Just beginning their D&I journey, this European finance company wanted to set a baseline on diversity and inclusion so they could understand key problems and measure progress

The Challenge

This organization was based across two separate European countries with reasonably small local populations in each.

They wanted to set a baseline understanding of how diverse they were as an organization, and collect data from employees on what had worked (and what hadn’t) on the action around diversity they had taken so far.

Their two offices have very different cultures – and native languages – but they wanted to ensure that any new initiatives would work across both with the whole business becoming unified in a vision to develop a more inclusive environment for all employees.

Due to the reasonably small employees numbers, it would be essential to:

  • Make sure data is collected and reported correctly.
  • Make sure data is compliant with the privacy rules and conventions in both countries.
  • Ensure that individual respondents could be assured that their honest feedback would remain anonymous to leadership.

The Solutions

We used our RADAR inclusion benchmarking tool across both regions to ensure a consistent approach and data which could be used collectively, or split by country. However some key demographic questions were adjusted to fit local conventions – especially around ethnicity classifications.

The RADAR itself consisted of:

  • An employee survey.
  • 3 focus groups (split across the offices).
  • A full HR audit to ensure that the fundamentals were in place to support inclusion.

We were able to take very specific insights from diverse individuals within the organization, but ensured that our data handling and reporting didn’t allow for individuals to be identified in line with GDPR.

The data supplied in the reports provided a valuable jumping off point for the client to share their D&I strategy with recommendations based on best practice from other organizations of similar sizes who were more advanced in their D&I journey.

The focus on action for diversity we brought to the company sparked the development of a new D&I council internally who are tasked with ensuring momentum for action is maintained with improvements measured against our benchmarking.