Guided Diversity Planning Model

Record your organization's diversity goals in the planning grid and create a SMART plan to achieve them.

Overview

Diversity and inclusion is a business imperative and crucial to the success of any organization. A diverse workforce comprised of individuals with a wide range of characteristics such as age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, education, and more can enhance creativity, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and increase revenue. However, improving diversity and inclusion is not easy and requires a lot of coordination and shared accountability amongst the leaders of an organization. With Visier's Guided Diversity Planning, you can set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) to increase the presence of underrepresented groups within your organization. You can model the actions and policy changes you might take to reduce resignations, increase promotions, or increase hires of those underrepresented groups and see the impact they have on the projected representation ratio. When creating your diversity plan, you can delegate parts of it to other leaders in your organization and obtain feedback from stakeholders to achieve alignment. Once you've finalized your plan, you can track, monitor, and adjust your diversity plan all in one place. Furthermore, you'll have access to many HR metrics that will help you identify what biases exist in your business processes, policies, and activities that may be preventing you from achieving your diversity goals.

Build diversity plans for different groups

With the Guided Diversity Planning model, you don't have to create a comprehensive, monolithic plan for your entire organization. Instead, you can concentrate on a distinct population that may be underrepresented in a larger population. This is all done during plan creation where you'll be asked to define a focus group, which is a distinct population within your overall population that you've identified as a group of interest. Let’s say you’re interested in the diversity of leadership positions at your organization. Set the overall population to employees in leadership positions. Then, create different plans to analyze the presence of different focus groups within leadership, such as women. You can define your focus group using attributes such as gender, tenure, or ethnicity. The ability to define different focus groups allows you to hone your plan and tailor your actions to these specific populations.

The plan items

The Guided Diversity Planning model draws on historical data and plan values to project the representation of a focus group within a population. Use the following plan items to create your diversity plan.

Goal

Use the following plan item to set your diversity goals for a given segment and period:

• Goal {Focus Group} Representation Ratio: The targeted focus group headcount as a percentage of the overall population for the plan period.

Assumptions

Adjust the following plan items to model the Projected {Focus Group} Representation Ratio, which is the future representation of a focus group within a population for a given segment and period.

• Added Positions: The number of new positions added to the overall population for the plan period. Adding positions in the future gives you more opportunity to hire diverse candidates.
• {Focus Group} Predicted Annual Resignation Rate: The predicted rate of employee resignations in the next 12 months for the focus group population for the plan period. The initial value is based on Visier’s predictive model but can be adjusted to account for actions taken to increase retention such as additional pay equity reviews to ensure underrepresented groups don’t leave for pay reasons.
• Non-{Focus Group} Predicted Annual Resignation Rate: The predicted rate of employee resignations in the next 12 months for the non-focus group population for the plan period. The initial value is based on Visier’s predictive model but can be adjusted.
• {Focus Group} Incoming Employee Ratio: The number of external starts and internal moves for the focus group population as a percentage of all incoming employees for the plan period. The initial value is based on the representation ratio of all incoming employees (includes transfers, promotions as well as new hires) to the overall population over the last 12 months and can be adjusted to reflect the goals set for the hiring committee in their efforts to increase diversity.

Projections

Changes to your plan assumptions will affect the following plan items. Look at the projections to understand the actions you need to take in order to reach your diversity goal.

• Headcount: The projected number of employees in the overall population for the plan period.
• {Focus Group} Headcount: The projected number of employees in the focus group for the plan period.
• {Focus Group} Predicted Monthly Resignation Count: The predicted number of employee resignations per month for the focus group population for the plan period.
• Non-{Focus Group} Predicted Monthly Resignation Count: The predicted number of employee resignations per month for the non-focus group population for the plan period.
• Outgoing Employee Count without Resignations: The projected number of exits including moves out of the population for the plan period. This calculation does not include resignations.
• Expected Incoming Employee Count: The projected number of external starts and internal moves for the overall population for the plan period. This represents the total number of employees the hiring committee would need to bring in.
• Projected {Focus Group} Representation Ratio: The projected focus group headcount as a percentage of the overall population for the plan period.
• Difference from Goal Percent: The percentage difference between the projected and goal focus group representation ratios.
• Difference from Goal Count: The difference between the projected and goal focus group representation ratios in terms of headcount.

Suggested workflow for creating a diversity plan

Use the following steps as guidance when creating your diversity plan. To illustrate this process, let's say you've created a Guided Diversity Plan to increase the presence of women (focus group) in leadership positions (overall population).

1. Set diversity goals for your focus group population by entering values for the Goal {Focus Group} Representation Ratio plan item. For example, let's say you want to increase the women in leadership positions to 50% by 2022.
2. Look at the Projected {Focus Group} Representation Ratio to see how far you are from achieving the goals you've set. For example, looking at the projections for December 2021, based on historical data the representation of women in leadership positions will be 28.4%.
3. Determine some of the actions you can take to achieve the goal. Adjust one of the plan assumptions to model these actions. Let's say you're going to put an emphasis on having stay conversations with women in leadership positions to reduce the resignation rate. In this case, you might decrease the {Focus Group} Predicted Annual Resignation Rate in a future period to 2%.
4. Check the Projected {Focus Group} Representation Ratio to see how far you are from the goal.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the projections meet or exceed your goals. If you're making unrealistic assumptions in order to reach your goal, consider pushing out the target date or changing the goal.