Cornerstone’s fourth DEIB principle states that we collect, protect and analyze data to create equity. Discussions around DEIB data often lead to graphs of hiring trends and demographic breakdowns. While these visuals can illustrate the current state, they frequently fail to provide actionable insights or result in meaningful change. Simply seeing gaps in representation doesn’t create a path to fixing them.
At Cornerstone, we believe that lack of inclusion and representation is a symptom of an inequitable process. As discussed in my last article, inequities within two key processes — hiring and promotion — contribute to the massive inequities we see across organizations today, particularly in leadership roles. Narrow job descriptions, unnecessary job ‘requirements,’ affinity bias, nepotism, and favoritism combine to systemically advantage some over others.
Rather than simply quantifying the result (representation gaps), we believe it’s important to quantify the underlying causes.
That’s why we’ve taken the bold step of implementing a voluntary global self-identification survey. While carefully navigating the legal, regulatory, and privacy considerations, we regularly collect, protect and analyze comprehensive demographic snapshots of our organization. We aspire to use the data in two ways.
The first is to gain a deeper understanding of our employees. With our self-identification data, we not only have a fuller picture of the gender, racial and ethnic demographic in our organization, but statistics on the number of parents and caregivers, those struggling with mental health issues and disabilities, the number of languages spoken, and the different generations in our workforce (among other insights). We can give our leaders a much fuller picture of their orgs, and design customized recruitment, retention and engagement strategies accordingly.
For example, we’ve used the demographic data we collected to add new accessibility features to our internal meetings, moved large company events away from locations hostile to the LGBTQ+ community, and added new benefits for LGBTQ+ employees, women and caregivers.
The second aspiration is to identify the root causes behind our representation gaps. By tracking how different groups are treated in our talent processes, we can quantify the problem and create actionable strategies to address disparities.
Using a DEIB Analytics tool called Dandi, we create dashboards that track equity across our employee lifecycle, including metrics for each stage of the recruiting funnel, hiring, compensation, attrition, promotion, engagement, and performance management.
This data enables us to treat DEIB as we would any other business issue. We begin by quantifying the problems we aim to solve and then design targeted strategies to address them. When we see inequities in any talent process, the data gives us a lens into why that may happen, whether it be hiring committee bias, ineffective methods in sourcing diverse talent, or bias in the way feedback is collected during a performance review.
By addressing the root causes of inequity in our processes and systems, we can start redesigning them to create equity and cultivate the mindset to sustain fair outcomes.
However, even the most effective strategies will falter without accountability. In my next article in “The Equity Advantage” series, I’ll discuss how organizations can hold themselves accountable for creating, implementing, and sustaining equitable processes.
Related Resources
Want to keep learning? Explore our products, customer stories, and the latest industry insights.
Blog Post
The Equity Advantage: Why equity matters
In my last article, I unpacked Cornerstone's first DEIB Principle: DEIB is good for everyone, highlighting the story of Ed Roberts, a pioneer for disability inclusion. His work resulted in onramps on public sidewalks at all intersections, enabling the inclusion of those with mobility challenges in public spaces. Just as these onramps created equity and inclusion for people with wheelchairs, organizations must ensure that their talent processes, and the decision-makers who run those processes, create 'onramps' for marginalized people whose talent, aspiration and opportunity are too often 'curbed' by the systemic barriers inherent in our society and organizations.
Blog Post
The Equity Advantage: Cornerstone’s equity-first approach to DEIB
In July, SHRM announced they are dropping ‘equity’ from their inclusion and diversity framework, citing polarization and misunderstanding about the term. The move ignited a robust dialogue amongst HR professionals about the future of DEIB efforts.
Article
The Equity Advantage: Why DEIB succeeds and fails
Have you ever heard the proverb “May you live in interesting times?” On its face, it reads as a blessing, but the irony is that living in interesting times can feel more like a burden. We certainly are living in interesting times – a time where the world order as we know it feels imperiled, the future of humanity is at risk due to climate change, fact and fiction are harder than ever to distinguish due to social media, polarization seems to force more and more of us into our own echo-chambers, and workforces and workplaces are changing rapidly due to AI, automation, and societal shifts.