Kathi Enderes – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Analytics

Connect with Kathi:

• 

Connect with Dwight:

• 
• dwight.brown@salary.com

Connect with David:

• 
• 
• david.turetsky@salary.com

Resources:

• Josh Bersin Company
• HR Data Labs Season 3 Episode 17
• HR Data Labs Season 3 Episode 19

• “We did a big study on employee experience and we found that of all the things that a company can do to create a great experience, the number one thing that drives the employee experience is trust in the organization.”
• “When we did our big DEI study, we actually studied many, many different topics of DEI because DEI is, of course, embedded in many different areas of HR and the business. One thing that we found out was when we interviewed several DEI leaders on what they were doing, one of the DEI leaders told us, ‘You got to approach DEI as a business practice, not as an HR program.’ ”

Announcer  0:02

Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent but count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

 

David Turetsky  0:46

Hello, and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky. Like always, we try and find you fascinating people inside and outside of the world of human resources to talk to you about HR data, analytics, and HR Technology. Today we have with us a very special guest, Kathi Enderes from the Bersin Company. Hello, Kathi. How are you?

 

Kathi Enderes  1:06

Good. How are you, David? Thanks for having me.

 

David Turetsky  1:09

My pleasure. And all as always, we have with us our cohost, Dwight Brown from Salary.com. Hey, Dwight, how are you?

 

Dwight Brown  1:15

Hey, David, I'm doing well. How are you doing?

 

David Turetsky  1:17

I'm doing awesome because we're going to speak with Kathi on something really cool today. But before we talk about that, Kathi why don't you give our listeners some background as to who you are, and what you do at the Bersin Company.

 

Kathi Enderes  1:31

Sure, thank you, David. And so, I am as you said, David, as SVP of research at the Josh Bersin Company, my background is actually not in research, my background is actually in mathematics. So that's something that people might know about me, but I swear, I'm not the oddest, wierdest geek, I actually hold the conversation on all of that. But I did start in Austria, where I'm from, I started my career studying theoretical mathematics. So that's, that's where I started out on and my PhDs in mathematics because I wanted to be a professor at the University of Vienna for mathematics. But then it turned out, it was actually not for me, because I looked at all these very smart professors. And they were very, very smart, but very detached from any kind of reality. So, I'm like, Okay, I'm going to be like them. And I didn't want to be like them. So, I thought I do something else. So, I started in management consulting. So I started with Ernst and Young, quite a while ago, management consulting, didn't know anything about business, but learned a lot about business, just working in management, consulting, and in Austria, and then I got the opportunity to move to London, and I moved with Price Waterhouse Coopers at that time to London, and was able to continue management consulting there. And then I had the opportunity to move to San Francisco in 2000 actually. The dot com craze. So, PwC was looking to hire a lot of people. And so, it took me one phone call to move to San Francisco in 2000. And I've loved it there. And I stayed there for the last 22 years worked in management consulting, PwC, IBM. And then I joined one of my clients as a director of organizational effectiveness, worked on change management, and in HR and performance management, talent management, and people analytics, of course, as well, because analytics, when you're in consulting is really key because you can't do any kind of current state assessment or any kind of work without knowing where the company is, whether that's on people side, whether it's on diversity, equity, inclusion, change management, organizational outcomes. So I went in an organization because I wanted to know what it's like to be in that job that we always consult into. And that was great. And then I had the opportunity to join an even bigger healthcare company, Kaiser Permanente, actually, and was working there for eight years in organizational effectiveness and people analytics I had as well. And a number of other things that are related to this area of change, organizational effectiveness, talent management, performance management. And then in 2016, I moved to southern Spain, and I actually started my own business because there was not really an opportunity to do any kind of related work in that area where we moved to so I started my own little consulting business and I did some remote consulting before remote was really a thing. I know today would be easier, but it was great there. And when I returned to the US in 2018, I joined actually Deloitte at Bersin by Deloitte group to work on research on all these topics. So, I'm like, Oh, that's really cool. Because I can apply my practitioner background, my consulting background, and also my data and analytics background to do all sorts of research on all of these topics and work with many different companies and organizations around the world on that. And then in 2020, and I'm almost done with my story. I swear. In 2020 I got the opportunity. to actually join Josh at his new venture, because the day I joined Deloitte it took so long to get hired, of course there, it was the day that Josh retired from Deloitte. And so when I sent him an email when I came and like I'm here, I'm here, we can start working together, but we couldn't, because he was retiring that very day. But then 2020, I got the opportunity to join him and others in the Josh Bersin company on his new venture that we're doing now, and leading all the research that we're doing here. So that's kind of nice.

