Kantar’s Global I&D team is tiny but mighty, and instrumental in bringing its new external purpose and brand promise of “shaping the brands of tomorrow by better understanding people everywhere” to life internally, across 26,000 employees in over 100 countries. Our 3 core I&D Centre of Expertise members are our only colleagues with a full-time focus on strengthening internal culture. The team consists of Megan Cross, Global Head of Inclusion and Diversity, based in the UK, Leigh Kelly Andrews, Global I&D Manager based in South Africa, and Abira Sabir, based in Northern Ireland. They’re ably assisted by inspired regional and local I&D champions and enthusiastic Employee Resource Group members, who help roll out our strategy and ensure this goes beyond talk to create change that matters across our business, both at UK headquarter level and in our offices across the globe.
This includes regular training for HR teams on topics like disability hiring and manager-level content on unconscious bias and inclusive language that’s available on-demand to every employee. We welcome event feedback on how to make things better, as inclusion and diversity is a continuous learning journey for all. Our I&D success is also driven by external touchpoints like consulting and coaching hours, conference attendance and collaboration opportunities in ERG-led information-sharing sessions on topics like ‘rainbow parenting’ and external community outreach initiatives to make use of our CSI-related volunteer leave. We held our inaugural enERGise week in November 2023 to introduce our I&D team and ERG leads, ending the week by announcing that we’d be formalising our global Employee Resource Group Lead roles in 2024 by repositioning this as a career development opportunity, recognising their contributions and rewarding this post-tenure.
The above serves as proof that our strategy also continues to be informed by listening to our people with a new I&D-related question added to our annual anonymous internal engagement survey and the launch of our new “Be Counted’ diversity data campaign, detailed in this entry, encouraging sharing demographic data on Workday to guide our retention strategies and local employee resource group activations to solve one of our most complex challenges to date: Aside from a 90% ethnicity data disclosure rate in the UK and US obtained from a previous initiative, we simply didn’t have enough information about where we were standing to create a thorough Inclusion and Diversity strategy to benefit both existing and future colleagues.
It was quite the conundrum because as a market research company, we have stacks of data on clients but not much on the very people of Kantar. To get to these numbers, our I&D team collaborated with Legal and Human Resources teams in the markets we operate in on an initiative named ‘Be Counted’, through which we asked our teams to voluntarily share their demographic data via the human capital management platform Workday for safe input and handling of sensitive data. The project team came together in June 2023. The campaign launched gradually in the different countries it targeted, between October 2023 and January 2024, depending on local needs. For the initial roll-out we targeted our top nine biggest countries in terms of workforce: Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, UK and the US, while noting different country legalities on what demographic data employers can collect and which topics are taboo. Testing and adapting the language took some time but was the right thing to do. We went ensured inclusion by being mindful of language capabilities. To bring the initiative to life, we partnered with our global Employee Communications and Engagement team for employee-centric communications based on best practice case studies, learning from our own teams that messages from local leaders are more effective than the global ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. We engaged these stakeholders via virtual sessions to introduce a special communications toolkit in various languages containing email drafts, a Workday guide, FAQs, a privacy notice and captioned teaser videos to get our campaign’s ‘why’ across in a genuine, personable way.
We review these results monthly and now have a clearer idea of what we are doing well and which demographic groups are underrepresented, resulting in more targeted interventions for a diverse and inclusive organisation, such as inclusive recruitment and colleague retention initiatives across different regions, divisions and skales or job ‘levels’. As we’re preparing a phase 2 launch in more countries in October 2024, we’re optimistic about the outcomes and feel better equipped to tackle the challenges of adapting a global message to many diverse local markets by connecting and co-designing with others. We also have a better understanding of all the elements we need to juggle with when executing a campaign that can literally cross borders.
