Employers struggle with driving business results through Diversity, Equity & Inclusion for several reasons, according to Brandon Hall Group research. These include:
• Unconscious bias
• Lack of executive leadership of DE&I
• Lack of strategies to build a more diverse and inclusive recruiting process
• Lack of targeted advancement strategies for diverse employees
• Limited training
• Limited tracking and measurement
• Lack of goals and accountability
While technology is front and center in the majority of organizations for most aspects of human capital management, it does not resonate for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Brandon Hall Group’s two recent DE&I studies showed that less than one-quarter of employers use technology to aid their DE&I efforts.
Organizations Using Technology for DE&I
While there are point solutions for diversity and inclusion, you don’t need a separate system to aid DE&I. Your talent-management suite or talent-management point solutions are excellent enablers.
Leveraging talent-management technology to support DE&I initiatives is an effective and cost-efficient solution that is often underutilized.
DE&I is not a separate function or competency. It must be embedded in everything an organization does. Therefore, the technology used for various functions — from recruiting and hiring, to learning, career development, employee engagement, data analytics and more — can be leveraged to help you with DE&I.
For organizations that already have a highly functional system, it just needs to be better leveraged to drive DE&I efforts. For those that need an upgrade or do not own a talent-management suite, the increasing importance of DE&I provides a powerful use case.
Technology is a critical factor of success that is severely underutilized. You have a choice: they can do nothing, shop for a DE&I point solution or leverage your talent-management solution more effectively. Our research shows that the latest talent-management software has many of the critical capabilities and tools you can leverage to support DE&I initiatives.
• How do we make Diversity, Equity & Inclusion part of our organizational culture?
• How can we coordinate and track all the different initiatives we need to improve DE&I?
• How can we integrate our DE&I efforts with other organizational initiatives?
The answers to all the questions listed above involve technology, the great enabler. Technology is not the solution, but it makes it easier to implement, track and analyze your DE&I efforts.
Here are a few examples of how technology — including solutions you may already have and may be using daily — can help:
• Improve diverse hiring. You can use your recruiting and talent-acquisition technology to access diverse job boards, remove barriers to applications from diverse candidates by running job descriptions that are edited to remove unconscious bias and more.
• Optimize content. A skills engine can deliver the right learning content that matches employees’ goals, interests and aspirations, leading to a greater sense of inclusion because the organization is actively assisting their development.
• Reinforce learning. Today’s solutions facilitate Q&As, feedback, follow-up exercises and nudges to supplement the primary training.
• Reduce bias. Natural Language Processing can identify language that might be biased or exclusionary and make recommendations for substitutions. This makes for more constructive and inclusive performance evaluations, assessments and feedback.
• Drive leadership development. An ongoing program that enables leaders to learn and practice inclusive leadership skills is critical and requires learning technology that can develop multi-modal learning.
• Develop inclusive capabilities. The best talent-management systems have an AI-driven skills engine that helps you understand the skills needed today in an increasingly diverse and inclusive workplace.
• Increase transparency with careerpathing tools. AI tools can automatically build career paths based on an employee’s profile, bringing transparency to a wide range of career options.
• Automate workplace practices. Talent-management solutions have AI-powered capabilities that automate processes such as onboarding and learning, providing equal access to everyone and making workplace practices easier and faster.
• Facilitate communication. Talent-management software can solicit and facilitate employee opinions and provide suggestions based on the feedback.
• Enable measurement. Tracking DE&I and leveraging metrics to show the current state and progress has been difficult for most organizations. But the analytics and monitoring functionalities in talent-management systems make this easy and can create dashboards to track KPIs. The best software can help you with critical intelligence, such as equal pay analysis.
About
Brandon Hall Group Strategy Briefs answer the critical questions learning, talent, HR and business leaders must address to manage their human capital. To tackle these critical questions in more detail, we built tools, frameworks, research summaries and business builders based on up-to-date research and case studies for you to implement best and next Human Capital Management (HCM) practices. To gain access to these valuable resources, contact [email protected].
Leading minds in HCM choose Brandon Hall Group to help them build future-proof employee-development plans for the new era. For more than 27 years, we have empowered, recognized and certified excellence in organizations around the world, influencing the development of over 10,000,000 associates and executives.
