Quanta Corporate Citizenship Creative awareness 19/03/2010
While working in Myanmar a few years ago, I learned from a Buddhist friend that the essence of meditation is to try to steer away from getting lost in digression and at the same time avoid getting stuck into trying to answer all questions. According to her, meditation is trying to stay creatively aware of what is essential.
One of the most interesting aspects of our work is that we get to work with a lot of different organisations, different people, and see a lot of different trends.
One of those trends we have started noticing is the desire of companies to get more focused on producing and presenting results. Some companies do it because they want to produce reports and portray their work to an wider audience. Others, because they need to justify their investments to their shareholders. Many, because they need to produce reports to show compliance to governmental regulations. And some, because they truly want to know more about what they are doing and what they are doing right.
What few still do, though, is to understand what exactly needs to be measured.
In order to know what needs to be measured, a company needs to know why it is committing to that specific initiative. In other words, what the ultimate purpose of that investment is.
To answer this question, the first step is to clearly define the primary audience. And, despite what many companies believe, their primary audience is often not the project’s beneficiaries. The beneficiaries might be just the channel/means to achieve some other purpose.
Some companies investing on equal opportunity for their employees do so not because they are particularly concerned about this issue or with the initiative’s beneficiaries (the employees), but because they want to comply with the governmental regulations. Therefore, the government is the primary audience. The positive impact on employees (secondary audience) is a very welcome side effect. Some other companies will incur the same investments because their primary concern is to motivate and engage employees. Employees, in this case, are the primary audience. The ability to comply and produce reports showing the compliance to governmental regulations are a welcome side effect.
Although the type of project might look similar, they are fundamentally different. Their setups are different because their objectives are different. And because they have different objectives, they need to be measured in different ways. Trying to apply the same metrics to both is simply a waste of time and money. The company will either not be able to collect the data that is really relevant for it, or it will have to collect more data than is required, waste significant resources and, even worse, by overloading itself with unnecessary data, not know what data is really relevant.
Following the example above, the first type of company should be trying to measure the outcomes that are relevant to the government. Things such as the gender ratio, minority ratio, salary difference per gender within each grade level, percentage of minority groups in senior positions etc. The second type of company should be much more focused on measuring whether this is an issue that actually increases employee engagement, whether employees believe there is a de facto equal opportunity environment, whether employees feel more motivated by specific initiatives the organisation takes to improve gender balance, how the non-minority group(s) react to different attempts to create a more equal working environment.
We are all tired of so many requests to fill surveys, research etc. Or to use the expression coined by a client recently, we are all ‘questionnaired out’. And, at the same time, we all believe that without quality data, we increase the likelihood of taking bad decisions and sticking to poor choices. The equilibrium is somewhere in the middle, where organisations focus on collecting essential data, and only essential data. And the only way to know what essential data looks like is to know why it is relevant and what it will be used for.
- Gus
One of the most interesting aspects of our work is that we get to work with a lot of different organisations, different people, and see a lot of different trends.
One of those trends we have started noticing is the desire of companies to get more focused on producing and presenting results. Some companies do it because they want to produce reports and portray their work to an wider audience. Others, because they need to justify their investments to their shareholders. Many, because they need to produce reports to show compliance to governmental regulations. And some, because they truly want to know more about what they are doing and what they are doing right.
What few still do, though, is to understand what exactly needs to be measured.
In order to know what needs to be measured, a company needs to know why it is committing to that specific initiative. In other words, what the ultimate purpose of that investment is.
To answer this question, the first step is to clearly define the primary audience. And, despite what many companies believe, their primary audience is often not the project’s beneficiaries. The beneficiaries might be just the channel/means to achieve some other purpose.
Some companies investing on equal opportunity for their employees do so not because they are particularly concerned about this issue or with the initiative’s beneficiaries (the employees), but because they want to comply with the governmental regulations. Therefore, the government is the primary audience. The positive impact on employees (secondary audience) is a very welcome side effect. Some other companies will incur the same investments because their primary concern is to motivate and engage employees. Employees, in this case, are the primary audience. The ability to comply and produce reports showing the compliance to governmental regulations are a welcome side effect.
Although the type of project might look similar, they are fundamentally different. Their setups are different because their objectives are different. And because they have different objectives, they need to be measured in different ways. Trying to apply the same metrics to both is simply a waste of time and money. The company will either not be able to collect the data that is really relevant for it, or it will have to collect more data than is required, waste significant resources and, even worse, by overloading itself with unnecessary data, not know what data is really relevant.
Following the example above, the first type of company should be trying to measure the outcomes that are relevant to the government. Things such as the gender ratio, minority ratio, salary difference per gender within each grade level, percentage of minority groups in senior positions etc. The second type of company should be much more focused on measuring whether this is an issue that actually increases employee engagement, whether employees believe there is a de facto equal opportunity environment, whether employees feel more motivated by specific initiatives the organisation takes to improve gender balance, how the non-minority group(s) react to different attempts to create a more equal working environment.
We are all tired of so many requests to fill surveys, research etc. Or to use the expression coined by a client recently, we are all ‘questionnaired out’. And, at the same time, we all believe that without quality data, we increase the likelihood of taking bad decisions and sticking to poor choices. The equilibrium is somewhere in the middle, where organisations focus on collecting essential data, and only essential data. And the only way to know what essential data looks like is to know why it is relevant and what it will be used for.
- Gus
Add Comment
