by Angela Guess
Bonnie Marcus recently wrote in Forbes, “Although the headlines focus our attention on the lack of diversity in business, especially in tech companies, many organizations are diligently working to create more inclusive cultures and they are using Big Data to help them. You only need to look as far the Diversity Inc Top 50 Award winners to see a list of organizations that have been employing Big Data. These companies have reaped the benefits, and they are the pacesetters in terms of triangulating the Big Data opportunity to Diversity and Inclusion programs. To get a better understanding of how Big Data is helping companies improve their diversity efforts, I reached out to Kieran King, Global Vice President of Loyalty Strategy at Skillsoft.”
King told Marcus, “When an organization has been struggling to define a broader agenda for a diversity program, they can tap into Big Data to accelerate that business case. For example, there’s a lot of research that points to the fact that balanced leadership in organizations results in statistically outperforming peers, against a traditional male-dominated leadership structure. If an organization has been making that case for quite a long time and has yet to be able to see budget and resources for Diversity and Inclusion program, they can actually point to some pretty sophisticated practices that Deloitte recently published. They found that those companies with more mature diversity programs were outperforming their peers at a rate that was two times higher in terms of cash flow per employee than those who didn’t have a diversity program, or certainly not a mature one.”
photo credit: Flickr/ Steve Snodgrass