 

David Turetsky  5:29

Very exciting. And so we're fellow geeks as well. And wonderful to talk to people who can understand not only the business problem, but also the mathematics that underlie the business problem.

 

Kathi Enderes  5:42

Yeah, that's exactly right.

 

David Turetsky  5:44

That's why you're on the HR Data Labs podcast today.

 

Kathi Enderes  5:48

Super excited about that.

 

David Turetsky  5:50

And we are to but what we ask most of, or actually we ask all of our guests is one fun thing that no one knows about Kathi.

 

Kathi Enderes  6:00

So I was thinking about the one fun fact, what's not so fun. It was what do I already share that I have a PhD in mathematics? So I thought...

 

David Turetsky  6:08

No, everybody knows that now Kathi.

 

Kathi Enderes  6:10

Everybody knows about that. Exactly. So here's one fun fact and actually relates to the topic of the DEI too. So when I came back to the US, I just told you my story in 2018, I came back to the US and I started looking for another opportunity to work in a big company or in a company really from having my own business. I read some article on like about a research study, what's the number one reason that stops people from in the US from having an executive position and the number one reason that this academic study found was having a foreign accent? So I was like, Okay, well, clearly, I have a foreign accent. You all hear this? Right? It's, an Australian accent. I've lived in English speaking countries for a long time, but, and my English is certainly not bad. But I've always had an accent, right? So I'm like, okay, so if I want to get a great job here, I need to get rid of my accent. And so I started actually trying this app out that you speak into, and it correct your pronunciation. And I tried it for like a week. And it was so frustrating. I tried every day, I spent an hour every day on it. And it corrected me on everything, like every single word. And I was getting so frustrated and then I'm like, After a week, I said, Screw it. If people don't like me for who I am, I'm going to give up and I don't want to work with them anyway. So I gave up on that app. And again, I gave up on getting rid of my accent. And I'm like, I'll own my accent. And this is who I am. And if people don't like it, they're not right for me.

 

David Turetsky  7:43

Absolutely, totally agree. 100%. Yep. And that actually is a really good transition to our topic today, which is around diversity, equity and inclusion analytics. And talking about how we can use math, we can use analytics, to not just measure, but also to understand who actually are the people who work for our organization, and how it impacts the business problem.

 

So I guess, Kathi, one of the best places to start on that is just to ask, what are, in your mind, What are DEI analytics? And why are they important to organizations today?

 

