Understanding employee diversity

Understanding the ethnic diversity of employees is increasingly important to organisations in order to ensure their workforce draws on all available talent and reflects the rich diversity of customers served.

Traditionally, this information has relied on self disclosure through time-consuming surveys, where results are often incomplete and skewed by factors such as inconsistent definitions of ethnicity. Experian’s Diversity Monitor solves these problems by matching the names of individuals against a database of three million first and family names. Through careful statistical weighting, it provides a consistent picture of the ethnic mix of any list of names.

The Royal Free Hospital (RFH) in London has used Diversity Monitor to profile its 6,600 employees and to compare this to a sample of 75,000 of its patients and to the local catchment area. The results have enabled the hospital to consider the representation of ethnic groups in different roles and to see how this reflects the ethnic diversity of patients and the local community. It has also allowed the RFH to make comparisons with important national trends when recruiting black and minority ethnic people into medical roles.

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