How do Lenses help improve Equity, Inclusion, Bias, and Belonging?
Updated: April 2023
Lenses are one of the most important concepts in Divrsity. Viewing workplace Diversity through multiple Lenses highlights opportunities to measurably improve Inclusion, Equity, Bias, and Belonging.
This article also highlights three real-world examples where Lenses have revealed insights that enable organisations to surgically target interventions
Introduction
There is a famous quote about ID&E: “Diversity is being asked to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.”. Using Divrsity lenses enables us to gather data how many are dancing and how many individuals are standing in the corner wishing they could join in.
There are two fundamental concepts in Divrsity:
- Lenses: represent groups of individuals that make sense to your organisation
- Diversity questions: look at the personal characteristics/preferences of an individual
Once the Divrsity survey has been run, the results can be compared along these two (orthogonal) dimensions.
To make this easier to understand, imagine a hypothetical company with the following departments:
The first, most obvious, lens is Department; where survey respondents can select Finance, Sales; or Technology. Combine this with a diversity question which asks about people's preference for being in situations involving alcohol, and we might find that having a bar at the Technology away day is causing 20% of the team to stay away.
Looking through the same lens might enable us to check that the gender and ethnicity split of our product managers is representative of our customer base.
- Is there Bias in our recruitment process?
- Do people from other backgrounds feel they don't belong in that team and therefore leave?
- Are all our prospective clients middle class?
- Will a lack of diversity lead to less innovation in that area?
Another dimension
Now we can think about creating more focused lenses. Let's say this company has a London office and a Paris office; we can create a Location lens with London and Paris as options.
Now our results will enable us to compare diversity between the Paris and London offices. Is one performing better than the other? Is there a reason?
Deeper still
Now let's start to think about our recruitment processes. Let's create an Interviewers lens that asks "How many interviews do you typically conduct per month?", with dimensions zero, 1-2, 3-5 and >5.
We can see that ALL the individuals who interview more than 5 times per month are middle-aged white men. Okay, that's actionable data that we can set targets against, and make measurable improvements towards.
- People tend to hire people who look/behave like themselves (unconscious affinity bias)
- Individuals are more likely to join a company if they are interviewed by somebody like themselves
Measurable insights
Other lenses could include:
- Tenure, helping to look at whether your organisation is hiring more or fewer diverse candidates over time
- Press and Presentations, to show whether people who represent your organisation in the press or at conferences are consistent with your internal diversity
- Managers, to see whether there are diversity hot-spots as people's span of control increases. Are all our senior managers from high income parental backgrounds; and is our company set-up for success if all our managers have always worked at large companies in our business sector?
Clearly this client has work to do, but the lenses revealed specific proactive actions to take around priviledge / micro-aggression training; versus a stream of exit-interviews once employees have decided to exit this toxic culture
Hopefully this has clarified the concept of lenses. If you have any questions about how lenses work, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.
More Blog Articles
Learn why we created Divrsity
Learn how we ensure employee anonymity