Let’s talk Certification.

I’m going to open with an aside about Kamala Harris being called a ‘DEI Hire’. I don’t think it is the roast/insult it’s meant to be. My first thought was, “Yes, she is, and that’s a good thing.”  If you do DEI right then a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent can become Vice President and maybe President of the USA. Her ancestral / cultural background was no immovable impediment to the lofty office. She got into her position with talent, achievements… merit! That’s how DEI is supposed to work.

It’s not like my country (Australia) has gotten close to anything like that.

This is a fair segue of sorts into our certification program. We’re often asked what all our customers have in common, and there’s a few things we could list:  they ‘need accurate diversity data’ is the main one, along with they ‘need answers to questions their HR system can’t ask (but we can)’, and they all ‘want to find opportunities to improve their DEI initiatives and programs’ (often with limited resources like money and time). One thing almost all of them have in common is that they would also like some validation of the good works they are doing along the way.

It is true to say that most customers that come to us are doing okay to great in the D&I space. The ones that are really bad at it aren’t likely to engage a platform like ours anyway (which is ironic – they may need us the most). But companies with, for instance, active employee reference groups (ERGs), or well-resourced DEI teams and great leadership buy-in might want to see this reflected in the data, and often they do. I’ve opened many reports with comments best summarised like this: “As a general observation, you’re doing pretty good…”

But these companies ‘doing pretty good’ would obviously benefit from some official acknowledgement of it, hence our certification offer. From now on, customers who meet our criteria have the opportunity to be certified as ‘Diversity Data Leaders’.

There’s a lot of certifications to be had in the world. I myself have been offered certification for strange things, like sitting through boring one-hour workshops at which I contributed nothing and yet I was awarded a badge or certificate for my excellent work and leadership and values or whatever.

What about our certification?

Our certification is far more stringent and considered. Working mostly with our lead data scientist Nicole Lee we have selected 27 criteria. Applicants need to achieve at least 75% ‘ticks’ in answer to the criteria, which include:

• We ensure you have you reported honest and real D&I data back to your own staff.
• We look at the census data of the regions in which the customer operates and look at languages spoken in those regions and see if the list resembles the list of languages the staff speak.
• Maybe 90% of the staff agree that the company is ‘inclusive’ (good result) but how far below the mean are people with disability, or women? Are they at 79%? Because that’s too far below the mean, even if it’s a decent figure in and of itself.
• Has the customer agreed to anonymously pool their data for benchmarking?

When we first ran simulations, no test-companies got certified. Had we set the bar too high, perhaps imagining a perfect Utopian world wherein everyone’s free and easy and loves their job and their company and can be their whole selves all of the time? Yes. But we don’t live in Utopia. I don’t think we live in Dystopia either (well, not yet). We live in the real world, and in the real world there needs to be a little bit of leeway for everyone, including companies on D&I journeys.

We’re there to reward and acknowledge those companies not for being perfect but for  taking meaningful action, gathering real-world data, not vague NPS numbers about ‘recommending’ or just isolating single queries like ‘leadership sentiment’ or narrowing it down to just ‘gender representation at board level’. We go deeper than that, and as such, the certification as Diversity Data Leaders means something.

We’re ambitious, and hope to make this a globally recognised certificate. We’re soon to launch our first cohort of successful applicants and they’re a mixed lot already – for instance,  a smallish philanthropic not-for-profit from Melbourne and a global industry behemoth are our first two. What they have in common is they hit that 75% mark, and fully deserve accolades.

Our certificate looks pretty good too:

If you want a deeper dive tour of the program, hit me up at [email protected] or contact Diversity Atlas

Want to find out how you can get certified? Visit https://diversityatlas.io/diversity-certificate/ for more info.