Conclusion

Concluding remarks

Katy Bennett, Director, Inclusion and Diversity Consulting, PwC

This guide seeks to articulate the value of collecting and reporting diversity data for your employee population. Although this is an area that can seem complex, it aims to set out the practical steps to follow in order to collect diversity data in a way that meets your legal obligations, utilises existing systems and, most importantly, positively engages your workforce and leaders.

Collecting diversity data is an ongoing process rather than a point in time exercise. To maintain

the quality and quantity of your data, it is important to continue to ask and encourage your staff to share information on their identity on an ongoing basis. You need to ensure that you continue to collect data for new staff and also recognise that how your staff respond to questions may change over time. The questions you ask and the categories under which you ask them should also be reviewed regularly, to ensure they reflect changes in your own D&I strategy as well as wider changes in societal context.

Having said this, much of the work set out in this document will not need to be repeated and will provide an important legal and systems baseline from which you can begin your data and reporting journey. As some of the case studies show, this is something many organisations within and beyond the industry are already embarking on and, at least in the UK, should be achievable regardless of your size or the sophistication of your HR processes and systems.

This guide seeks to provide the tools and guidance you need to collect this data. More importantly, it hopes to also help guide you on how to best use and interpret this data to deliver meaningful insight which drives your D&I strategy. Ultimately, collecting and analysing this data should be the starting point, rather than the end. Using this data as part of every key people decision will ensure that you fully embed your D&I priorities into your wider business and people agenda, while a data driven D&I strategy will help focus actions and interventions where their impact will be greatest, and help hold leaders to account for its delivery.

The pandemic has led to many changes in the way people work. The introduction of flexible and hybrid working patterns will have an impact on your employees' experience in the workplace. These shifts will likely have a disproportionate impact on certain employee groups which, without care, could lead to different outcomes in relation to key decisions relating to pay, performance and promotion. In the longer term, fundamental changes in ways of working will likely lead to large-scale reskilling and redeployment of staff, which may have different experiences and risks for different groups. There are already concerns from employees, as shown in PwC’s Upskilling Hopes and Fears survey, an alarming 41% of respondents in the UK believe they have been overlooked for career advancement or training due to their gender, ethnicity, age, religion, disability, social class, caring responsibilities or sexual orientation.

In these contexts, your D&I data is a critical tool in understanding whether employees have the right level of support through these changing times and ensuring wider business and workforce changes do not have unintended consequences from a D&I perspective.