emh group’s data-driven journey towards equality, diversity and inclusion. Part 1.
emh group is one of the largest providers of affordable homes and care and support services in the East Midlands, England. In 2019, the organisation agreed a five-year strategy to ensure equality, diversity and inclusion was part of the DNA of the business. A key focus of this strategy was to ensure that they were making data-driven service delivery decisions that reflected the needs of their residents, clients and colleagues.
With around 21,000 properties, 1,000 care service clients, and over 1,100 colleagues, this was no small ask. As Kathryn Eyre, Head of Quality and Standards at emh explains:
“We’d recognised that data was essential in bringing about the change we wanted to see, but when we looked at our data as a whole, there was no ‘one version of the truth’ – there were several, depending on how you asked the question and who you asked.
And when we looked at our EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) data in particular, we recognised a few things. That our data was, at best, partially complete; that it was collected in many different ways by many different teams; and those teams all used it for different, yet inter-related purposes. We needed to understand this and unpick the issues surrounding it to achieve our aims.”
Some of those aims were to:
improve practices around equality, diversity and inclusion, including creation of robust targets and policies
enable data-driven decisions to improve access, quality and reach of services to all
create transparent, inclusive and trustworthy services for tenants and clients, as well as employment and personal development opportunities for staff and board members
create impact and change in the way equality, diversity and inclusion issues were raised, handled, and learned from.
A stock-take of data
One of their first steps was for emh to understand their existing data on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), assess its quality, and come up with a plan to improve it. They asked Data Orchard to help them with this.
In early 2020 we began working with emh to:
review existing EDI data and analyse its quality
identify comparative EDI measures locally and nationally
define requirements for future EDI data collection
analyse and explore pay gaps
engage staff, through creative and interactive data workshops, in working to improve EDI data.
emh shared three anonymised data sets with us – over 18,000 tenants, over 1,100 employees and 14 board members. Looking at the data held on protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010, we considered, for each:
completeness (is there missing or unusable data)
consistency (do different systems reflect the same information and the same meanings)
definition (do data fields have a well-defined, unambiguous meaning).
Analysis of equality, diversity and inclusion data held
The completeness of data held ranged from 0% (on gender reassignment for tenants or board members) to 100% (for age and sex for colleagues and board members). Similarly, consistency and definition ranged from ‘excellent’ to ‘very poor’ across the different characteristics.
Our analysis of the data also highlighted differences in how some protected characteristics were coded in different datasets. These differences make comparisons (such as ‘how far does the diversity of our workforce reflect the diversity of our tenants?’) hard or impossible.
Pay gap analysis
As well as an audit and analysis of the data held on protected characteristics, we took a detailed look at emh’s pay gap.
Like all employers in the private and voluntary sector with over 250 full-time employees, emh are legally required to report their gender pay gap to the Equality and Human Rights Commission each year. This became a regulation in 2017. However, pay gaps and pay ratios are more complex when you consider the fuller picture of part-time employees across the whole range of equality characteristics. Even more so, when exploring intersectional diversity and pay. We were also able to compare gender pay gaps at emh group with other peer organisations in the housing sector.
Since we completed our analysis, emh have gone on to publish their ethnicity pay gap in their Gender Pay Gap and Ethnicity Pay Gap Reports 2020.
Moving forward
A key part of the project was about supporting emh colleagues to develop their sense of ownership and direction around their next steps. We ran several fun, interactive data workshops with various groups, including tenants, the HR team, managers and leadership team. These validated our findings, and explored how managers would and could make use of improved equality, diversity and inclusion data to improve services across the group.
Creative outputs from Data Orchard's dashboards workshops
We collated all of our findings into a report with ten recommendations for emh. Broadly, the themes covered included:
Ask the right questions and be consistent.
Ask in the right way, at the right time and place.
Create a process with regular cleaning, updating and understand how to monitor it.
Train all staff in equality, diversity and inclusion - especially the data collectors!
We designed a universal questionnaire for gathering data from staff, board and tenants which can be used online and face to face. This incorporates guidance from the Office for National Statistics, along with an understanding of the needs of emh as a group. We also recommended piloting the questionnaire, to understand the barriers and explore how to overcome them.
emh have used the questionnaire to pilot the ‘emh Census’, and have been exploring different methods and incentives for data collection, while working around the additional challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately brought.
They still have gaps in their data, but have begun to make significant headway in some of the protected characteristics data (for example an improvement of +31% completeness of ethnicity data for tenants).
Change in EDI data completeness at April 2021
Kathryn is realistic that the organisation is on a journey that will take time and effort, but feels strongly it has been worth it to take the time to understand their data:
“Bringing Data Orchard in to do this project with us gave us the opportunity to take a step back and to allow ourselves to be challenged. It gave us drive and momentum. We knew our data wasn’t working for us, but rather than being ‘busy fools’ in response, we now had a defined set of actions to take forward to improve our data.”
Part 2
In our second piece in this two-part blog, we find out more about emh’s efforts to fill in the gaps in their equality, diversity and inclusion data.