E380 Recruiting Community: Diversity Metrics with Diana File

🎧 Show Notes

Transcripts and/or show notes

Chris Hoyt, CXR 
Raise children. They’re up in the house. You got theory on vacation with small children. And I think I think this is the data people are really wanting to hear.

Diana File, DF Analytics 0:12
Hello? Yes, so my theory is vacation is a myth that single or childless people make up to torture people with children so that they can fantasize about traveling and relaxing. And then they actually do it and they feel worse than when they left in the first place.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:33
So, vacation is for grammers and scammers.

Diana File, DF Analytics 0:39
My new verbiage for this is it is a trick. It is a family trip. We are traveling we are doing the same thing we do at home. Well, more of the same thing we do at home because we work less and run after wild mongoose more on geese. So you know,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:55
Mongooses I think I think, mongeeses, doesn’t make any sense. Yeah.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 1:03
Children is real work. Yeah, but if you can convince your, you know, parents to say, oh, I want them for a week ahead handoff zone, find vacation. That’s the only way so it’s like Tom Sawyer painting the fence and convincing others that they would rather do that. I don’t know how you do it. But you work on that.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:28
So Gerry, do people do people by people I mean, your family drop off grandchildren with you for weeks at a time?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 1:28
Not me? No, no, no. Coming I’ve read Tom Sawyer. It is what it is.

Diana File, DF Analytics 1:44
It is very rare when we had one we hadn’t we now have two when we had one. We could leave him with my parents and he was okay. They’re not able to handle to them for a few hours, let alone for a week.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 1:55
In January, I am taking tw of my grandchildren. They’ll be 13 and 15 at the time for a week. But that’s that’ll be the first time. Yeah, so yeah, and that’s much easier. And as a matter of fact, my daughter is scared to death of leaving two impressionable teenagers with me.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:21
I was just gonna say at that age with you. It’s not about what to get into, what they’ll be inspired to do.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 2:29
Yeah, and I’ve got a you know, room full of wine. So what the hell?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:34
Oh, my gosh, with that. Is everybody ready to get started? Yeah. All right. Let’s do it.

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Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:10
All right, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of recruiting community podcast. I am your host Michelob. And I’m gonna bring in my co host and spirit animal Mondello. Hello, everybody. Everybody. Gerry, it’s good to see you.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 3:23
Good to see you.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:24
Haven’t seen you since? Well, gosh, we could go we were

Gerry Crispin, CXR 3:29
Nike was you know, it. First of all, the weather was great. We’re watching the weather, you know, being over 100. Everywhere else it was it was lovely. From that point of view, but Nikes Nikes headquarters a hands down is one of the most unusual and interesting places anyone could want to go.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:51
Yeah, I would. I would put the Nike HQ in Beaverton against any other we’ve probably seen well over 1000 of them. I have now to be fair, I’ve not been to some of their biggest competitors campuses. But I will say I think Nike was doing cool campuses and amazing campuses long before and on a much bigger scale than the Facebook’s and the Amazons, I think we even had somebody who was like, Have you been to our campus at Amazon? If you see them, like, I don’t think you understand when we say world class at Nike and their headquarters, we mean world class, the fact

Gerry Crispin, CXR 4:23
That they have hundreds of volunteer guides who have to get certified by each other on the stories that they can tell. I think it kind of tells part of that story.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:36
So for those who for those who don’t know and as a reminder, this is a live this a live stream live chat. So if you’re watching this on one of the socials or networks that has a live chat or a little chat window, go ahead and ask questions in there, share LinkedIn profiles in there, share whatever you’re sure you’re talking to one another. But you’ve got questions for the guest today and we’ll get right to her. She’s patiently waiting. We’ll jump into that and we’ll make sure we get those all adressed. So with that, coming back to Nike, so we had for those who don’t know, we had about 30 companies come out where for two and a half, almost three full days, we not only did a fun nonprofit charity work, but we did. Countless case studies, competitive practice shared, the networks are stronger. And then of course, the epic hosts and Kismet and the Global Head of early career in college and campus and recruiting out there for Nike, just a fantastic host. It’s always one of my favorite places to go.

