DEI Insights with Camilla Bruggen - How to use Data to reset DEI
.png "DEI Insights with Camilla Bruggen - How to use Data to reset DEI")
Using Data to reset DE&I: Insights from DEI expert Camilla Bruggen
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has risen rapidly up the corporate agenda in recent years – but its trajectory has been turbulent. The recent backlash in some markets, means the field now faces renewed scrutiny. For people leaders and DEI specialists, this moment represents both a challenge and an opportunity: and perhaps a chance to reset efforts on firmer ground.
In a series of interviews with DEI expert, Camilla Bruggen, we explore how organisations can approach this new era with renewed vigour - starting with the role of data in driving meaningful progress.
Camilla, tell us a little bit about your career to date including your DEI experience:
My current area of focus and expertise is around inclusion and belonging, but with a data twist. In my last role I was global Head of DEI at Wavemaker (part of WPP Group). I was responsible for DEI across 7000 employees reporting into the CPO. Within that role, I was looking at a number of elements, including how to make the structure and culture of the business as inclusive as possible.
I was working closely with leadership and employee community groups, looking at policies and practices to see where we could refine them to ensure that everyone coming into or moving through the company was having a similarly inclusive experience and felt like they belonged.
I did a pivot in my career into the world of inclusion. Before that, I headed up the Global Data Insight team at Wavemaker, working on client business, using primary and secondary data about consumers, industries and media to help our clients build brand and communications strategy.
I am fascinated by how people behave and think. I have 3 degrees in psychology with MSC’s in both Organisational Psychology and Health Psychology. I was able to apply my data skills and behavioural science knowledge into my inclusion role.
How and why did you make that pivot?
Initially it was through setting up Women at Wavemaker, which is a women's network focused on tackling gender inequality. At that time within the organisation, the global board and leadership was almost exclusively white and male.
There were only 1 or 2 women on the board, and they were in typically “female” roles such as marketing and HR. I got together with a colleague, and we thought, what can we do as people on the ground to make a difference and have an impact? So we set up Women at Wavemaker in 2018 and did a series of things such as implemented inspirational events,mentoring and training as well as bringing together different groups/stakeholders to work on policy and practice.
Very quickly I realised it wasn't just about women, it was much wider than that. There were a lot of underrepresented groups within the organisation, and so I put together a plan of what Wavemaker as an organisation could do to look at inclusion from a broader perspective and use the data that we had within the organisation to build a strategy.
I took this plan to the CPO and said I would like to do this one day a week. I managed to sell this in, and so by stealth, I started off doing one day a week and two days a week, and then I managed to move into the role full time.
So you actually used data to create anew role for yourself. That’s clever!
I did! Wavemaker, like most organisations,has got a ton of (employee) data but there was no one who was looking at it and bringing it all together and analysing it to find insights and then thinking about how those insights can be used to inform strategy, but also to track progress. So I was able to bring that all together and take that to the organisation and then use that throughout my time in the role.
DEI is having a moment right now – and not a wholly positive one. What do you think the state of play is with DEI right now?
When I moved into the global role at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, one of my primary objectives was to raise the visibility of inclusion within the organisation.
Then the pandemic happened, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent increase in support of Black Lives Matter, and suddenly we went from “how can we make a DEI more visible?” to a spotlight glaring in our eyes.
In many organisations there was a knee jerk reaction and response that was often heartfelt, but sometimes not thought through. It was a case of “something needs to be done and done quickly” and a lot of money was thrown at different initiatives and programmes. Some stuck and some didn’t. Then interest waned and while some infrastructure had been put in place in many companies to deliver DEI, there were also a lot of performative actions and initiatives that didn't have much impact.
The situation now isn’t even that we have gone full circle. Having gone from a low plateau of interest we saw a big spike and now we’re starting to see an anti-DEI agenda, and people being very vocal about that – particularly in the US.
