How Fidelity Investments Is Using Data And Analytics To Create A Diverse And Inclusive Organization

Amy Philbrook is the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Fidelity Investments, a financial services company with around 50,000 employees. She's been with Fidelity for 24 years working in almost every department. She started her career there in customer service answering phones.

"Diversity is the presence of differences and inclusion is a leveraging those differences to create value," Amy says. They are two separate things and you can easily have one without the other. It's easy to feel included on a team full of people who are just like you. And you can have a very diverse team, but if you don't create an environment that is inclusive and that encourages everyone to share their ideas, those differences won't really matter. You have to have both diversity and inclusion.

As the head of D&I, Amy works closely with the People Analytics team at Fidelity to make sure they leverage data in order to are make the best choices for the organization. "Data is the foundation for every decision you make in corporate America, and human decisions are no different. So working with the leaders in one sense means doing heavy lifting on people analytics and data analysis and then sitting down with the leadership team and putting that data on the table in a way that they can understand. And that motivates them to take action".

Amy shared an example from a recruiting issue at Fidelity that was solved using data analytics. They found that they had a challenge retaining women in their first year at the company, no matter what role they held or what experience level they had. After conducting interviews, analyzing internal social networks, and finding out what managers were observing they were able to pinpoint the issue, which was that in the first year at the company women were more focused on learning the job vs. building a network.

Because they used data to pinpoint the main issue they are now able to work on a direct solution for the problem. They are currently modifying their onboarding process to ensure that everyone coming into the organization has a network of people around them that they can connect with and turn to for help.

In a perfect world we wouldn't need a D&I team because everyone inside of organizations would be focused on staying diverse and inclusive, but we do not live in a perfect world. When it comes to getting leaders to buy into the importance of D&I, Amy says she tries to say away from technical D&I language she talks in terms of business, productivity, outcomes, etc…"I think it (D&I specific language) comes with baggage that creates barriers that waste time and energy trying to get over them."

What you will learn in this episode:

• How to use data to improve diversity and inclusion in your organization
• Why she has stayed at Fidelity for 24 years
• Why everyone should care about D&I and not just leaders
• How to get leaders to care about D&I
• How Amy works with People Analytics to improve D&I inside of Fidelity
• Trends Amy is paying attention to

Link from the episode:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fidelityamyphilbrook/