Metrics for Meaningful Change: a data driven approach to bolster inclusion, engagement, & retention of Women
How TodayTix’s first-ever Employee Resource Group is taking a data driven approach to set the stage for bolstering inclusion, engagement, and retention of Women.
The Beginning
My first meeting of the new year was to define goals for our Women+ Employee Resource Group (ERG). Working in tandem with TodayTix’s Digital Marketing Manager, Kimberly Ta, we wanted to ensure that this group was metrics driven in four key categories: Cultural, Hiring, External, and Business. These areas were derived from an internal focus group’s want of a holistic approach about how Women+ can impact all areas of the organization.
As 2019 Q1 comes to close, I am pleased with progress of the Women+ ERG (which is also our first and only ERG at the moment). Since the kickoff meeting the group accomplished:
- Building a survey with the theme of “How do we build upon current foundations to develop a better workplace for (those who identify as) women at TodayTix?” and with the intent of “making a conscious effort to acknowledge gender diversity within our company” that identified the top 3 goals of the ERG for 2019
- A 65% employee participation rate and responses from all office locations on survey about goals and metrics
- Defined specific metrics for each category and made significant progress on those goals
- Hosted an office viewing and discussion of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s ‘He Said, She Said’ episode about sexual assault
- Created a more inclusive women’s group name based on survey consensus
Metrics
The ERG leads wanted goals and metrics that are both a stretch and accomplishable, knowing that we would be adding to these goals before EOY. Some of these are set to create our own bar and inform future metrics because we didn’t have data previously in those areas.
On a high level these are our goals:
VP & Tech Hiring
- 5 women join the tech team by end of 2019
- Gender-parity for internal promotions in 2019
- 20% of tech team applicants are female by end of June 2019
Family-Leave
- 40% of the company is aware of all leave-policies by end of March 2019
- 80% of the company is aware of all leave-policies by the end of June 2019
Gender Bias Education
- 20% company-wide improvement from pre-test to post-test after training activities by the end of June 2019
Next Steps
The work Kimberly and all the ERG leads have completed has been at an incredibly high quality and caliber. I’ve asked them to publish our decks, session notes, and work products publicly. As a personal and professional aim toward transparency in the People Ops realm, this is a key goal of mine.
The TodayTix ERG update page is coming soon to our website — but if you want to hear more follow me or our company page for more on how our metrics are progressing, other activities we’re hosting, and about any other ERGs that get created!
As an advocate for technical women, I meet many people who run the women-in-tech (WIT) group at their company. I’m always curious about what metrics they use to measure the impact of their programs, so I ask. In return I often get slightly embarrassed looks.
Typically, the answer is, ‘Well, we don’t exactly know.’ Then comes a hastily constructed justification along the lines of, ‘We have annual goals for how many events we host’ or ‘We run a survey for our members and meet as many of thier needs that fit in our budget.’ Clearly they’re thinking about the activities to offer, but not about the greater impact and how to measure it.