Kathi Enderes  8:30

Yeah, and it's a topic that's really near and dear to my heart, and that I'm very passionate about because of my own background. And and of course, other backgrounds too. And, and having observed of people, either being included or not being included, or having opportunities or not having opportunities for just who they are as a person and, and how that also impacts organizations negatively if you don't give people opportunities to advance and to be successful and your company. But what I'd like to talk about first is before we talk about the analytics, what is diversity, equity and inclusion, because that's another thing that people sometimes get confused. And they use these words sometimes interchangeably. So when you think about diversity, I would think about the, the mix of people. So it's the being invited to the party, right? I like being part of the party, right? The whole thing about that. So it's the mix of the similarities and differences in a group. So a person can't be diverse, right? A person is who they are. So in Austria, I'm not ws because I have an Austrian accent, obviously, and everybody else has an Austrian accent if we talk about it, right. So a person is never diverse, a group can be diverse. So diversity is of course many, many different measures. It could be gender, it could be sexual orientation, it could be age, right? We see all the things about ageism, and all of that.  I live in Silicon Valley and there you are old when you're over 35. So it could be age and of course it could be a race, it could be ethnicity, it could be economic background could be many, many different factors and, and religion or any of these kinds of things could be many, many different factors. So diversity is pretty easy to measure. If you think about the analytics around that, right, you can count some of these observable things. And you can even ask people about the not so observable things, and get some measure of how diverse your team is, how diverse your group is. So diversity measures are pretty easy to measure. And that's why most companies measure them. Equity is, of course, a lot harder to measure. And maybe we start with inclusion first, and then we turn around with equity. So inclusion is a perception, it's feeling, right? Do I feel like I belong? Do I feel valued? Do I feel like I can bring my accent, for example, to work in my case, or any of those kinds of things. And inclusion is a lot harder to measure because it's a sentiment. So how do you measure sentiment, of course, there's, you can ask people, you can observe their behaviors, you can observe, if they're part of meetings, all of those kinds of things, you can do that surveys, observe, like how people interact with each other. So that's, that's kind of inclusion measures. And it's a lot harder to do that. But there's still some inclusion indices out there, and all of that good either by into create your own one. So, and many tools out there, of course, for employee opinions and apply employee perception.

 

David Turetsky  11:12

I think one of the things that we have to overcome as well as that DEI used to be thought of as being affirmative action. It used to be something that we had to do, because a government told us we had to do it. And now the perception needs to change to be, this is who we need to be because our culture needs to represent not just what we want to be as a company, but who we want to serve as a company as well. Who are we catering to? What are our customers? And how do we perceive? How do they perceive who we are, and how we treat people? And make sure that that falls in line with our culture and our marketing.

 

Kathi Enderes  11:51

Absolutely, yeah. And I'm thinking back on my time at Kaiser Permanente, for example, where we had a lot of different members, of course, who are members of our health plan and our health services. And I live in California, and there actually our majority was minority, if you if that makes sense. But most of our nurses, most of our healthcare professionals were not minority. So they were usually white women, most of most of the nursing professional is very well known. Average age is 54. Right? So but if you have a lot of people from Mexican descent, for example, which we have a lot of people because because California used to be Mexico, not that long ago, so they're not even immigrants, right? They're people that have lived here for generations, we always thought about how can we actually represent the communities that we serve in our employee population? So that was always very important for us. And I think that's a way of thinking about who you need to be as a company, can you represent your customers? Can you be, when your customer comes to you for your services for your products? Do they feel that somebody who is like them, do they feel welcome, do they feel like somebody speaks their language literally and figuratively.

 

David Turetsky  13:00

But I think it actually goes even deeper. And we've seen customer experiences, especially early last year, we saw customer experiences where people were being very open and honest about how they would, especially African American, you know, customers would walk into a Starbucks. And because of everything that had been happening with BLM, there was a lot of tension between that customer and the in the store. And I'm not trying to pick on Starbucks, but it happened a lot in a lot of different retail situations where, you know, there was almost a hair trigger on, you know, calling the police because, you know, we thought something was gonna happen. And you know, a lot of African American people, they looked at the people behind the counter, and they did not see the same race of people. And they said, Oh, my gosh, you know, I'm not being represented here, you know, does Starbucks really feel like a place I belong? And there, it's correct. I mean, that's what I mean, when I talk about how it's kind of become. It used to be, let's check the box that we're doing something for the government, but now it has to be about who we are and, and how we represent.

