion agenda.
In order to do this, we need to rethink ways of working. Jobs sit at the heart of how we manage talent, but how does an organisation achieve this as part of its diversity strategy?
Creating a more inclusive culture means looking beyond traditional 9 – 5 working patterns. According to research from Harvard Business School and Accenture, in the US alone there are more than 27million ‘hidden’ workers who are unable to get a foothold due to disability or personal circumstance. The survey also highlighted the majority were in middle to senior-level positions.
This is a significantly untapped talent pool, but flexible working has shown to remove barriers to work and gives those locked out of the job market more opportunity.
Good job design is simply good practice. It’s an opportunity to capitalise on future work planning and re-think job design
People leaders have a window of opportunity to integrate a holistic view of flex – not just location flex but also time flex – and accelerate their diversity and inclusion agenda.
We talk about top-down strategies, but we also need to recognise the increase in demand from bottom up. With the surge in flexible working requests, people are rethinking how they engage with work.
At the same time, it is important to highlight that not all flexible working patterns work for all jobs. For example, there’s a lot of talk around the four-day week as a win-win solution for both the business and its people, but leaders do fear that flex patterns will be imposed and consequently have a negative impact on the ability to get the job done.
In order to combat this, leaders need to consider the following:
Establish the business case for re-thinking how jobs are designed and encourage experimentation. We have seen companies map out KPIs that track:
Re-imagine jobs
Organisations need to reimagine jobs at the point of role design. Jobs sit at the heart of how we manage talent and it’s the job that determines what flexible working options will work. I think we can all agree that the need to work flexibly is not a pandemic focused ‘one-off’.
To ensure a more sustainable approach, it’s important that flex is built into the core of a job, which means re-designing work to focus on outcomes. As we mentioned earlier, not all flex options work for all roles, so it’s important to design-in what flex will and won’t work. As a result, organisations will need to build-in processes to operationalise flex consistently, and fairly, across the business.
Wellbeing and future-proofed flexibility
Sustainable high performance and wellbeing are now at the core of many organisations. By re-designing jobs and creating the conditions and foundations that allow employees to choose how they can work, can be key drivers to keeping your people engaged, present and in a better place when it comes to wellbeing.
Now is the time for action. HR professionals have a huge opportunity to use the strategic focus and momentum on flex in order to re-imagine work at the point of job design.
RoleMapper has launched FlexApply, a first-of-its-kind platform that helps organisations automate and manage flexible working requests and applications.
With many organisations still figuring out how they are going to make flex a success in the long-term, as well as the type of flex to offer, FlexApply removes that pain by ensuring a fairer and more business-driven approach that works for both employee and business.
Key features of FlexApply include:
· AI-powered algorithms that provide bias-free flex assessments for every role
· Flexible working outcomes that work for the team and the business
· Dashboards providing visibility of all applications across roles and teams
· Workflows and reporting to ensure compliance and legislation
· Ability to customise to policies and work modes
Sara Hill, Founder and CEO, RoleMapper says: “Since the pandemic, there has been a seismic shift in how people want to engage with work. To attract and retain talent employers are having to be more open to increased flexible working - the days of traditional office-based 9-5 working is a thing of the past.
The challenge for many organisations is that the process of requesting and managing flexible working is manual, inconsistent and fraughtwith bias. FlexApply helps organisations automate the process of managing flexible working application requests, ensuring a consistent, visible and biasfree approach, focusing on the right flex that works for a particular organisation.”
FlexApply offers comprehensive reporting tools for HR and leadership teams. It also gives organisations the ability to analyse by team or department, as well as take a more strategic approach with reporting views across the enterprise.
FlexApply is part of a suite of solutions from RoleMapper: RoleFlex, FlexAssess, RoleShare, all supporting the design, automation, application and large-scale roll-out of flexible working.
Support for a four-day week was gaining momentum before the pandemic. Pre-2020, a range of organisations were trialling versions of this work pattern and recognising impressive benefits, especially when it came to productivity and wellbeing.
However, recent events have put flexible working front and centre of every major company's thinking. One flex working option that often includes serious consideration is asking employees to only work four days each week instead of five.
There are a number of drivers around this approach:
When you read between the headlines, you’ll notice that a four-day week means different things to different companies.
In 2018, all 240 employees at Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand Financial Services company, were offered the opportunity to try working four, eight-hour days each week but get paid for five days. Some employees didn't work on Fridays, others didn't work on Wednesdays. Following the two-month trial, the main benefits reported by employees were a better work-life balance and decreased stress levels.
Before the trial, just over half of employees felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments, which increased to 78% of employees. Employee stress levels decreased by 7 percentage points, while measures of “stimulation, commitment and a sense of empowerment at work” also all showed significant increases.
The assumption that might be made is that this reduction in working hours would have led to a corresponding drop in productivity. However, despite the reduced hours, productivity actually increased by 20%. Following the trial, the decision was taken to make this change permanent.
Microsoft Japan also tested out a four-day week with 2,300 employees over five weeks in 2019. They reported that employees were not only happier but 40% more productive, whilst electricity and paper consumption also decreased (23% and 59% respectively).