Always.

Did you did you have a big takeaway?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 5:29
Who me?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:30
Yeah, topic not on the campus, but an OMG moment for you.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 5:38
I have a dozen of them. I, there were, but the range of experience was quite broad. And I’m always interested in whether or not we learned from each other. I mean, I believe in it, and, you know, someone who is just coming into our space. And what they observe to me is great learning or reminding, if you will. And so we had a few of those there, there were a couple fairly new to to recruiting, or to early career recruiting, who were doing some amazing work. Yeah. And there were, you know, there were solid companies that for many years are still elevating the game. So I’m just I’m just very impressed where things are.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:28
Yeah, I like the earlier in career perspective. So it was pretty helpful. So I’ll say that if we send out an executive summary, so if you’re a member, and you’re watching and listening, we’ve got an executive summary, that will come out in just a couple of weeks where we’d kind of throw all of that together, we’ve already shared, I think 30 some odd case studies and documents. They’re in the they’re in the online library that everybody contributed, each company, as you know, comes to meeting is responsible for sharing the case study and output a question to the group. But upcoming, I think September 11, through the 13th. We will be out at Edward Jones HQ in St. Louis, where we’re going to be talking about candidate experience Gerry, a topic near and dear, obviously, to your heart. But we’ve got one seat left for a guest member. So non member if they would like to attend if you’re interested in interviewing and seeing if you qualify to sit in the room with some of these really, really impressive people just send an email to info at CXR dot works. Anything you’d add for candidate experience, Gerry?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 7:27
No. No, you know, it’s every stakeholder is critical, but only one of them doesn’t really have a champion. And that’s that’s the candidate. We need. We need internal champions for that stakeholder.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:43
Yeah, yeah, good stuff. And then I think, August, August 17th, we’ve got a virtual session on military recruiting, veteran recruiting, you’re not gonna miss that you can also check it out. I’ll throw this up here. I think we have these fancy little tools that were there we go. Anybody anybody’s interested in check that out seeing cxr.works/events, August 17. We do military recruiting virtual that also our monthly lecture is coming up on August 24. We’ve been doing this we’re in the end, we’re wrapping up our second year of bringing in 10 speakers, you know, that sort of thing, that level accountable speaker to talk about topics that the leaders of the membership have picked. And I think we’re talking on the 24th of being an inclusive leader. We’ve got Bernice Feller, Tim, who is culture and inclusion strategist, and a team performance coach. This is a big one we did negotiations last time we had tons of people registered Gerry, we broke a record for all events for the number of minutes registered, you want to guess how many people have registered to come to the to the lecture here in August.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 8:41
If it’s anywhere near the other 180 to 100. Keep going, it’s going to be amazing if it’s more than that.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:49
It’s 373. 373 members have registered to attend that. So if you’re interested, you want to check that out. CXR works slash lectures, you can see that you can check out the guests, I think we show you previous and of course, upcoming members and if you’re excuse me lectures, and if you’re a member, you can just dial in and watch those. We keep them recorded in the library. Some of those are open to the public. We’ve got one by Antonia Forester, and then we’ve got one with Glen Cathey that we did. That’s a lot of fun. We’ve opened those up to the public see and get into those if you have trouble, let us know. Did I miss anything here? No. So I guess we should bring our guest in. Okay. All right. So I want to take a second. We’ll welcome her in here. There we go. It’s Diana, not Diane. It’s Diana File. Who’s coming with us DF analytics and Consulting. Diana, why don’t you give us kind of a sort of an elevator pitch on who you are. And kind of why we should be listening to what you have to say.

Diana File, DF Analytics 9:52
Thanks everyone. And my dog also wants to give her elevator pitch.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:56
You just don’t realize the dog is saving your life probably.

