Are you interested in learning about your company’s areas of strengths and improvement for diversity and inclusion initiatives? If so, join our inaugural Diversity Engagement Survey (DES). Your discounted cost to participate is $2,500. Benefits include an overall summary with breakdown of demographics, a one-hour consultation to interpret survey results, and recommendations for next steps.
CLI has partnered with a research team to develop benchmarks using DES. At this time, we are several more Denver law firms to participate in this pilot study over an 18-month period, starting this Winter. We will have future surveys focusing on government agencies, legal departments and law firms outside of Denver.
Your participation in this ground-breaking project will provide your firm with an assessment of:
- Inclusion factors within your law firm that create the right conditions for achieving the benefits of a diverse workforce;
- Identification of areas of strengths and improvement in diversity and inclusion efforts;
- Data for strategic planning, enhancement, implementation and development of diversity and inclusion programs; and
- Analysis of law firm diversity that moves beyond compositional diversity or the representation of the demographic breakdowns of race and gender, openly LGBT individuals, and attorneys with disabilities.
Diversity is considered a driver of excellence…but only if the conditions are right. Knowing what the right conditions are requires an assessment of the organizational culture for factors which leverage differences to achieve business objectives and drive innovation.
The Diversity Engagement Survey (DES) provides data on the organization’s level of worker engagement, its inclusive characteristics, and the degree to which diverse groups experience inclusion. DES was originally conceptualized as an evaluation tool for measuring the academic medical centers through the lens of inclusion and diversity. After a pilot using the instrument with 14 academic medical centers, the instrument was demonstrated to have value not only within educational settings, but could be successfully utilized in any organization that desires to build an engaged and inclusive workforce.
DES is best used:
- For building an inclusive culture that seeks to recruit, retain and promote diverse individuals.
- To determine the level of engagement of the total workforce in relationship to specific diverse groups.
- To assess baseline strengths and areas for improvement related to inclusion and diversity efforts.
- To determine progress toward inclusion goals in an organizational diversity plan.
- To measure progress of diversity plans in response to regulatory agencies.
- To identify salient concerns such as historical baggage from stereotypes, social isolation, economic constraints and the impact of few culturally-competent role models and mentors for underrepresented groups within the organization.
Thus, the DES functions in three ways:
Descriptive – describes the inclusiveness of the environment by determining its level of engagement by demographic categories.
Diagnostic – defines areas of strengths and areas of improvement for the diversity and inclusion efforts through benchmark comparative data.
Prescriptive — points to the strategic direction for change by identifying which engagement domains and which inclusion factors to target for improvement.Join us and learn how you can create an inclusive workplace, using your unique information. Contact Phyllis Wan (ceo@legalinclusiveness.org; 303.313.6861) if you would like to be a part of this exciting new venture, have questions, or if you would like to be considered for future surveys.