Women and men of color only comprise 10% and 18% of the senior-level and leadership positions in US organizations, respectively. Most organizations aren’t taking full advantage of data analytics for diverse talent acquisition and retention.
“Hiring is only half the work done, retention makes up the other half. For the hires who do make it to the organization’s diversity pipeline, a host of problems can arise. This means that great talent can be driven right out the door of your company.”
If you are not using a data-driven approach to increase retention in your organization, you are doing it wrong. Here are some ways through which you can use data to ensure you can retain diverse talent in your organization.
Notice The Post-Hire Data!
The diverse candidates that leave prematurely reveal a lot of significant data about your hiring and retention practices. Based on the post-hire data acquired, their time working for the company, performance graphs, promotion stats, and other related elements can tell you a lot about your diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
Use your pre-hire and post-hire data to analyze the status of diverse employees. It will help you find loopholes in your employees’ lifecycle and onboarding procedure that might be driving away your recruits from the company. Based on a successful case study, reenact the same methodology to retain long-term satisfaction for your diverse employees.
Design A Culture of Belonging For Diverse Candidates
When your company isn’t accustomed to being inclusive with diverse employees in the workforce, a lot of problems can arise. Moreover, when conversations around how to deal with diverse colleagues aren’t initiated or handled efficiently, retention numbers can be low. If you don’t want great talent to be driven out of your company, address cultural issues like exclusion, discrimination, bias, and microaggressions in the workplace.
The loss of talent can be expensive as well as hazardous in terms of creative cost. To improve your retention rates, change the culture by working on the mindset and behaviors that are deeply embedded within the organization. Data here can help you assess the previous patterns, the departments with the most fallouts, successful managers, etc. Use this data to successfully revamp your company culture to integrate more diversity.
Help Candidates Settle In!
Your analytics can also help you identify which part of the onboarding process has proven to be the most successful or unsuccessful. Look into the data you have gathered through years of hiring diverse talent and design a strategy that addresses real challenges. Once you have identified and addressed these challenges, create a safe space for your diverse employees to discuss them if the need be. Do not shy away from difficult conversations.
Assign mentors and sponsors and create a curriculum for them to follow in order to provide ongoing support to diverse employees. Most importantly, every time you hire diverse talent, go back and check the history of similar ex-employees. Identify internal policies, practices, and procedures which drive diverse talent from your organization. Make changes to create an inclusive procedure to remove or decrease the ability to utilize the previous practices so they aren’t used against the new hires or current diverse employees.
Make Your Organization Inclusive!
If there is one thing data can show you, it is your unconscious bias and discrimination manifested through scarce recruitment, rare promotions, and other obstacles that diverse employees have to face. Based on your organization’s growth and the previous results, set retention and inclusion targets backed by data. Track them and share results to hold everyone accountable.
Support and empower employee resource groups. Encourage them to use their numbers and data to create diversity and inclusion playbooks that can help everyone in the organization. Make pay equity your goal. Share ongoing challenges and ask everyone in the company to help you tackle them.
“The importance of diversity is as straightforward as it ever was. It is now time to make your organization diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Using data to help with employee retention might be one step but it is one of the biggest pillars in ensuring DEI as success in your organization.”