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BLOG: PEOPLE ANALYTICS

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is getting a lot of focus right now. Organizations are becoming more aware of the many benefits they can gain by improving their D&I; from increasing shareholder value to innovating faster and gaining access to a whole different world of perspectives.

But while some progress is being made, it’s not that great, and everyone agrees that it could be much better.

A national aggregate of all industries between 1985 to 2014 shows an increase from 3% to 3.3% of black men in management roles, and an increase from 22% to 29% of white women in management through the year 2000, and no substantive movement since then.

One reason that many D&I programs are still struggling to make an impact is that most of the effort has been on the easy part of the phrase - Diversity. At its most simple, to succeed in ‘Diversity,’ an organization needs to know how many employees they have in each Diversity group. To improve those numbers, companies are creating programs that enable them to hire more employees from different Diversity groups, and that’s a good start. But many organizations are struggling to retain these amazing employees, and I believe that is mainly because they are not focusing on Inclusion.

By: Greg Newman, Product Manager People Analytics, TrustSphere

Moving from counting Diversity to measuring Inclusion

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However, the strategies that most organizations are attempting that go beyond hiring more diverse people are also struggling to make an impact. For example, most ERGs and mentoring programs are failing to create real business impact because they seldom create strong working relationships between individuals.

Different types of employees build very different networks

As documented by my favorite academic, Boris Groysberg from Harvard Business School, in a study and in his book “Chasing Stars,” different types of employees build very different networks. For example, his work demonstrated that female employees built more external relationships outside the organization that they currently worked in. This “portable network” increased their chances of succeeding when they moved to a new organization because they could leverage those relationships straight away. Male employees, on the other hand, tended to build strong relationships within their current organization. So when they moved to another organization, they had to rebuild their network from scratch, which negatively impacted their performance.

As Verna Myers once said:

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These two examples of very different network building show us that we are just scratching the surface of understanding how employees build networks and fit into their organization’s broader network. Imagine what differences we will see when we look at different ethnicities, generations, socio-economic groups, cultures, regions, etc. There is much more to analyze in this space!

Leaders need to be more inclusive

Data from another one of our People Analytics clients showed that in their organization if you had more than ten years tenure, you had virtually no strong working relationships with anyone with less than five years tenure. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much this lack of relationship diversity would impede innovation not to mention creativity, collaboration and problem-solving.

There also appears to be a difference in the seniority of the relationships that males and females build. Work we recently did with a D&I client showed that male employees built more relationships with senior employees than females at the same level. Females however built more relationships with those at the same or a lower levels of their organization’s hierarchy.

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We recently met with a global S&P 500 company that now runs what could best be described as a reverse mentorship program. They recognized that their senior leadership team is basically a group of older, mainly white American males, who have all typically worked with broadly the same group of people and generally in the same industry for the last 40-50+ years. Don’t get me wrong, the network that these leaders have built has definitely helped them to succeed and to build a successful global business. However they have also rightly recognized that their network is also limiting their companys’ prospects.

To help them to see the world differently, their top leaders have all been assigned a junior Generation Z employee to work with. These Generation Z employees (who were born the from mid-1990s to mid-2000s) are just starting to enter the workforce. They literally live in a different world from the baby boomers they are mentoring.

The idea behind this is that by collaborating on a joint piece of work (not just casual mentoring, and catching up for coffee) these relatively junior employees can share their knowledge, perspectives, wisdom and general life experiences with the senior executives, to help them understand how much the world is changing and help them to create an innovative organization that can keep up with the marketplace.

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Inclusion is built on strong working relationships

In a recent project with a financial services client, we saw that the type of networks females built had a strong correlation with their chance of being promoted. What our client observed was that if a female employee had strong working relationships with senior level leaders, then she was more likely to get promoted. Interestingly this correlation was not the same for male employees. Male promotability was correlated with having a broader network across all hierarchies.

In other words, for female employees to be promoted, it wasn’t enough for them to be high performers. They also needed executive sponsorship that was only formed from working with executive team members. Ultimately female team members needed to have one of those executives stand up for them in the promotion discussion and make a case for them to be promoted over a male colleague. This could only be done when they had strong, mutually inclusive, ‘working’ relationships.