Diana File, DF Analytics 9:58
Yeah, so I’m Diana file. So great to be here. I’m a research psychologist by background. And I’ve spent my career creating a bunch of proprietary metrics and approaches to de-bias, data science for dei purposes. currently doing that through my consulting company, DF analytics, and we are a tech driven neuroscience based data analytics strategy and training firm. And we have a suite of services around EDI, as I mentioned, we also do a lot of work around change management, m&a, and HR solutions more broadly, again, from that data driven strategic perspective.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:36
Good stuff. All right. So I got about 15 minutes sort of set aside to talk about some of the work that you’re doing. And to kind of ask you, I think, early on any big, happy to have you share some stuff out, but any big? Any big call outs? Any big takeaways

Diana File, DF Analytics 10:52
from my work in general? Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think Data Science and Analytics specifically are one of the most misunderstood and poorly used areas of Dei, specifically, and HR in general, I think people come to the HR practice, not because they love numbers, necessarily. They love people. They love words and stories and helping people. Maybe they love operations. But data doesn’t always come naturally to folks. And I think when we look at classically, the way HR has been run, or dei has been run in both of those areas, we really see a lot of reliance on anecdotal or gut driven instinct to make decisions. So my mission in life has been to bring data to those fuzzy unmeasurable things. I believe everything is measurable. And if it’s not, you shouldn’t be doing it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:46
Yeah, well, it’s a good it’s definitely a good call out the science aspect of the art. I mean, Gerry, you were just out sort of what would you say adjacent related, but you were just out of the SIOP conference not too long ago, and we were talking about bringing more quantitative tactics, right, more data driven tactics into recruiting we’ve been talking about for a long time number would Moneyball and we were using that all the time in recruiting, but I think it’s it’s taken a number of years, I think, for us to finally just sort of what would you say accept that or really begin to adopt that more broadly?

Oh, I think you’re muted. Gerry. Did we lose him? Okay, his hat his hat. He pointed to his hat, maybe his hats.

So, Diana, well, Gerry, sorting that out? Is it? Would you? Would you say the same thing across the board?

Diana File, DF Analytics 12:46
I’m sorry. What’s the question again?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 12:49
I managed on mute myself. It was nevermind. It’s another question. I agree with you, Diana 100%. If you can’t measure it, you can’t do anything with it. You have it’s it’s not anecdotal, it’s nothing, it’s your we really need to be in a position where we can say we have a at least a hypothesis of what what this number looks like what this index should be or where we should be in relation to it on some kind of dimension, so that when we take action, we can see a change or not. And fundamentally, we can then ask ourselves, is there another measure that we’re not looking for? Or? Or is our action just useless? So I’m just a fan of the fact that we need to be able to do this in in talent, acquisition and human resources.

Diana File, DF Analytics 13:49
I would agree and just piggyback piggybacking on that the flip side of it is people get really interested in measuring things for measurement sake. And I think the other piece of it is, how does, how does the measurement impact the business and drive business value. So finding the right measurements rather than overwhelming people with data that, frankly, is more about the internal efficiency of let’s say, the HR department among itself, versus how it drives business value. A classic example of this would be training. So people often report on how many hours of training employees have had, to me, that seems like rather a useless metric in a vacuum. Because I don’t know what they’ve learned during those hours. I don’t know how fast they learn. I don’t know how engaged they are, and what skill sets they have developed. So to me, if you’re doing a training analysis, I want to know how that training has impacted whatever the goal of the training was. So if the goal was to increase leadership skill sets, then what was leadership skill set number or metric, before the training, what was it after? And how far did you move the needle? Did it vary among different groups? Was the training easier for some groups to follow? Was there you know, an effect of if you also had a mentor alongside your training journey then years ago So let’s develop more quickly because you have one on one interaction. There’s a lot of different ways we can think about it once we’re focused on Okay, the point of this thing is, we need better leaders so that we can make more money and be a better company. Right?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:14
So we’re talking about when we talk about I guess D E and I metrics and analytics, I guess, Diana, my question is, have you seen organizations advance past? What we typically expect for DEI data? Diversity data to be reported on five years ago, like over the last five years, has it gone past people saying they’re a veteran or self identifying, you know, whether their, their ethnicity or their, you know, their their gender? I mean, is it more than that now? Are we are we evolving in that front of all, are we just gaining steam?

