made to measure by Chuan Chew, CC-BY-NC licensed
This is the second post in a week-long series exploring DEI professional competencies. I believe the five key competencies for DEI professionals are:
- be strategic
- translate academic research into action and measure the impact of initiatives
- meet people where they are at and help them move to be more inclusive
- influence others
- get cross functional projects done.
Yesterday I wrote about strategy as a key competency for leading DEI work. Today I’m going to explore translating academic research into action and measuring the impact of initiatives.
I love doing DEI work in the corporate space because it allows me to bring my values and all the different work experiences I’ve had (feminist organizer, academic librarian, accessibility leader, workshop facilitator) to this work. These are emergent problems, meaning that no company, industry or country, has solved them, so we need to try new things and figure out if they work. This means keeping up with the current research and being able to translate it to programs and initiatives and measuring the impact of programs.
When I started at Mozilla I started a Zotero library to keep track of all the research and reports I was reading, so I could easily find that specific study on psychological safety in the workplace that had the survey tool questions. I adapted these for our employee engagement survey so I could measure if a pilot program improved psychological safety on teams. I also read various posts on the impact of hiring referral programs at other companies and then working with our Talent Acquisition team to look at our actual data to understand if the referral program was helping or hindering our diversity efforts.
This is the second in a series of five posts. Tomorrow’s post will explore meeting people where they are at and helping them move to be more inclusive.
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