 

Kathi Enderes  14:04

Yeah, and there's tons of studies out there. And we found that in our study, too, when we studied diversity, equity and inclusion, that diversity at all levels, including board members, including executives results in much higher financial performance, customer satisfaction, innovation, on and on and on, of course, engagement and retention of your people too, because this revolving door from a people practice is real, right. You might check the box to bring in an African American woman, for example, and then she sees all these white men in their 20s or something. And what is she gonna do? She's probably gonna say, Well, this is not my place, because nobody's gonna listen to me and nobody looks like me. Nobody thinks like me, and I'm gonna turn around and leave and so you've just created a little bit worse situation for your company too because you had somebody who just turned around and left you right away. So yeah, I think there's like tons of things of course going on in this area, including of course, do you see what's going on at IBM, for example, right now with the ageism kind of thing, and all of those, like there's many different dimensions that you got to think about. And it's not just a nice to have, it's not just a legal requirement. I'm not a big fan of quotas, because I think it doesn't serve companies, it doesn't serve, even the population that are underpresented.

 

David Turetsky  15:21

No, but quotas are looking at the problem wrong as well. I mean, it's not about that. I think you mentioned this just now, which is that when someone walks into an organization, they want to feel not just that they're represented, but they're comfortable. And if they look at the executive team, or the board members, and they feel like the board represents them, that there are people there who look like them who talk like them, who can actually be an example for them, of here's what you can aspire to in this organization. That's what people want to feel. And I think one of the things that the Great Awakening or Resignation, or whatever you want to call it has given us is that people want to be comfortable, they want to be happy, and they want to enjoy work as much as they have at home. They want to actually feel like those hours they're putting into their jobs matter, and that they feel like the organization reflects them.

 

Kathi Enderes  15:48

Yes, absolutely. You know, it's it's absolutely true. And I think it's, it's actually a great sign that people are much more empowered now that they say, "Well, I'm just gonna pack up and leave and go somewhere else and take my talent and all my work and the 40, 50, 60 hours, however much I put in, into a place where I feel valued where I feel welcome, where I feel happy". So I think it's, it's actually a good thing, that people feel that empowered, it's, the power has shifted, and I think it's not going to go back anywhere. It's not gonna go back to organizations.

 

David Turetsky  16:45

Well, people have found their voice. And like, I was talking to a CEO the other day, and they said, people are voting with their feet, which is a good thing. And now we as organizations and leaders of organizations, we have to start catering to them more so than we ever have before, not just through pay, because you can't pay people enough to be in hell. But to feel like sort of part of something better.

 

Kathi Enderes  17:08

It's so true. When thinking about how pay impacts or doesn't impact employee experience, and engagement and all of that, and it's very short lived, right? Because you don't get up every day and say, "Here's my paycheck. Here's my big bonus. I'm like, I'm gonna do my best work". It's like it goes a little while and maybe you think about it. If you get a big raise, again, a big bonus, you think about it, like a week or something like that, maybe? And then you're like, okay, yeah, that's good. But I also did a lot of great work. So I kind of earned it.

 

David Turetsky  17:36

Exactly. That's the point. That's the point. I did the work. I earned it. Now. And this is something my father used to say to me that his his people used to say to him, "What have you done for me lately?" You know, as an employee, they'd say that to him the boss and say, "What have you done for me lately?" And he actually saw that as a really huge negative. And I said, "Dad," and this is when I was a consultant already. I said, "Hey, Dad, what have you done for them lately?" And it was a very honest question. And he could "Oh, shut up, boy". Because he didn't want to be put in that position. But I think a lot of managers, they don't have the answer. And that's why they get very frustrated by that. And things tend to go pretty badly when they're faced with that. So HR really needs to step up their game to be able to help managers be able to answer that question better than "Shut up boy", which my dad loved to tell me.

 

Kathi Enderes  18:24

It is so true. Yeah, we did a big study on employee experience, which I'm not gonna dive too much into. But we found of all the things that a company can do to create a great experience, the number one thing that drives the employee experience is trust in the organization. So do they trust you? And do you feel like you're a leader that does something for them? Right, not just "Well, I paid you, obviously", "But I also gave you my work". "But what else have you done for me because I did above and beyond that didn't just check the boxes and see that I have worked my eight hours or something. I'm not a clock puncher. I did a lot more. So what a lot more have you done for me". And if people don't feel like they can trust their organization, they're just gonna pack it up.