Diana File, DF Analytics 15:46
I like to believe we are I mean, I think I’ve seen the business. So much. So I’ve been consulting my entire career, which is about 1520 years now. And the DEI side of the analytics work I do, has exploded since 2020. That being said, yet people got really excited about doing all different kinds of data around DEI and I can list the different ways we’ve gotten past it since 2020. But this year has been a challenge. And we’ve seen a lot of companies regress and go back to not taking DEI seriously in the wake of, you know, naysayers getting gaining voice politically. You know, the recent SCOTUS ruling being a classic example of that, what you’re talking about is really how classically, you know, civil rights or EEO data is reported. With diversity numbers, there’s a lot of problems in the way that data is, was traditionally handled, not least of which, I think there is a tacit encouragement to get 100% of our data in there. And so HR directors are often guessing people’s identities and filling it in for them instead of having the employees fill it in, because they can’t get employees to disclose their own data. So that’s just one small example. When you look at DEI, more broadly, we have a five part framework that we like to think of when we think of DEI data. Diversity is the first one the diversity of our workforce currently, but also your applicant pool, and all the stages of that applicant pool. And where do you see leaks in that pipeline? So we’re talking, when people first learn about your company, when they meet, when they submit an application, when they meet the HR screener, when they go through an interview process, when they get an offer, when they accept an offer, all of those are stages where you’re going to leak out people. And so if you’re seeing a shift in the proportions of different races, ethnicities, gender, veteran status, LGBTQ or any number of other dimensions, you’re going to want to understand what’s happening in that stage where we have an opportunity to improve it, so that we see more consistency. The second part after the D, or the diversity focus, for me is engagement and culture. Inclusivity, how do people once they’re in your workforce actually interact and engage with each other so that employees are included? People feel like they belong, you get that data from surveys, focus groups, interviews, you know, engagement survey data, exit survey, data, stay interview data, pulse survey, data, onboarding, survey data, anytime you interact with employees, you can also see a number of different metrics around how they work and collaborate with each other, which we can talk about, without actually having to run surveys. The third part I talk about is accountability and leadership. So that’s where we look at corporate governance, we look at how the board is structured, how the leaders are structured in terms of the diversity of the corporate leadership, their commitments they’ve made any past dei work that the organization has done, what are the KPIs? Are leaders held accountable? Is it part of their goals, their incentives, pay equity fits in there as well. And a variety of other things. We look at brand perception or external visibility external. So that could be like marketplace visibility, and that it’s you know, your customer feedback. Are your customers from different segments giving the same feedback? Are you getting specific feedback from certain customer segments? What’s the market penetration in different customer segments? And how can we increase market penetration by increasing both the diversity and the engagement and the inclusion of different folks in our, in our organization? And then moving into the last part, we look at external partnerships. So that would be your supplier diversity, your corporate responsibility efforts, all of these things can have metrics attached to them, internships, ways that you are investing in the future of talent so that you’re not just looking at who’s applying right now. But how are you nurturing relationships with different communities so that you’re building talent? I mean, as some organizations call it, kindergarten to careers. So yeah, the more progressive organizations are really taking a broad look, I would say my clients mostly are trying to expand that way. And you’ve got some major industries and organizations that still very much focused on the D, I think in the wake of what’s been happening, especially with the affirmative action repeal, people are going to have to either abandoned DEI and, you know, fold their business and become dinosaurs, or if they’re going to engage in DEI, they’re going to have to look more expansively beyond just the diversity numbers, because there’s going to be more impediments legally in place for them to focus on those targets as well.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 20:28
I probably feel like I’ll be devil’s advocate, right. So we’ve been doing this while I feel like this, this interest this this cyclical wave of interest in in diversity. It’s not the first time we’ve seen it, I’ve been in the space about 30 years. And the first time we see it, we see this big push, there’s some sort of social event or social injustice, that happens I use the murder of George Floyd is really great example, unfortunately, but there’s this swelling interest, all of a sudden about, you know, we’re supposed to make this right, we should be better. We should know by now we’re good. Now we’re going to invest in doing the research, we’re going to hire more diversity. At the C-level, we’re going to hire somebody who’s in charge of all diversity. But then what inevitably seems to happen is this wanes. And then we see some of those diversity leaders who have been hired, put into more like project manager roles, or begin to slowly fade into the background, or the passion of collecting the data and doing something actionable with the data, you know, and these insights seems to wane. And I heard you when you were saying like it does, it does kind of put her off a bit. And maybe it’s political climate. But but this seems like to me, this is not the first time this has happened. Yeah, I just love your take on you know, is this just going to be a constant roller coaster for us if you know, pushing organizations? Because I think we said last time at the time for the time for they’re gonna have to close their doors, and they were gonna have to go on.

