Introducing Talent Pulse 4.1: Diversity & Inclusion
When HCI launched Talent Pulse in 2014, we envisioned it as a means of soliciting feedback from our HCI membership to learn what’s on your minds, stay ahead of trends, and paint a clearer picture of what’s really happening in talent management today that produce insightful findings and recommendations that shape strategy and encourage action across the continuum of talent management. The quarterly Talent Pulse reports are proprietary research from HCI aligned to each of our four communities. We produce insightful findings and recommendations that shape strategy and encourage action across the continuum of talent management.
Talent Pulse is now in its fourth year, and we’ve worked diligently to provide our HCI learners with a solid foundation of data and insights on which to craft prescriptive solutions to your most pressing talent problems. As the head of Research for HCI, I am excited to kick the year off by discussing Inclusive Diversity. These concepts have grown in importance exponentially in recent years, both as a result of standard diversity practices falling short of expectations and the realization that true inclusion has a measurable impact on a company’s bottom line.
In this research, we discovered that a vast majority of organizations feel that diversity and inclusion is a strategic opportunity, rather than a problem to be solved. Leaders are seeking to attract a wider talent pool, diversify employee backgrounds and skill sets and increase engagement. Our survey respondents had a lot to say about the topic as well. One respondent shared with us, “Executive leadership is starting to ask the right questions as it has become more apparent that our company is not very diverse. One problem to overcome is our industry is not very diverse, either. We are implementing and addressing policies to make things better because we take the long view.”
We’ve also gotten important feedback from organizations that have already made strides in their inclusive diversity strategies. For example, one respondent said, “Our strategy has been to encourage staff to model behaviors to show senior leaders and managers how it is done. We have supported staff networks and have co-created learning & development programs with stakeholder groups. We have insisted on external assessments for awards to help identify areas for improvement and get a ‘reality check’.”
In developing HCI’s model for inclusive diversity, we were able to leverage a variety of perspectives from organizations of all sizes. In addition to these outside perspectives, HCI’s newest Senior Research Analyst MaryFran Heinsch lent her expertise in the social sciences, particularly the study of anthropology, to contextualize our findings and inform our prescriptive recommendations.
The research report is free to download for all HCI Learners and can be downloaded here. For a guided tour of the research, join me, MaryFran and Priya Dhingra Klocek, Business Consultant, Executive Coach, Mentor, and Facilitator for Consultant On The Go LLC, as we discuss the findings in webcast available to view anytime by clicking here.