Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at Workday’s recent announcement about their new product offerings around Diversity and Inclusion. If 2020 has done anything, it’s brought the conversation of diversity and inclusion to the forefront like never before in organizations. Many HR tech companies have been working on products in this space for a while, but few will have the impact of Workday’s new VIBE Central and VIBE Index.

One of the largest issues faced by organizations in moving the needle around having employees feel a sense of belonging, as well as broader D&I issues, is those front-line leaders and above never truly felt like they had the data to help them make the right decisions. So, we mostly just tried to make change by gut feel and subjective data that was constantly changing.

Workday’s VIBE (Value, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity) Central brings all diversity- and inclusion-related data into one centralized place in Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), enabling organizations to set goals and then monitor progress against those goals. Businesses can assess, measure, benchmark, and manage diversity and inclusion by the dimensions of their choice, such as race/ethnicity and gender. For example, VIBE Central could surface that 10 percent of women in the organization have been promoted in the last three years; in addition, benchmark data could show that promotions for women are well below the median of 50th percentile, which may be 20 percent, for peer companies in the same industry.

Organizations can benefit from the ability to assess talent management, talent development, and employee experience for key factors including:

• Hiring. Organizations can better understand if hiring practices are balanced or if one group is over- or under-represented.
• Promotions. Business leaders can look at metrics to determine if their promotion process is inclusive and then view a succession report to gauge if they are planning in an equitable way.
• Leadership. Companies can look at leadership/management levels and succession planning to compare planning to the actual diversity of management and to see if diversity drops off from one management level to the next—which may indicate a need for more targeted development.
• Attrition. If hiring and promotion practices are helping to increase diversity overall but there’s a high rate of voluntary attrition for that diverse talent, HR leaders may need to focus on belonging and inclusion.

VIBE Index (being released to Workday customer in Q1 2021) empowers HR leaders to set a B&D strategy and create a tailored plan aimed at driving positive outcomes. It will measure the relative performance and outcomes of an organization’s efforts across talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, employee experience, and workplace culture to deliver a heat map that identifies the highest opportunity for positive change, as well as a VIBE Index score for overall workplace equity.

VIBE Index will allow organizations and leaders to have real-time diversity data, to ensure that progress is being made to the plans and goals. For too long organizational leaders have been making strategic D&I decisions with dated and insufficient data, many times that wasn’t even their own. VIBE Index changes this completely. Your own plan. Your own goals. Your own data. Belonging and D&I isn’t the same for all, it’s very specific to your organization and your culture, and your strategy and data should reflect that.

Workday is drinking its own Kool-aid, as well. Workday’s Chief Diversity Officer, Carin Taylor, announced a bunch of initiatives that Workday will be taking on including:

• Increase overall representation of Black and Latinx employees in the U.S. by 30% by 2023.
• Double the number of Black and Latinx leaders in the U.S. by 2023.
• Invest 25,000 hours in training over the next year to help ensure all people leaders can attract, recruit, hire, and advance employees of all backgrounds.
• Help ensure less than a 3% difference in belonging for all Workmates across all demographics (as measured by the Great Place to Work questions that power the belonging outcome of our VIBE Index^TM).
• Infuse VIBE into how we think about and act on our Workday core values.
• Invest 150,000 hours in career development programs and education that increase visibility and opportunity for Black and Latinx talent over the next year.
• Donate $10 million, as previously announced, to social justice initiatives over the next year.
• Create opportunities for Workmates to contribute 250,000 hours toward mentoring and skills-based volunteering in communities around the globe by 2023.
• Accelerate Opportunity Onramps hiring to fill 20% of our early to mid-career full-time roles by 2023.

No small plan! I love it when organizations put it in black and white. Yes, there is some risk you don’t meet all of your goals, but it’s how real change happens!