Diana File, DF Analytics 21:48
Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. Yes, it’s cyclical, and the trends demographically in our country are increasingly pointing to there will be a point at which we are going to be a majority minority culture, right. Like already, I think the demographic of teenagers 16 years old, that range is majority people of color, if I’m not mistaken, and so it might take longer than a few decades, maybe it’ll take our generation, right? My generation to be, you know, the next generation to see, you know, the full swing and shift. But increasingly, organizations are going to see that their workforce, they won’t be able to reach the workforce, they want, fight for the talent, they need and innovate the way they need to serve the future because of where the market, you know, of where the economics and the demographics are heading. And I hope that organizations that are forward thinking will come we’ll look at the solid evidence, because as you say, yes, it’s cyclical. And we also have 30, or 40, or however many decades, years of evidence showing that connections between profitability, financial impact, ROI of investment in people, and DEI investment is strong. So you can either look at the data or you can ignore it. And I guess you’ll always have companies that do, you know, foolish, short-term kind of thinking in terms of how they make decisions, you always have those companies.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 23:10
So it sounds to me like you’re saying that with the demographic shift that’s coming. And by the way, if you’re currently a majority and worried about being a minority, maybe that’s because of how you treat minorities. But that’s a whole nother whole nother podcast. But it sounds to me like with the demographic shift coming up, what you’re saying is, even though that’s cyclical, we’re taking two steps forward with only one step back, because yeah,

Diana File, DF Analytics 23:32
yeah, look, I don’t have a crystal ball. Right. I, but I do watch the trends. And, you know, I am seeing people take it seriously that are, you know, kind of forward thinking, and I hope more companies do.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 23:45
Well. So let me ask you another question, which is kind of, so Gerry and I do a series of benchmarks. And we have, I think we have three open benchmark surveys. Now, our members will call us up and say, hey, we’d like to know what other words are doing for this or that and we push that survey out, and it comes back. And one of the things we tell them as well, this information is really helpful. When we collect it from a larger audience, the best place you should be measuring is against yourself. Gerry, Gerry has a stance on what is the average whatever. And Gerry, if you want to jump jump in with that, but when somebody asked for an average number, but I guess my my question to you is, do you sort of see the same thing? Or do people come to you and say, I need to compare myself against the whole industry or the whole world looked inward yet? Or is how does that work in your space?