So I think it is about regrouping and really understanding the things that are going to make a difference. How do we best serve all these different employees who have been sold a dream and have been told “We do care about you. We do want to give everyone the same opportunity. Have representative leadership teams” Can we back down on that? I think it's difficult because people coming into different industries, that's their expectation and that's (the promise) they've been brought in on. There is a duty of care to employees.
Also we're at an interesting point in terms of law and compliance, where we have one set of potential laws coming out inthe U.S, and then we have other laws in the UK, EU and South Africa. Then there are countries many countries, especially in APAC that are pushing the agenda around gender equity.
So in answer to your question – things are fractured and how they’ll come back together, we don’t know.
In terms of the next steps forward for DEI - if it’s time for a reset, then there’s no better place to start than with the data?
Absolutely. And in terms of thinking where companies should start (with DEI) as with any business challenge, you need to be clear about what question you want to answer and what data is going to help you answer that. What's the problem you're trying to solve?How can data help you solve that problem?
All too often what organisations do is they look at the data available from their annual report; employees or sentiment data; or demographics data - and they think ‘what is telling a nice story here? what is showing some positive results? That's the data that we'll use.’ Which just skews the picture and doesn't answer any questions. It’s a good PR story but it's not going to shift the culture. It's not going to lead to any structural change within the organisation.
What we need to do is have a hypothesis, have a question and then see how we can answer that using data. Therefore we need to look hard at the data. It may or may not be positive, but we need to be transparent and avoiding only picking positive data.
It's not always a positive story but showing growth from a position of imperfection can actually be a great way of showing strength.
Where should companies start when it comes to approaching the data?
I'm going to start from the position of two shared beliefs. And those two beliefs are:
1. Talent is equally distributed,but opportunity is not. Let's be honest that we don't operate in the perfect meritocracy and sometimes people don't get the opportunities that that they deserve, and they get overlooked for several reasons, including identity.
2. Organisations should broadly aim to reflect the city in which they're based, and, or the talent pool from which they are drawing employees.
I was talking earlier about an organisation where the senior leadership team was almost exclusively white men and that didn't represent the whole organisation, which was actually pretty diverse. So what would fair representation look like? At the very least in an organisation where 60% of employees were women. It would have looked like 60% of leaders being women.
But we know from research and literature in the field around the (so called) ‘leaky bucket’ or the ‘broken ladder’ theory that at each stage of progression, the rungs on the ladder are snapping and women are not managing to make the progress in the same way. So it is then about having a holistic look at what's the employee experience and what is going on.
We need data to show that this is happening because when things are happening in front of you it can be difficult - I'm sure we've all familiar with those conversations where there's a leadership role coming up and people say - oh we do need more women in leadership roles, but that will have to be next time because so and so, he's a really strong candidate and it's his turn now, we'll get to the women next time, but just for now, this person is the right one. Rather than taking a step back, broadening perspective and thinking - which candidates could be in the mix from a company of thousands of people? Who else could be good in this role?
So it's good to establish some baseline assessments and those can be done in a couple of ways. They can be done by looking at the population of the organisation as a whole and its demographics and through looking at the population of the city or the country. In the UK you could use the Office for National Statistics, where you can very quickly get a snapshot of the demographic makeup of a city.
Ok we've got our baseline, what's our next step and how are we going to use the data to get there?
We've touched on this already in our conversation, those two beliefs, they touch on two big questions. One of the questions is around culture and what is happening in the organisation to allow people to progress or not to progress.
We can look at that culture and specifically from employee experience and the employee life cycle across all levels of the organisation. What happens when people come into the organisation and then how do they get promotions? How do they get opportunities for stretch projects and to move up?
Then by using the data we can see who is progressing within the organisation, and who is it that is doing well. As I mentioned earlier, there are lots of data sources available and there's lots of different ways of looking at the data as well. There's an opportunity to do primary research and there are some great sentiment studies out there which ask employees about their experience of the organisation.
