Published on October 26, 2021
Background & Challenge
In Spring 2021, a global company appointed Laws of Attraction to design and deliver an all-employee Diversity, Equality and Inclusion survey (DE&I) across the parent company of Liberty Global and five of its operating companies including Virgin Media 02 located across the UK, Europe and North America.
The survey would go out to more than 22,000 employees and the insight gained from it would underpin and inform the organisation's global DE&I strategy. By understanding the lived experience of their employees across diversity characteristics, this would in turn measure and benchmark the presence of DE&I behaviours within each operating company’s culture.
The Solution
Laws of Attraction and our Vibe survey and analytics platform was chosen as the preferred and sole supplier after a lengthy and rigorous tender process.
Vibe was co-created nearly five years ago through our relationship with Virgin Trains to bring a new approach to employee listening, being the first corporate employee survey platform to introduce image-based questions into the mix.
By blending an exclusive mix of tried and tested methodologies including OCEAN, Implicit association tests (IAT) and other psychometric profiling systems to put each respondent into one of eight thinking profile categories that are aligned to the organisational values.
© Laws of Attraction - Image shows Vibe ED&I Survey using Implicit association test (IAT)
In addition, we use our proprietary FABS inclusion model, which measures employee responses across the 4 key areas of Fairness, Acceptance, Belonging & Safety.
Vibe was ideally suited for this project as its modular and configurable survey component combined with its deep analytics capability ensured it met all the customer requirements, including:
- All responses to be confidential and anonymous
- Ability to tailor the question set per operating company
- Multiple languages
- Allow the comparison of the lived experience of employees by different identity groups
- Considering the legal backdrop for DE&I data in each country
- A set of questions or a process that capture sentiment as well as a free text box at the end to capture wider employee insight
- An ability to benchmark performance against specific localised norms of comparable questions/method
A deep dive into the current cultural landscape
Before the survey was configured our team worked with the lead project stakeholders at each operating company to work through and understand the specific cultural landscape and where each one was on their DE&I journey.
This enabled us to tailor the survey as well as use the appropriate local language, cultural nuances and any specific data privacy legalities associated with the different countries operated in.
We combined our innovative and robust research techniques and the latest psychological methodologies to collect insights that reveal not only what people think, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how they feel.
This discovery and design phase of the process lasted several weeks and included:
- Review of existing data and DE&I landscape
- Cultural workshop from a cross-section of employees for each operating company
- Presentation of key findings to project leads
- Tailored communication plan
- Co-creation of question sets based on insight gathered
© Laws of Attraction - Image shows Vibe HR Periodic table of ED&I Cultural elements used as part of the diagnostic phase.
Next steps
Although we can’t report on the full set of results at this stage, what we can say is the ED&I survey is well on the way to delivering the data insight to provide the client and their operating companies an understanding of their full diversity landscape as well as the levels of inclusion across key business dynamics.
The next part of this project will see some of the most important work taking place. Taking the data, analysing, and reporting it to the OpCo’s and then running a series of coaching sessions and creating a tailored series of learning programmes and employee listening forums.
These two components are fundamental to supporting the leaders, managers and HRBPs to create meaningful SMART action plans integral to the ROI of this DE&I engagement initiative. Ensuring empowerment and accountability for goal setting and individual performance, supporting the strategy and ongoing development of DE&I for more than 22,000 current and future employees.