Diana File, DF Analytics 24:29
I mean, I think it’s a push pull. Right? I think some organizations are really excited about doing the work internally for reasons that don’t require competition. And most of those organizations also, I’ve noticed will be like, Oh, we’re so unique. We’re different. There’s we don’t really have a lot of competitors. And so for them, you’ll see that they are looking more at themselves, and maybe they’ve done some of that internal work initially. Now they want to expand and they are like okay, so what are our what’s our competition doing? To get ideas, right? What’s the like latest and greatest? I will also say that benchmarks are really tricky. Because if no one in your industry has gotten this right, then how do you know measuring yourself against them is the right benchmark? So a classic example of this going back to diversity data, is people will look at the kind of available talent in a specific region, given the assumptions of how your recruiting strategy currently works, and kind of keeping all things equal. So I had a client in Long Island that had a nonprofit, it was small. And we did some numbers on how they were 80%, white and 90%, female and all this stuff. And they were like, What do you want, Long Island is a white place. And it’s hard to find that talent here. We recruit locally, we require people to come into the office, this is the pool of talent. And that’s what we’ve got. And it’s like, how do we then work together to think about evolving the strategy so that maybe you are going to invest in stipends for people to come from and relocate from a different region? Maybe you will invest in, you know, building stronger relationships with the communities around you. And just thinking more broadly, I think, let’s say another example. So I’ve worked with some law firms where same question, right? It’s really hard to find people of color who are lawyers, especially women of color, the legal profession is just heavily white, what do you want from us, right? And when they benchmark against each other, it’s like, oh, we’re 80% White, and the benchmark is 85. So I guess we’re okay. Versus how do we look systemically at the education system, and the things that companies can do to influence the ways that people get weeded out, and the systemic barriers that prevent them from getting the law degree in the first place, so that we can expand the pipeline and the talent pool much more broadly than we could if we were just looking at people who are already at the professional experience level with their credentials you’re expecting so kind of expanding to look at the labor market more broadly than then people have been looking at it today

Gerry Crispin, CXR 27:08
I love the way you’re looking at thinking it through from an from an innovation point of view, is really the key. And it’s why I think a lot of people get screwed up with benchmarking is because the purpose of benchmarking is not to find the best practice. It’s to be inspired about competitive practices. If once you’ve deconstructed why someone wants to benchmark you focus in on those key things that people are doing, or not doing. Not so much to copy them, but to be inspired about the kind of thinking whether you’re going over the wall through the wall under the wall or around the wall in some way, shape, or form. And and that, I think, is why there’s such value in peers having conversations about what they do in an open and honest way. And that’s why I’m such a fan of that approach to learning.

Diana File, DF Analytics 28:08
I agree. And one thing I forgot to say is also some companies will do the benchmarks before they do the internal work, as you pointed out, Chris, and often what happens is we’ve tried to do some internal work, we’ve run into roadblocks, the way we get buy in with leadership is by kind of lighting a fire under them to show hey, look, 10 out of our 11 competitors, you know, are all doing this more than us are succeeding at it. Here are the numbers. Here’s how their financial impact has grown. We’re losing ground, right. So that kind of blows away the resistance of making money. It’s okay, right? We don’t need to do this.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 28:44
When I worked for Johnson and Johnson many, many years ago, the rule in that corporation for almost 80 years at the time, was that when when 80% of our admired competitors, were doing it, we would then consider doing it. And once we decided we would do it, we would do it better than anyone else. Did it work? It worked fine for you know, 10 years that I was there until I said, you know, I’d really like to do something first. And that’s when I left J&J.

Diana File, DF Analytics 29:22
Yeah, how about we don’t wait to jump on the bandwagon. Why don’t we create things.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 29:26
I through through a question up here? Didn’t didn’t know it was gonna cover half of Gerry there. If you’re watching, I apologize. One’s got a big question here. So I’ll take a second but he says he finds it interesting individuals are choosing to identify themselves. He says he’s noticed a number of individuals that are from a mixed background, but who are identifying as white.

Diana File, DF Analytics 29:46
Is that a question or?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 29:47
It looks like looks like he’s making the statement. But I wonder I mean, it brings me to the you know, sort of full circle back to when you had said earlier what I heard you say was survey survey survey survey survey. Yeah. And it’s, I don’t know a better way to collect some of that information? But I’m just wondering, do we see a lot of that? I wouldn’t call it gamification, but just kind of really, you know, fudging the corners to? You know?

