7 May 2025 at 8:00am-10:00am
Data & Strategy:
Harnessing Your Data
On 7 May 2025, participants of our Power of Inclusion programme met at Mayer Brown for a breakfast session on harnessing your data to support your social mobility strategy.
To begin the workshop, The Lord Mayor Alderman Alastair King highlighted the importance of data saying ‘if we want to make our workforce more representative of society, we have to start by truly understanding it’.
He also encouraged participants to consider sharing their personal story of starting and progressing a career in the City with The Lord Mayor’s Appeal team as part of the Change Starts Together campaign.
Ed Parker, a Partner at Mayer Brown then welcomed participants and reflected on Mayer Brown’s commitment to remain data-driven in efforts to enhance inclusion and diversity.
The session involved two roundtable discussions, first exploring where everyone in attendance is on their data journey.
Many raised challenges around the following themes:
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Demonstrating to the workforce why data is collected
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Variations in personal understanding of one’s own socioeconomic background
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Defining socioeconomic background with an international workforce or as a global organisation
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Shifting markers of socioeconomic status (i.e. changes to the number attending university)
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SME challenges regarding lack of anonymity
Following the initial scene setting discussion, Sandra Healy, CEO & Founder of inclusio, gave an overview of the work inclusio do to support organisations with data-driven culture transformation. Given the challenges many organisations face such as survey fatigue and lack of trust, inclusiobring a fun and interactive approach to collecting data through gamification.
The next discussion section focused on how we can be more purposeful in the collection of data and strengthen disclosure rates.
These solution-focused conversations touched on:
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Reviewing data collected to ensure all data leads to action
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Making data more visually appealing
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Using the support of networks/ERGs
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Focusing on building a strong culture of trust to improve disclosure rates
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Storytelling with data
Participants left the session committed to feeding back to DEI teams, working groups and networks and exploring the solutions raised during discussions.
On why data is so critical to successful Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategies, Richard Fisk at Addleshaw Goddard said:
“It’s critical. Without data you can’t build, without data you can’t understand who your people are, you can’t understand where the leaks are in your pipeline, you can’t understand your challenges. You really need to understand what people are experiencing, who people are, how you can then built it authentically. In the DE&I world its not one size fits all, you can’t just run a programme because that’s what the next law firm ran. You’ve got to make sure it’s authentic to your business and your people because that’s how you can have the most impact. And that in itself with then feed your data, because you can say ‘you told us this, we did that.”
Robin Creswell, Payden & Rygel
“We live in a data world, whether we like it or not, we seem to live in a world we are data dependent and if we don’t have the data then we can’t prove our argument. That might not be true but nonetheless data helps us define the discussion and outcomes. People generally like to see the data in order to make decisions. In times past we would approximate, we didn’t have data, we had to approximate. We made decisions purely on judgement and there are flaws in that. People’s judgement can go badly wrong. So the data really helps us improve our judgement."
Sign up to the next Power of Inclusion event here
Data & Strategy resources
Upcoming events
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27 September 2021 at 12:00pm-1:30pm
Events Culture & Belonging
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23 May 2024 at 12:30pm-1:30pm
Events Culture & Belonging
Driving Socioeconomic Inclusion through Storytelling Webinar
13 February 2025 at 12:30pm-1:30pm
