Diversity Executive - November 2008 - (Page 27)

Plummer said the turning point came as leading practitioners began to expand their goals beyond building diversity awareness to broader business challenges. It’s a transition that some have yet to make. “That’s where many practitioners fell off the track, or they kept playing the song with the same tune that was a No. 1 hit in the ’80s,” she said. “Right now, it’s an old song.” It’s at this transition point that practitioners and academics have turned to metrics to help elevate the level of practice, Plummer said. The next step is to build a set of standards around diversity practice that supports the theory and leads to a measurement focus. “In diversity, we’ve always had people doing excellent work who have given us great theory, but we didn’t always have the science,” Hubbard said. “Our focus is around adding the science and creating the other half of the discipline and applying measurement to that process.” Context Is Important Making that transition from theory to practice opens up a whole new level of complexity that requires a broader view of diversity and a more sophisticated way to examine its organizational impact. “It’s not about just representation; it’s about utilization because that’s how you get to the measurement piece,” Hubbard said. “The impact isn’t so much in the diversity as much as it is in the context of how you utilize people in the environment.” Hubbard maps out the context for diversity across four layers: • Workforce diversity: Race, gender, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation. • Behavioral diversity: Differences in working styles, thinking styles, values and belief systems. • Structural diversity: Teams, alliances across levels and the different structures to be navigated in an organization. • Business diversity: Customer markets, diverse community representation and supplier diversity. The Diversity Road Show Cleveland Clinic uses a comprehensive diversity tracker to collect metrics and draw a line between business objectives and diversity. Using this scorecard, CDO Deborah Plummer connects diversity initiatives such as increased organizational cultural competency to patient satisfaction scores, and employee resource groups to higher engagement scores. “We report every quarter, like the operating metrics, not just on our strategy but how we are helping to move the needle around the areas that are important to the organization: the employee engagement scores, the customer satisfaction scores, even productivity,” Plummer said. The scorecard also allows her to share results with the organization at-large and spotlight diversity’s impact on the bottom line. “It’s always a road show with diversity,” Plummer said. “Part of it is making sure we have a communication agenda about what we’re doing and how it’s tied to the operating metrics of the organization.”

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Diversity Executive - November 2008

Diversity Executive - November 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Leadership Connections Guest Editorial Diversity Executive Online Middle Management Roadblock ‘Hidden Winds’ Hinder Progress The Domino Effect Supplier Partnerships Unlock Economic Opportunities Measuring Diversity Special Section: Who’s Who in Diversity and Inclusion Dimensions of Difference Overcoming Language Diff erences Business Intelligence: Combating Subtle Discrimination Case Study: Shifting Diversity Into Overdrive Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Strategies

Diversity Executive - November 2008

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