Diana File, DF Analytics 30:11
That’s a really interesting question. Um, you know, we don’t know anything about other how other people choose to identify themselves unless they tell us unless we ask them, which is why I don’t encourage people to guess. That being said, you know, you could speculate there could be a number of different phenomena going on, maybe it doesn’t feel safe to identify about who I feel I am. And if I’m white passing, I’d rather kind of go along with whatever privilege I get by saying that maybe the categories in the survey or the system you’re using to identify people are not fleshed out enough and are not reflected. The government categories basically are 10 years behind whatever people actually identify as perfect example, Middle Eastern, North African, not a category, but a lot of organizations. It’s not a government category, but a lot of organizations are adopting it. Because those folks don’t know where else to put themselves and often they’re not white. So, you know, could be lots of different things going on there. I also think there’s a tendency, especially with the younger generation to avoid labels, like, I don’t want to label myself, I don’t want to put myself in a box. And it’s okay to say, I don’t know, right, or I don’t choose to or choose not to identify.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 31:24
Yeah, here’s got your Mahira. I hope I say that correctly. I was always asked to mark White because there was not a Hispanic/Latino option.

Diana File, DF Analytics 31:35
That’s surprising because the government has one in the census. But maybe that I don’t know when that was developed or added. Yeah. And also, that’s often listed as I think race and ethnicity separate and one of them has Hispanic Latino, or non Hispanic, Latino, and the other one has all the other categories, which I find really confusing.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 31:53
Your comment about it being a safe space, or resonates, we had a and with the military recruiting, veteran recruiting event coming up, oftentimes organizations struggle to gather that demographic of data, because a lot of times veterans aren’t aren’t. And unfortunately, what they don’t realize, I think, and what what we’re talking with the leaders is, they’re not doing a good job of explaining why the data is being collected that it is to get more funding to help more veterans to move these programs forward. Not like you said, from a safe space perspective, not to put them in a bucket or, or service, or segregate them so much. And I wonder if we have an opportunity to do that from a self reporting standpoint with ethnicity, and gender?

Diana File, DF Analytics 32:32
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, one of the services we provide is helping organizations run communication campaigns around data gathering in general and creating communication strategies, we have a number of folks who have very similar experience on our team who do that. And one thing we find is self identification. Campaigns, the people are not good at communicating in order to get that engagement. Because A, you need to communicate how the data will be used, be you need to communicate how the data will be protected. And C, what often happens is organizations fail to acknowledge that, hey, we’ve messed this up in the past, people have messed this up in the past this, this data has been has a history of being misused, because like, you know, let’s not talk about that, right. But getting vulnerable and actually being authentic and saying, Look, we recognize that this data, you know, is is very personal to you, here’s how we’re going to protect it and treat it. Here’s the thing, here are the there’s the list of people who have access to it. And listen, people who will know everyone else won’t. And here’s the encryption like, you know, as much information and transparency as you’re willing to, to offer to people and then say, Look, if we’ve screwed this up in the past, like we are committed to not screwing it up again,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 33:44
I think the communication aspect is a big call.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 33:47
And here’s how it will be deleted.

Diana File, DF Analytics 33:51
Yep, here’s the Yes. And you should have a policy around you know, data security data privacy, people don’t often have those. In especially like we write policies specific to dei data, because they should be it should be treated differently and dealt with differently in an in a large organization. Okay, what are the parameters once I get my, you know, if I’m a manager, and I get a list of headcount. And here’s the breakdown by five different demographic groups whom I allowed to share it with. Right, and people will share it freely if they don’t know if they don’t know the policy, because there might not be a policy.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 34:22
They hold it. They hold it so tight, that people who need it in order to do their jobs don’t have access.

