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Understanding the diversity of your current team is an essential first step in crafting your Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy. You can use Charlie to collect information and report on your team's diversity across a number of important characteristics.
This article explains the process of gathering diversity information in Charlie, generating your first report, and how you can update this report over time as your team grows and evolves, as well as how gathering this information in Charlie protects your team's anonymity and personal information.
How to collect diversity information
Before you can report on diversity information you'll need to collect it all together!
Step 1/3 - Announcing your intentions
Asking the team for this kind of information is something best approached carefully and deliberately. For this reason we recommend you begin by announcing your intentions to collect this information, giving everyone plenty of time (we recommend 2 weeks) to understand what you're asking for and why; as well as to ask any questions they have about how this information will be used. We provide a templated message on the diversity homepage to help explain the process.
You can also use this time to learn about the diversity categories your team will be asked to populate. You can read more on these categories here.
Step 2/3 - Switching on diversity information
The next step is pretty straightforward: simply switch on diversity information collection for everyone in the company. This is done from the diversity homepage.
Enabling diversity information collection will automatically trigger an email from Charlie to your team inviting them to begin adding this information to their profiles, along with guidance on how their information will be stored safely and securely.
Once you've completed the setup process, the form will appear on the Personal Details tab of each team member within your account. Everyone will have two weeks
Step 3/3 - Remind your team (if necessary!)
In order to gather the most representative picture of your team's diversity, it's important to achieve as high a response rate as possible. During the two week period, encourage your team to share any questions or concerns they may have about the process, including how the information will be used and shared.
During this time, it's also possible to send an automated reminder email in Charlie, which will only be sent to those who have not yet submitted their information. We'd recommend doing this on the second week - no need to nudge anyone before they've had the time to do it.
Reporting on your Team's Diversity
After the two week period has passed, you will be able to see a report showing the diversity of your team members across the 14 diversity characteristics. You'll be able to find your new reports in the reports tab of the diversity section in Charlie.
To protect your team's anonymity, responses will be displayed if either:
- A category has at least five individual answers in each of the majority & minority groupings
- If your entire team provided the same answer to one category
Otherwise, that category will be shown as unavailable. You may not be able to report in much detail across all demographics because too few people have identified under a certain category - this is to protect those individuals' anonymity.
If you're having trouble interpreting the results of your diversity report then you can talk to your advisor about drawing out insights and designing strategies to improve the diversity, equity and inclusion at your company.
Sharing the report
When you've pulled all of the insights you can from the information - share them with the whole team! They made it possible and so they deserve to know about the fruits of their labour :) Being transparent with the data, as well as the strategies you are implementing as a result also builds a sense of shared ownership and accountability within the business, and makes clear that the information was not gathered only as a form of box ticking, but instead as a catalyst for meaningful change.
Updating your diversity report
Gathering information to generate your first diversity report allows you to understand the make-up of your business and set appropriate hiring goals. Over time, it's important to measure the impact of your efforts, and to understand the changing nature of your team as it grows and evolves.
You can generate an updated diversity report from the diversity homepage. In order to do so, you need to have at least five new sets of answers submitted. This can either be from new team members, or existing employees who did not submit their information previously. These rules are in place to prevent individuals being identified based on the changing results between one report and the next.
Protecting Anonymity
Each person's individual Diversity section will only be visible to themselves. No other user in Charlie, including account super admins will be able to see anyone's individual diversity information.
If you wish to offer specific support or accommodations for anyone in your team that you feel might not be suitably supported at work then we recommend you reach out to the team separately from this data collection process. Your HR advisor can offer you help in fostering a safe environment for individuals to come forward.
Finally, no one at Charlie has access to any individual diversity information - it is anonymised at the point of entry.
Data Security
Every line of code in Charlie has been written with your security in mind. We are both Cyber Essentials certified and ISO 27001:2013 certified. We also frequently review and externally test our software to keep it ahead of emerging threats. You can read more about our approach to data security here.
If your company, or anyone in your team, wishes to have their data deleted, please get in touch via customer support for help doing this.
GDPR
Diversity information in Charlie is managed by our Team Member privacy policy. Since we believe diversity information should stay anonymous, this policy outlines how the team member acts as the data controller in this instance rather than the company they work for. What this mean in reality is that your company cannot ever request access to your diversity information from CharlieHR.
You can read the privacy policy in full here