They tend to follow a relatively standardised question set that can then be compared across departments, countries and companies, within the group. Often, the organisations running these studies can give you industry norms to use as benchmarks.
Then there's also a whole load of external data around the employee experience, especially for people from underrepresented groups. They include: The Parker Review, which looks at UK boards (especially from an ethnicity perspective) and at some of the experience of people from underrepresented cultures.
There's also a brilliant white paper from Fearless Futures, which brings together a lot of data and research to show the experience of many different marginalised groups, and how systems of oppression hold people back within organisations.
CoQual published a good paper called Being Black in in the UK. They used a very good mix of qualitative and quantitative data and went into a lot of depth about the corporate experience and strategies to overcome that.
There's also the McKinsey report – Women in the Workplace, which I think has been quite a game changer, it's been around for about ten years now. So you’re seeing some interesting trends coming from that as well.
There's also a couple of books which are particularly good, that bring together a lot of different research and, relate to what we were talking about earlier:
The Glass Cliff, Sophie Williams. Definitely worth a read, is about how it can be very hard for women or underrepresented groups to get into leadership roles. The leadership roles they often get can be on the “glass cliff” – in other words in circumstances where it’s almost impossible to succeed.
The Authority Gap, Mary Anne Sieghart is focused on why women aren't taken as seriously in business as men, and the challenges they have to overcome.
Any of these sources or even listening to a podcast by any of the authors will give people leaders a really good foundational knowledge and understanding of some of the issues that are experienced by underrepresented people within corporate organisations, and ways to overcome them.
Talk us through the sources organisations should be collecting data from.
Organisations should absolutely collect data about themselves to understand what's going on there. They should both collect it and analyse it to understand where inequities exist. Having a foundation in the actual data means then we can go back to thinking “what is the problem that we need to solve?”.
For example, an issue might be that you need to have better gender representation at leadership. So you bring in from outside a whole load of fantastic female leaders, they come into the organisation, but within a year or two, they've all left because they've come into the organisation and nothing has changed.
The culture is exactly the same. They find in meetings, they don't have a voice and the promotions and pay isn't transparent, so they're not progressing. They're not getting put on the projects that they wanted to run and lead. So they leave and nothing has changed and a lot of money is being invested and we haven't seen a return on that.
But actually, if it was based in data and understanding of the experiences and problem, they could have put practices and policies in to address those challenges.
Surely the good news is, everyone has that data because surely every organisation keeps a record of who they hire and who leaves?
Well another kind of challenge with data is that you say everyone does have this data - we hope it's being collected, we hope it's being recorded and it's being recorded accurately.
But even if it is being collected, is it being shared? Because we might see that there's not enough women in leadership,but we’re not tracking and reporting on that process.
In the absence of that, what a lot of organisations tend to do is share a different type of data that shows a good story for them in terms of inclusion. They will show data that reflects the number of people who've attended an International Women's Day event, or the number of people who have been on their training programme.
Those are actually the inputs into making a change – it’s not measuring the output at all. I think it's important organisations and people teams look out for and call out those kinds of measures which are about attendance of events or training, rather than the actual progression data.
Digging deeper into representation, we know that organisations measure a lot of variables, and it's good that those are measured. Ideally there's a level of transparency within that. I know it can be hard in terms of privacy but at least these are things that the board and leadership should have access to and be able to discuss.
It’s not just about hiring but also promotion rates, the gender pay gap and retention rates - because those are the actual outputs of inclusion. If we're doing well with inclusion, we should begin tosee a positive trend in that data.
Then you can overlay the hard employee data with the sentiment data and that sentiment data should help to bring it to life, add some colour and add some of the whys behind the what so we can see what is going on.
In regard to that sentiment data, I’d also like to add that it's essential that the results are shared and acted upon, because we know that psychological safety takes a long time to build up, but can be very quickly lost, and one of the ways to lose that is to lose trust by asking people their opinion and not sharing results or acting on them.