Inclusion comes from building strong working relationships and earning trust

What is emerging from our data is that for an organization to be really inclusive, its employees need to build strong two-way working relationships with diverse groups of employees. These relationships need to be formed through working and collaborating, achieving concrete business outcomes that impact the organization’s performance. These type of relationships are built on trust that only time and collaboration can create.

We are not saying that employees should stop maintaining relationships that they have with people who are similar to them. However, we are saying that companies and individuals would benefit from adding to their network and building relationships with people who might provide a different perspective, experiences, and knowledge.

How TrustSphere Helps

By extracting and processing log data from corporate communications systems such as email, instant messaging and telephones, TrustSphere’s revolutionary passive Organizational Network Analytics technology enables our clients to continuously measure the workplace relationships that employees maintain, both internally and externally. To be clear, we do so without examining any content or even subject lines - just patterns of interactions.

This passive data gathering process requires no surveys, no online forms or questionnaires. As the name suggests, the data is collected ‘passively’ meaning that it already exists as dormant data in corporate communications systems that automatically record these interactions, such as the date, time and person to whom or from whom an email, message or call is sent. By analyzing the networks continuously and in real time, our clients can better understand the workplace relationships that employees have and how they are changing over time.

Unlike traditional survey-based approaches, because this relationship data is continuously changing, we can apply key algorithms to measure how network structures change. Leveraging our wide network of academics and practitioners has enabled us to build a set of proprietary algorithms that create unique insights on top of the traditional view that ONA typically provides. Our proprietary algorithms include TrustScore, which measures the strength of every tie or connection in the network, and Network Activity Score, which measures the employee’s relative ability to exert influence within their team or organization.

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We know that employees build up to six different networks at work:

Our passive ONA technology enables us to accurately measure these three networks:

This means that the networks and relationships that we are measuring are relationships that employees use to complete their work, to innovate and to share expertise. When we go look at the examples of networks above, it’s important to keep this in mind; we are not talking about purely social networks, friends or mentors, we measure the relationships that people have built over months and years, to enable them to do their jobs. These are their working networks.

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Inclusion drives business results

We believe that measuring inclusion should be the next big area of focus for D&I teams. Network analytics technology like ours enables organizations to baseline their current levels of inclusiveness within their organization, identify hot spots where inclusion is either particularly strong or weak, and then based on what is observed in those parts of the organization develop specific programs to alter the way that employees work and collaborate, enabling them to build new relationships and increase the inclusiveness of the organization.

The financial benefits of increasing inclusion are undisputed. However, beyond that, the focus on inclusion is also our greatest opportunity to make our workplaces better for everyone.

Greg spent 15 years traveling and living in New Zealand, Australia, England, Brazil and Singapore and when time permitted, building global HR systems. Over time he became increasingly frustrated that HR technology was focused on doing what was easy, rather than what was important.

Greg is TrustSphere’s unofficial Chief Story Teller and is responsible for the development of their People Analytics product. TrustSphere are pioneers of Relationship Analytics. At TrustSphere we are focused on delivering HR analytics that businesses can use to increase their bottom line.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/newmangreg/Twitter: @_6RE6

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For more information, email us at PeopleAnalytics@trustsphere.com.

People Analytics by TrustSphere. Organizational Network Analysis to help maximize your talent.

TrustSphere is the widely recognized market leader in Relationship Analytics. We help organizations leverage a most

valuable asset – their collective relationship network.

By analyzing log data from enterprise communication and collaboration systems such as email, and using advanced data

science and machine learning, TrustSphere builds and maintains an enterprise’s own relationship graph. Leveraging the

science of Organizational Network Analysis, TrustSphere measures the social capital of individual employees, of teams

and of organizations as a whole.

This rich set of analytics surface insights which help our clients across the globe address key business challenges including

workforce productivity, sales force effectiveness and enterprise-wide collaboration.

Current uses of our workforce analytics solutions include measuring the impact of leadership development, identifying high

potentials, understanding finding hidden influencers, accelerating new staff onboarding and measuring the effectiveness

of inclusion and diversity programs.

Our ground-breaking solutions, processed on our proprietary technology platform, are deployed through an increasing

number of technology and business partners including IBM, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Veritas and leading management

consulting partners.