Workday Aims to Aid D&I by Measuring ‘Belonging’

Workday VIBE Heatmap

Workday announced new products to help employers develop and implement effective D&I initiatives. They’re built around the idea of “Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity,” or “VIBE,” which the company uses in its own approach to diversity and belonging.

The first product, VIBE Central, offers content on best practices, as well as reports that show the state of workforce’s diversity and representation in one place. The second, VIBE Index, helps organizations measure and benchmark their D&I efforts.

.@Workday's new products aim to boost D&I by measuring "belonging" across the entire workforce and employee lifecycle #HR #HRTech Click To Tweet

The products go through “the entire experience of an employee, whether or not they feel like they’re included, like they belong, like there’s fair equity within the organization,” Workday  Chief Diversity Officer Carin Taylor told Business Insider.

Taylor said the VIBE tools go beyond other solutions because they measure more than workforce demographics. “It’s when you get specifically into measuring inclusion or belonging—this whole picture that we’re trying to look at—that it becomes much more difficult,” she said.

Workday contends that employers need to account for the many identities and perspectives each employee possesses when it looks for equity in experience across the organization. VIBE is designed to help organizations where they stand and where to intervene to help create a more diverse, inclusive workplace.

Home Base for Diversity

VIBE Central acts as something of a home base for D&I data within Workday HCM. It allows businesses to assess, measure, benchmark and manage their efforts based on factors such as race or gender. For example, companies could determine that 10% of their female employees have been promoted over the last three years. They’d also see that that rate is below the 50th percentile median of 20% for peer companies.

Such analysis can be applied to all points of the employee lifecycle, such as hiring practices, promotions, succession planning and attrition.

The VIBE Index is a more tactical tool. It measures the outcomes of D&I efforts across talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, employee experience and culture, then presents a heat map to identify areas that need attention. It also scores overall workplace equity.

The index uses Workday Prism Analytics to integrate external data, such as information from employee sentiment surveys, to provide real-time analysis.  

Workday says the VIBE Index is one of the first products to use intersections, which combine different elements of a person’s identity—such as race/ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation or religion—to examine the complete employment lifecycle. It also looks at parity in the workplace and uses a heatmap to highlight opportunities for change.

VIBE Central will be available in September 2020 at no additional cost to Workday HCM customers. The VIBE Index will become generally available to customers in the first quarter of 2021.  

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Image: Workday

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