Many companies do listening circles, where people with a shared identity are brought together to talk about that experience. Now, I think those can be effective and I’ve seen some great insightful ones that have been well managed and acted upon.
However you must handle these things sensitively. It's essential that if you are asking people to open up and share their experiences of oppression and discrimination, you act on it, because you're asking people to make themselves very vulnerable, which can impact on levels of psychological safety and a duty of care to employees.
Are there any specific challenges for global organisations in regard to employee data and sentiment surveys?
Firstly there are some things you can ask in some countries that you can't in others. In France and Germany, for example, it's illegal to ask people what their ethnicity is.
It's important to think about what the demographic makeup of a certain country is. For example, Italy is ethnically not very diverse, so you don't need to have a long ethnicity section when it will be a small proportion of the employee base.
There's also a lot of laws (such as GDPR) around what can and can't be shared and what can and can't be asked and there's a lot of different ways of categorizing differences as well.
However, if you're working with a supplier delivering these employee sentiment questionnaires, they will know these things and they will be able to guide you on that.
Then, when you get the results back, it's important to consider the wider context and influencing factors when you analyse the data. So you can certainly look at one country versus another to understand if some countries are managing inclusion better than others, but it also depends on the amount of difference within the country.
I remember doing some work with France and asking about how inclusive the organisation was and the answer was “It's really inclusive. We all get along great. Everyone feels they can be themselves. We all feel like we belong”. However, while this was an office in Paris - which is a diverse city - everyone in the office was between 25 and 40. They all went to the same schools. They all had the same background. There was zero diversity. So why wouldn't they all fit in and feel totally at home? There's a lot of nuances like that to think about.
Sometimes it's better to look within a country rather than comparing countries to each other to understand them, because there are cultural norms in the way that people respond to sentiment questionnaires.
In Germany for example, when people respond to questionnaires around the employee experience, whatever organisation they were in, their responses tended to be lower.
They were more negative?
Yes but maybe more realistic as well. For example, in England to say you are average is actually bad, but in Germany when they say, “yeah, I'm sure this is kind of average of what everyone experiences” maybe they're being more realistic. So it's important to understand these international nuances.
Let's talk about AI tools and how they can help companies in the DEI efforts.
I think we're seeing some great examples of how it's being harnessed in a very positive way, to take bias out of recruitment – that can work really well.
Also in the inclusion space around neurodiversity or disability, AI is being used to improve the user experience. For example, for people with dyslexia it's an absolute game changer, and makes a huge difference to people's experiences and productivity.
One area I think that could be a great opportunity to use AI is around inclusive meetings. There's been some great work around people from underrepresented groups, who can find it harder to have an impact in meetings.
Dr Grace Lordan, the founder of the Inclusive Initiative at LSE, has done a lot of work around inclusive leadership and meetings, and how inclusive meetings led by inclusive leaders who make the most of everyone, get the best out of people by encouraging contributions. They don't allow 1 or 2 people to talk over everybody else. They also discourage people from just agreeing with the most senior person in the room, but actually build on ideas, be constructive, to make great contributions.
I think AI can have a real impact in this area. With the latest iterations of Teams or Zoom you can see who talked and for how long in the meeting. So you can very easily get a snapshot of who had an input. Is there an opportunity in meetings to say to those people who haven't contributed to the meeting yet, give them space and a platform to talk?
So I think with AI, there's a lovely opportunity to have a consciously inclusive approach to meetings, to set some goals at the beginning, to set some rules of engagement and then track them and use them, in an effective way, and my understanding is some organisations are beginning to do this, and I think it's going to have a big impact on productivity and business success.
So to finish up, what is your takeaway from this discussion for leaders in organisations regarding DEI?
Always start with “what is the question I need to answer?” or “what is the problem I need to solve?”. and how can data do this?
And then it's not just the what (is being said or what you're finding) but it's the why. And that's the cultural piece behind that. What's going on? Why is this happening in my organisation and what do I need to do to address it.