Are people from diverse backgrounds really included? Or do they just sit on the perphery?

Measuring diversity and inclusion via a percentage headcount is one way of understanding social inclusion of people from diverse backgrounds within an organisation. But are there other ways?

Enter Social Network Analysis (SNA). With SNA, you can see not just the number of people people from diverse backgrounds but alos how they are connected in to an organisation (or not, as the case may be).

The figure above show technical knowledge-seeking within a highly specialised research laboratory. The blue dots (nodes) represent males, and the pink dots represent females. Notice the biggest dots (sized by the number of connections they have) are in the most centrally located part of the network - oh, and they are all male. In contrast, the pink dots are barely connected and sit on the periphery of the network. In other words, a headcount approach tells us that females make up 13% of this research laboratory team. SNA tells us that men are ‘running the show’ and women are on the pepriphery.

Importantly, if you use an SNA approach, you can still ask all of the same questions that you would ask in a standard survey, such as feelings of inclusiveness, length of tenure, role, etc….. all of that wonderful individual-level data that is so important. But you can include this alongside and in conjunction with the SNA data. That is, SNA augments other data you already collect, adding in the peer-to-peer relations that show how, for example, advice-seeking, knowledge sharing and problem-solving is structured within an organisation.

Think about what you could do with data that helps you better understand how your people connect.

Foster connection, build culture, enable performance