Diana File, DF Analytics 34:29
That’s right, because it’s always easier to restrict kind of a blanket restriction than to know and understand the nuance, which requires working with we go and crafting kind of forward thinking policies where you really balance the transparency and the confidentiality issues. The other thing I’d say about self disclosure, leveraging your ERGs is a really easy way to increase self disclosure rates and that’s a whole nother topic for another day. But people do find that having a safe space where you could talk about people of similar identity groups, and helping you maybe giving them talking points or helping them gather data in different ways, can increase disclosure rates as well, rather than here’s this announcement that came by email, how am I supposed to trust it? I don’t even know who this is from.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 35:15
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Well, look, Diana, we asked this, we’re kind of at times, but so I want to make sure that we give you a chance to answer we ask all of our guests this question at the end of the show. If you were going to write a book about this topic and where it’s at today, in the work that you’re doing, what what would the title of that book be and why?

Diana File, DF Analytics 35:34
So the title will be bringing hard numbers to soft guesses. How to de bias, traditional research methods, it’s working title, yeah.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 35:44
Are you already?

Diana File, DF Analytics 35:50
One day when I have lots of free time, and someone to ghost write it for me, but yeah, why, but my tagline. My company tagline is bringing hard numbers to soft guesses. And I think the reason for that title is because I think people spend too much as we talked about, spend too much time guessing or assuming that things can’t be quantified. And the subtitle is as debiasing traditional research methods, I think the way that research traditionally is conducted, certainly the way I learned to conduct research, psychological research on human beings is full of bias. And I’ve spent my life trying to debias it and find areas in new techniques to amplify the voices of groups that are historically marginalized by those methods love

Chris Hoyt, CXR 36:34
Well, so let us ask you present company excluded. Who gets the first signed copy of your of your book?

Diana File, DF Analytics 36:46
My husband.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 36:47
Oh, that’s nice. That’s lovely. Well, look, Diana, we’re so grateful for you to give us a lot of time, much gratitude, we know that you’re super busy. And we just want to thank you for the work that you’re doing and put forward and it’s such an amazing endeavor. So thanks for leaning all the way into to just help push that forward.

Diana File, DF Analytics 37:12
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This has been a really fun discussion.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 37:14
A fun chat. I’m gonna put you in the greenroom for just two seconds. So don’t go anywhere. in there. There we go. And then really quickly, Gerry, I thought we could just give a quick mention of a follow up to a TA Talk Tank been out for a couple of months mow. We have a nonprofit. For those who aren’t aware, we have a nonprofit that has created this, it does a number of projects, platforms, both in person charity events, that sort of thing. But we launched a couple of months ago to a TA talk tank.com And your you give a way better elevator pitch of what this is, than I do my elevator pitch ends up going like for five minutes. So why don’t you share what what ta talk tank is because we

Gerry Crispin, CXR 37:52
I never give the same thing twice. I think it’s the softest approach to the word mentor that we can get right now. And essentially, it’s a non formal way for you to pick the brain of just about anybody who’s interested and willing to to talk to you about your job, your career, or your life stage that’s, you know, connected to those two things. And, and the fact is, all of us want to be able to tap into that kind of thought, wisdom, whatever, of people who’ve done it before you. And the fact is you’re willing, most of us are willing to do that as well. So all of this is is a platform, where literally 100 plus people have profiled themselves as willing to talk to you and some indication of who they are and what they’re about. And my feeling is do two things. One, take a look at that list. There’s got to be a few people that you go oh, I’d really like to pick the brain of that person. And and if it works for you, then profile yourself as one of the people on topic.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 39:08
Yeah, you can be on both you can be a mentor or mentee or coach or coach he or someday will come up with a better term but you can list stuff you want to talk about and list stuff you want to learn about and do a nice matchup and it’s just this it’s maybe a 30 minute conversation with somebody so not a big formal program and it’s free. It’s from CXR foundation. It’s ta talk tank labor of love. Lots of just wonderful people have been part of that program to put it together. We just encourage everybody everybody to go out

Gerry Crispin, CXR 39:35
there and transition. This is your you’re late to getting this done.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 39:42
Whether it is you know, slow, slow adopters or fast followers. Let’s call them fast followers. Yeah. All right. With that, we’ll see everybody next week. Say bye Gerry. Bye.

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