Last month, Out Leadership hosted a webinar, OL-iQ: Capturing the LGBT+ Opportunity, which explored some of the insights Out Leadership and our clients at EY, DuPont, and Royal Bank of Canada have gleaned from our new LGBT+ inclusion diagnostic, OL-iQ.
OL-iQ provides firms with “a snapshot for opportunity, outlining strengths and weaknesses, and gives [companies] a plan to act on if they desire,” according to Out Leadership Managing Director Stephanie Sandberg. The need for a tool to provide clear insights into how a company is doing around LGBT+ inclusion was underscored by DuPont’s Director of Engineering Gayle Gibson, who told participants, “data drives awareness, it drives understanding, and from a leadership standpoint frankly it helps drive accountability… this is really the tool to say ‘we truly value our employees.’”
This value extends beyond simply identifying the policies required to demonstrate LGBT+ inclusion. While many indices currently evaluate the policies a company has in place, OL-iQ attempts to dive deeper into the business impact of these inclusion practices. As Todd Sears, Founder and Principal of Out Leadership, remarked, “Policy does not equal culture. There’s a gap, and that’s what we’re trying to address with OL-iQ.”
Chris Crespo, Inclusiveness Director, EY, spoke about how OL-iQ’s data-driven insights helped provide EY with a holistic overview of its efforts around LGBT+ inclusion. “We had a strategy around why we were implementing LGBT+ inclusion efforts, but we never measured it, and so therefore it was hard to articulate what we were doing… OL-iQ helped us think through how we look at each one of our LGBT+ inclusion strands.”
At a more tactical level, RBC’s Jeff Formanek outlined how OL-iQ revealed that implementing a system for employees to self-identify as LGBT+ could serve a jumping off point for further inclusion efforts at the bank. “[Self-ID] would actually unlock out strategy in the other dimensions… Implementing self-ID would allow us to look at the effects of external engagement, how our employees are engaging with our philanthropic programs, and how well we had fostered an inclusive culture.”
For more information about OL-iQ please visit outleadership.com/oliq.