Understandably, four-day week trial reports tend to focus on the positives. However, as with any way of working, there are potential downsides.
Whilst this approach would work for some roles, it can be more difficult to implement for others (e.g. employees in back office and support functions, such as IT, finance and human resources). There are also concerns about the potential negative impacts on employee wellbeing and productivity.
So, what is this telling us?
To be effective, rolling-out a four-day week strategy across an organisation needs to be designed well. As we’ve seen from those less successful examples, there are elements that need to be considered. Spending time properly designing a role will inform what flexible working options will work and which won’t.
Our Future of Work modules allow you to design, integrate and implement sustainable, consistent and fair hybrid and flexible working practices, at scale.
Automating and operationalising flexible working policies into every role ensures they are business-led, eliminate bias and give your organisation total visibility of flexibility and work patterns across the enterprise.
To learn more about the pros and cons of the four-day week, download our latest guide.
For any organization working with the U.S federal government, compliance with the OFCCP guidelines around workforce and hiring practices is essential. Non-compliance can result in significant fines.
Discriminatory practices could cost you up to $9 million in fines
The OFCCP has issued over $200m in violation fines to over 430 companies and this is increasing. $45 million in fines were issued in 2020 alone, up over 30% on 2019 and a 110% increase from 2018 - with an average fine of $460,000 and larger fines reaching over
$9 million.
Desk Audits cost over $23 million in time and resourcing
It’s not just the financial burden of a violation fine, however, there are also the ‘hidden costs’ of administering an OFCCP audit. In addition to investigating complaints, the OFCCP conducts audits to determine whether the Federal contractor (the employer) is fulfilling the obligation to maintain non-discriminatory employment practices.
As a result, the OFCCP can issue a request to conduct a desk audit at any time, where they will review your data, policies and practices to determine whether you are fulfilling the obligation to maintain non-discriminatory employment practices.
Over the course of 2021, the OFCCP expects to conduct over 3,000 audits annually. According to industry experts, the average audit lasts 720 days and costs US companies a total of $23,910,884 in time and resources.
In summary, organizations are paying a heavy price for poor practices and non-compliance. To further this point, the OFCCP keeps a record of these violations, and they are retained on the organization’s procurement record for all prospective federal government customers to see.
The average OFCCP audit lasts 720 days and cost US companies a total of $23,910,884 in time and resources
How you design, manage and report on the inclusivity of your jobs has a huge impact on ensuring OCCCP compliance and plays a vital role in the data provided in an OFCCP compliance audit. If you are not prepared, it can cost you millions in unnecessary time and resources.
Achieving OFCCP compliant Job Descriptions
STEP 1: Integrate a systematic review of Job Qualifications into your recruitment process
STEP 2: Ensure candidates are selected and hired based on valid job qualifications
STEP 3: Put an equality statement on all job postings
STEP 4: Ensure gender neutral job descriptions
STEP 5: Job Family diversity analysis and reporting
STEP 6: Quick access to accurate job descriptions for desk audits
The RoleMapper platform has a range of modules that adhere to all requirements and enables you to, not just standardize and digitize your library, but also debias roles, job ads and descriptions, access data-led insights and practice good governance with a range of reporting features.
With RoleMapper, businesses are able to Digitize, Standardize, Optimize, Connect and Manage job families, libraries, ads and recruitment practices.
If you’re looking to improve compliance across the enterprise, why not book a demo and find out how we can help your organization.
Inclusive job design is more than just re-working the language and copy on a page, it is the sequence of key steps you go through to design a job to create job descriptions and job ads that truly make an impact.
This is the process of job design, which sits at the heart of your ability to attract, retain and progress talent across your organisation and create more inclusive cultures.
The importance of inclusive job design can’t be underestimated, as it can:
· Increase hiring diversity by 125%+
· Increase quality of hires by 80%+
· Achieve 30% women in senior roles
· Reduce employee turnover 80%+.
We highlight the key elements of the job design process to show what conscious consideration actually means, and what debiasing and breaking down barriers looks like in the job design process.
Step one: Simplify and segment responsibilities
Make sure responsibilities are concise enough to be easy to read, but detailed enough to make responsibilities clear
Step two: Design inclusive requirements
What would a person need to have, day one, to be successful in the role that they can’t learn in the first 90 days of the job?
Step three: Use inclusive copy
Scientists have found that when you write more, people understand less. Make sure you watch the language you use, avoid gender-coded words and be mindful of the way sentences are crafted.
Step four: Design inclusion into all aspects of a job
Inclusive job design is not just about what you do in the role, it’s about the whole package.
Step five: Design hybrid and flexible working strategies
87% of candidates now want hybrid or flexible working. This is no longer a nice to have. It also has the potential to widen the talent pool, enabling around 4million candidates to enter a jobs market that previously locked them out.
Step six: Drive systemic change
Embed systemic change around how you design job and create job descriptions. As we said at the beginning, true inclusion has to start at the beginning at be at the core of the job design process. This is more than simply re-working the language and copy on a page
Want to learn more about inclusive job design?
Download our guide, Six Steps to Debiasing Job Descriptions or book a live demo of the RoleMapper platform.
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