 

David Turetsky  19:07

One of the things we actually do a lot of surveys to check employee sentiment, we had a survey that we had just done very recently, in fact, in the last month and a half, and it said that employees don't believe that their managers have those answers right now, even though they...., in another question, they said, managers are the people I turn to first, before HR to answer the questions. Managers don't have the skills or the tools to be able to help them. So it's tough.

 

Kathi Enderes  19:33

And it's true. It's true. I think it's sometimes a little bit unfair to managers, because people usually are put in manager positions without knowing what that even means, right? They're good at that job. I'm a great salesperson, then I got to be a sales manager. I'm like, oh, what does it even mean? Because being a great salesperson doesn't mean you're a great people manager. Usually it's actually kind of opposite. Like directions are great. My husband is a software architect. If you're great software architect then you get put in a management position, but you actually don't want that. "I don't want to talk to people all day long". You want to code someone something really cool, right? Oh, nurse manager was the same thing.

 

Dwight Brown  20:11

It is not a natural skill set. And and it's true that so many managers get put into their position, but there's no training on how to even become a manager is just sort of trial by fire.

 

Kathi Enderes  20:23

Yeah, we had at Kaiser Permanente, the hardest job to keep people at was nurse manager, because a nurse manager you put a nurse into that and, and they want to see patients, that's why they became a nurse. But then you have to do the scheduling, paperwork, performance evaluations, and like all that boring stuff that it has doesn't have anything to do with the patient and people self demoted into nurse roles.

 

David Turetsky  20:47

So so the Peter Principle is really true, which is what we're talking about. And one of the things that we've been consulting with clients on is creating career tracks for their employees, where they understood when you go from this job, to this job to this job, what are the skills you need to acquire or develop in order to actually get to that other role? Because, and especially today, it's really, really true today because of so much compression in compensation. And we're gonna get to why this is important in a second for next question. But one of the things that companies aren't doing a very good job of is telling people when I, I can't increase your pay, because you didn't develop those skills to be able to get to the next level. And therefore, I have to slow down your rate and pay because you're getting too expensive inside your grade. Because we've held that stuff very secretively, you know, those grades and those structures and things. Now, with DEI, we're opening things up with pay transparency, giving more people access to knowing how did my pay get developed, and being more empowered about that? And then that leads to people being able to take more control of their career inside that organization. I don't know if you've actually seen that in person.

 

Kathi Enderes  21:58

Yeah, we have seen that a lot. Actually, what the pay equity is actually a huge topic that comes up, believe it or not many different topics that we study. So we studied, for example, employee experience, were initiated, and we had two questions in there, one of them was around pay equity. And another one was around above average pay and benefits. And we ranked all of these practices that were like 76, or something we ranked all of them in, in their correlation to outcomes, business outcomes, people outcomes, innovation outcomes, and pay equity was number six, so very high up. And there were many other things like trusting leadership, those kind of things. And above average pay and benefits was number 70. So it was way below was way low. Right. And we see that that correlation also with health and well being for example. So pay equity actually has a huge impact on employee health and well being so when we studied health and well being we saw that transparency of pay, comparable pay, fair pay, pay, that's perceived as fair, not just that is fair, but certain people know it's fair, it doesn't really help if you do a lot of pay equity work, but nobody knows you're doing that you're actually looking at a leveling the playing field. So I think that's a that's a really important consideration as well. So pay equity is a huge problem that I think we're just scratching the surface right now.

 

Announcer  23:23

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David Turetsky  23:34

Let's talk about how and what companies are doing in DEI and analytics, and where did they get started on it? So let's talk about first, you know, what have people been doing to actually measure these things? And then what how can people start?

