J. Murphy & Sons: Enhancing D&I through a culture of transparency, technology and trust

As part of this approach, a number of steps can be taken and these can be summarised as follows.

Top tip 1: Approach the experts

I can’t recommend enough speaking to the experts – the best experts being your employees and particularly those from underrepresented groups. Feedback from them as to why they may be hesitant to give you the data can often give very clear direction as to the technology, transparency and trust required which can then be supplemented with external verification. Here is a tangible, internal example from Murphy. when gaps in the diversity data were being revived. This has since been used as ‘food for thought’ among senior managers.

Top tip 2: Transparency and innovation in data collection

To achieve a different result on diversity data you need to do something different to what you’ve done in the past. Based on experience, this approach can take two forms, and I’ve used this approach successfully in more than one company.

Ask yourself two sets of questions, behavioural and practical:

Top tip 3: Technology and engagement

Technology is integrated into this in a number of ways. Firstly a video from a client of Murphy, HS2, was used as to highlight to Murphy employees the why, how and benefits of ensuring accurate diversity data collection.

There is then the opportunity to link the data your technology can give you to your business performance:

I would also recommend following this by taking the opportunity to leverage actual technology itself. I would encourage all organisations to think of the technology they already have and how it can be utilised better to help you on this journey. Two examples of this from my experience are as follows:

Power BI was deployed in one organisation I worked for to maximum effect – not only to gather and present diversity data but to give genuine data-driven insight as a result of different relevant factors within the business, such as:

• Complex reward and remuneration structures with lots of different pay elements (eg. weekly paid workforce)
• Identifying any existing pay discrepancies based on gender but also ethnicity, disability
• Look at not just obvious salary based inequalities but other factors such as housing allowances, cars, locations
• Insights into why gaps exist based on a combination of data and other information (e.g. employee surveys)
• Enables managers to home in on areas of concern or share areas of best practice
• Insight takes the emotion out of the subject and away from randomly setting targets
• Opportunities to take more data-driven decisions to narrow these gaps.

This piece of technology can also be used to present the data transparently and innovatively.

Similarly within Murphy, we have also used our already ongoing data warehouse and analytics project to link all the key data sets involved to ensure our diversity data – and hence things like our gender and ethnicity pay gap reporting – is as robust as possible.  An overview of this is given below:

Top tip 4: Present completely transparently

It is far easier to present a solution to the board when it is based on technology and other factors they are familiar with already, such as in the examples shown above.

Not only that, but ensuring the technology gives genuine insight which is relevant to the current challenges that specific business faces makes it all the more powerful.

For example, where Power BI and the data insight project and technology solutions were used, trends and specific points for action were able to be highlighted which correlated well with ongoing business challenges. These included skills shortages, underrepresentation of females and BAME employees in the construction sector and much more. Some mock examples are given below along with business specific actions able to be agreed as a result of it:

The outcome

This is something that is ongoing but certainly the goal of  gaining powerful workforce diversity insight and tangible business action through the Three Ts – a culture of transparency, technology and trust is well underway. Below are some real results from the business insight given in the examples above which give every reason to be optimistic that this is an approach that works: