(Taken from www.timesonline.co.uk, October 4th)
"We are continually working to improve the support and development of our talented women."
Stick your head into any HR briefing these days and you'll hear the phrase "What gets mesuared gets done". In fact, it's fast approaching the cult asset of mantras such as "people are our greatest assets".
There's a simple reason: it works. Take KMPG, for example, Matthew Gregory, diversity senior manager, puts measurement into context: "We've just been through our annual pay and bonus round. All awards are gender checked to make sure there are no anomalies. For example, if a man and a woman are performing equally in similar managerial roles, we cross check to make sure that they get the same bonus."
Like many organisations in the Top 50, KPMG demonstrates its committment to gender inclusivity through the membership schemes such as Business in the Community's Opportunity Now. Last year KMPG scored 100% in Opportunity Now's section on mentoring, recruitment and selection. Rachel Campbell, partner and head of people management at KPMG, puts this success down to hardwork and dilligence: "In an industrt which has traditionally been seen as dominated by men, we are continually working to improve the support and development of our talented women."
Another 100% company in the monitoring, recruitment and selection category is Morgan Stanley. In 2002, it formed a European Diversity Council (EDC) to promote diversity initiatives and develop action plans. The heads of the key European business units sit on the committee. At each quarterly meeting, council members are updated on workforce composition so that trends, areas of concern and areas for improvement can be tracked and discussed. The EDC has completed several initiatives as a result of these discussions, including networks, support groups and leadership programmes for women.
There's a similar story at JP Morgan. Its Treasury and Securities Services (TSS) reviews jobs and promotion opportunities for women through its regional and global management and committee structures. Management and HR work together to analyse representation, attribution, recruitment and promotion of women. In the past year TSS has made considerable progress on retaining, hiring and promoting women to senior roles.
Shell is another employer that monitors gender diversity at a global level. The statistics monitored include the percentages of women in senior leadership, management and supervisory positions. Senior diversity adviser Ida Yuan explains that doing all this will lead to a more productive organisation. "Shell believes it will be able to attract the best talent, be more responsive to it's customers, reduce turnover costs, be more creative and improve its corporate reputation," she says.
Meausurement isn't restricted to the private sector. West Midlands Police has the highest ration of female police officers in the country - 28% of it's 8,500 officers. Intake numbers stand at 40% female, so the next few years are likely to see the gender balance improve. Measurement has been a major factor in this change. From tracking staff numbers based on gender it became obvious that women were under represented in several specialist departments - so it took on a positive recruitment campaign. One result was to quadruple female numbers in the serious crimes division in just 18 months.
Chief Inspector Jan Thomas-West is head of the firearms division. She says that having hard figures at her fingertips to spell out the under representation makes it easier to drive through the changes. "Women are still under represented, but we've arranged two open days for women and have also amended the fitness test slightly because our stats showed that disproportionately more females than males were failing it."