 

Kathi Enderes  23:48

Yeah, so when we did our big DEI study, we did actually studied many, many different topics of DEI because DEI is, of course, embedded in many different areas of HR in the business. One thing that we found out was when we interviewed several DEI leaders of Target and Hyatt and like big companies based on what they were doing to one of the DEI leaders told us and that really resonated with us, you're going to approach DEI as a business practice, not as an HR program, right. And what that means is, of course, you're going to measure it too because you wouldn't ever do your marketing strategy without knowing first way of stand and setting goals and then tracking progress. So it becomes very natural that you have to do full DEI measures and outcome measures, including not just diversity measures, but now also equity and inclusion measures in order to run DEI like a business. So so that's one thing. Most companies are struggling with the effective use of DEI metrics. And the reason for that is I think, a number of reasons and they don't have to just do to do with the data side. So I don't even want to talk a lot about data. I think one thing that that gets in the way way of effective DEI metrics and analytics is lack of HR skills. We saw in our HR capability assessment that four in five HR people are very inexperienced in putting DEI metrics together and with 8,000 people that have taken our HR capability assessment. So it's a pretty broad data set. And I think the reason for that is that it's usually relegated to either people analytics teams, or DEI teams, but any HR person, actually, and any manager has to know what these metrics are, because they need to use them in their own business day of work, right? If you want to run it like a business, you can't just say, Oh, here's our people analytics team, which is usually a small team. Right. And, and we wanted to add Kaiser Permanente to that I was running in, and we had 10 or 15 people, but we had 220,000 employees. So like, these, these analytics groups can do that. So so that's one reason why it's not very effective. I think the other thing that that's happening there is most companies focus mostly on the the D of DEI and not so much on the E and the I. And we talked about why that is because it's hard to get that right. It's pretty easy to count heads. And it's pretty hard to evaluate inclusion or equity. But you absolutely have to do it. Because that's where, really the crux of your DEI strategy is, is in the E and I not just on the D.

 

David Turetsky  26:26

I think we again, going back to one of the things we were talking about before, I think a lot of times people think about the E potentially as being pay equity which really isn't necessarily but it also might come into the engagement surveys piece of being able to sneak in questions that question how people feel not just about what they do and where they are getting the manager in the business, but also because of who they are. And the people who had been running those studies in the past really hadn't had the writ, they hadn't had the leverage to be able to cut the data by those particular factors.

 

Kathi Enderes  27:06

Oh, absolutely. I mean, when you look at averages, things always look great, right? If you look at you don't see the outliers. So you get to look at much more in a much more detail level where the outliers is, if we, for example, have high engagement or high inclusion perception, is it the same for African American women in their 50s? As it is for white men in their 20s? And maybe not? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if you don't look at this, these cuts, the diversity cuts of inclusion service, you will never know, right? And so how is it by ten year by different diversity groups, by age groups, by, on and on and on all of these different groups. And, and that's really where it's at. It's not just about measuring heads on teams, which is kind of a basic thing. And the we talked about about AAP and EOC reporting, which of course is the lowest bar, right, but you won't get to full, full value of DEI, if you're stopping at the legal compliance kind of falls.

 

David Turetsky  28:07

No and I think one of the problems also is is that you need to do that Rubik's cube, and keep turning the analyses to find where those problem spots may exist. And they may be hidden, very hidden, and not give up. And that means you have to have somebody who has really good programming data programming skills, to be able to find those nuggets of truth, because they're just not going to be there for you, you have to really dig

 

Dwight Brown  28:31

when you have to have those people that have that inherent sense of curiosity.

 

David Turetsky  28:36

Exactly.

 

Dwight Brown  28:36

If you if you're lacking that curiosity at it, because it is a treasure hunt. And it takes a long time and it takes a lot of energy. And if you don't have the curiosity driving that you really are not going to start to get those insights from, from the data.

 

David Turetsky  28:52

Totally agree.

 

Kathi Enderes  28:53

Absolutely. No, it's It's so true. It reminds me of my mathematics studies, of course, you don't know where the nugget is gonna be. So you just gotta keep digging, right? Because nobody can tell you the answer. Otherwise, they'd already have done that.

 

David Turetsky  29:07

Well, and the problem is because this data constantly evolves, there is no one answer, either it's the the problem is going to be it's on a continuum. And when, to your point before, because the organization is breathing, and this has to become a business process. And part of how everybody lives and everybody works. It may need necessarily some training or some retraining on things we used to do in the past.

