How do you know how diverse your company’s workforce is, how equitable its processes are, and how included people feel if nobody is using any metrics? DEI strategist Lily Zheng explains the power of data to track a company’s progress, fix unfairness, and hold people to their promises. They have advice for measuring and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion even when you don’t have a budget or you’re starting from scratch.
Over 40,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one platform.
Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com womenatwork.
You'Re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review.
I'm Amy Bernstein.
I have a couple of questions for you.
How are your company's DEI efforts going?
How do you know what data does your company collect and track that shapes those efforts?
To strategist Lily Zhang, data driven efforts are everything.
The way people make lasting progress on diversity, equity and inclusion is to measure outcomes.
And I couldn't agree more.
During this year's Women at Work Live event, Lily explained the opportunities that data, when used ethically, of course, can create for dei.
Lily will give us examples from their consulting with different companies, like the one that found out where exactly its recruiting efforts, which started out fair, took a turn and how the company fixed the problem.
Lily also has advice for making a difference, even when the company is tiny, even when you're starting from scratch, even when there's no budget.
Lily is someone who always makes me and Amyg think and laugh, and we're delighted to share this conversation with you.
Hey, Lily.
Hi, Lily.
Hey, folks.
Great to see y'all.
So we're going to get to data in a sec, but first I want to hear about the decisions you you've observed business leaders making in response to the backlash against dei.
Can you take us through one of them?