M3.0 — Diversity Index

How diverse are the capacities and experiences of your workgroup?

They asked me to do an exercise for a team that is being formed in a small company that creates content for other organizations. I wanted to experiment by doing something different and I told them that we would do a practice called Diversity Index. These practices would help them to identify the differences, the similarities, and how these can help them to generate better content by allowing people who have a taste related to the needs of the clients to develop the work with great enthusiasm and knowledge.

I explained that currently many organizations are increasing diversity to give them certain competitive advantages since having people who think differently because they belong to a certain culture, have experiences in other types of industry and education, these give them a broader vision than those who they are always hiring people with similar profiles with the same experiences; They add value from different points of view and even more if the purpose of the company is to generate content for different types of customer.

The results of the Employer Branding Now (EB Now) study conducted in February 2019 included a sample of more than 2,000 global employers: 85% of them stated that hiring for diversity is considered a high priority and the focus on communicating the issue has increased by 14% in the last 3 years (percentage of companies that include D&I as part of their value proposition for employers)

How do we play?

1. We use the template that we download from Management3.0 on a board of Miro.
2. I asked them to select 8 areas in which we would assess diversity; I told them to take areas that they believe are important for the activities they carry out and others that will help them to know a little more about them. They selected: profession, age, movies genre, hobbies, form of transportation, politics, Contribution in Di (Company), and years of experience.
3. For each area, they answered individually and 1 point was added for each different response.
4. An X was placed in the value corresponding to the diversity point they obtained.
5. Once we finished placing the value in the areas, we added the total.

Here is the template that we fill out:

Facilitating this practice taught me to value that knowledge and experience in other areas can support the creativity in this type of company and that although they work contributing their experiences in other areas, they are all supporting the success of the company.

In the end, the team understood that having different experiences allows them to perform much more than just in their areas of specialty, in addition to contributing creativity by having different hobbies, thoughts, and tastes. They knew a little more about each of them, some found points of affinity and even agreed to share a list of their 5 favorite movies.

I would like to be able to experiment this tool with a new team with which I will work soon, taking advantage of it as an ice breaking game, get to know each other a little more, and challenge ourselves as to whether the configuration of the team can give us the benefits of a team with a diversity index high. I’ll apply the tool in the same way without making any changes.

Tips:

• It can be used to integrate new members of a team.
• It can be used in an established team to assess whether the team configuration is adequate, in case the diversity points are low and they can experiment by exchanging people, re-evaluate the index, and check if this had an impact on the performance and happiness of the team.

I invite you to use this tool with new teams or mature teams, to experiment and corroborate if it is necessary to improve the index by adding or exchanging a member of a team for another in explorer mode and verifying the impact that this brings to the teams.