 

Kathi Enderes  29:30

Oh, absolutely. You constantly have to evolve it because the way that you can actually get to these insights evolves all the time, too, if you think for example, about organizational network analysis, which we didn't have when I started out working, but now you can actually see who is working with whom and what are the connections and where are the barriers to working together. Can you see for example, if women in a certain age group, I'm working with the senior executive men and they're in another age group, but do they have these barriers? Well, have like the glass ceiling or anything like that you can see it in behavioral data too, not just from asking people at counting heads like nudging is another thing that, of course, another interesting thing, right that we were not able to do in the past, and now we can because it really personalizes your insights for yourself, not for people like you, but for yourself.

 

David Turetsky  30:30

So Kathi, we talked about what is DEI, and we talked about how people need to make it important, an important part of the business and a business problem, not just an HR problem. We also talked about how people are measuring these things and where and how to get started in DEI. What did we miss, though? I know there's a, we can probably fill a couple more episodes, but what else would you tell people before we close?

 

Kathi Enderes  30:56

Yeah, I just tell, like summing it up a few insights, three points, really, because I would like to think in threes, three points on how we can make a bigger difference with the DEI analytic. So first thing is, and we all found that out from studying the topic at length with many, many different companies. First one is an outside in orientation. So rather than just comparing internally and looking at your internal DEI measures and metrics, compare them also to external benchmarks in comparison when work with other companies to learn from them on what they are doing. And so many, many big companies that we talked with Target, Accenture, Kaiser Permanente, on and on and on, they have dedicated analytics experts that collaborate with other groups in other companies to understand what they are doing and just pull over some of these insights from other companies. So don't just look at your company was broaden the spectrum, because DEI is a big problem that you can solve alone within your company. Of course, the second, the second point I'd make is, and we talked about that at length, too, is focus on inclusion and belonging, not just diversity. So just looking at diversity measures you may miss the bigger picture of the inclusion metrics, where it's really the, the value of DEI comes out. So focus on these inclusion metrics, create your own inclusion index, or use one that's already created, and just start cutting the data in different, many different dimensions as, as we talked about. And the last point we also hit on is transparency. So many tech companies, for example, they share their diversity stats publicly, because they've been forced to, right, so they've been forced to share their, like, how many people of color do they have? How many women do they have in engineering, those kind of things. And that's important, but what's even more important is internal transparency. So people don't want to find out from the media on how you are doing in within your organization, they want to do more, they want to know more about what you're doing to help them how to create more diversity, equity, inclusion in your company, they want to have it earlier that want to have more detail. And they want to have just also insights on progress, good or bad. Even if you didn't make progress, you're also going to share it internally and tell people, "This is what we tried. This is why it was not successful. And this is what we're gonna try next". So sharing internally, transparency is very important. But internal transparency is actually more important than external transparency. So those are the three kind of nuggets that I wanted to share.

 

David Turetsky  33:23

That's brilliant. Thank you so much, Kathi. Thank you for coming. And we're gonna definitely ask you back to go into more detail.

 

Dwight Brown  33:30

Yep, definitely.

 

David Turetsky  33:32

We love geeks like us. And you are definitely one.

 

Dwight Brown  33:35

Like minded people.

 

Kathi Enderes  33:36

We could talk for hours.

 

David Turetsky  33:38

Yeah.

 

Kathi Enderes  33:38

Totally. Well, thank you so much, David. And Dwight, I really, really appreciate your time. And I'm looking forward to joining you again soon.

 

David Turetsky  33:47

That'd be great. Dwight, thank you very much for being here.

 

Dwight Brown  33:50

Thank you. And thank you so much, Kathi, for being here.

 

David Turetsky  33:52

And thank you all for listening. And if you liked this episode, please subscribe or hit follow. And if you know somebody who might find value in it, please send it to them. Thank you very much. Take care and please stay safe.

 

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