Is it possible to measure diversity within a UX team?
I bet so …!
As a UX team, we faced what we have the same role within the organization, and we all aim for the same result. However, each member brings something unique to our team, and that enriches us.
Ten months ago, we assessed our UX maturity level within the organization, and we discovered that each of us had particular interests within our practice. Some have an interest in research, others want to continue growing as UX Designers, a few others as UX leads, and some more love to be closer to the visual, and others start on the path of UX writing. I have seen how we have grown in soft and hard skills (technical knowledge).
Understanding the benefits of having diverse teams is essential to encourage the team to transform ourselves and accept diversity. As of today, our team comprises 23 women and 14 men of different ages living different life cycles and professional training that ranges from graphic design, industrial design, anthropology, psychology, mechatronics, among others.
In 2014, Sangeeta Badal of Gallup published the article The Business Benefits of Gender Diversity. It can be seen that the business units with gender diversity show an average quarterly net profit of 19% higher than the less diverse units.
Within this study, another of the most relevant findings that I find is what:
Open, trusting, and supportive relationships among coworkers and supervisors unleash the power of diversity by enabling employees to turn their differences in thought, behavior, skills, knowledge, and talent into innovative ideas and practices that can drive a company forward.
Part of the experiments that we started as a team since the beginning of the year was on how to connect and establish bonds as a team, but how to build bonds within the team when the work rate is intense, communication is not efficient, and the coordination of free time and the agendas is in itself challenging.
When we began to apply the dynamics, the first with each team was Personal Maps. I managed to understand some of the behaviors that I had been observing since January of this year. When we did the Diversity Index practice, it allowed me to understand each one more thoroughly. It also allowed me to discover how diverse we are. I managed to connect the dots between their essence (personal maps) and their perception.
The dynamics of the Diversity Index helps the team understand how high the current level of diversity is. It is a simple and effective tool better to understand the degree of diversity within the working groups.
You can download the template to put this dynamic into practice with your team of Management 3.0 (https://management30.com/practice/diversity-index/).
Like the other dynamics, each week, we give ourselves a time of approximately one hour to allocate to integrate ourselves by teams. Since we are a large team, we discover that we work better if we are a smaller subgroup, ten members maximum. Normally the team chooses the schedule that suits us all, and we do it in zoom since we are distributed in different locations.
When we carried out this dynamic, we first established the criteria. We began with the conversation reflecting on what we consider diverse; one of the first topics was gender and ages. However, it took a turn more on skills. We began to discover that we come from different training (mechatronics, design engineering, photography, arts, systems, and we had a varied training between courses, masters, and doctorates).
As a team leader, it is information that dominated, since I have been involved in all the selection and hiring processes. Still, I discovered that many of them did not know well where their colleagues were coming from, so the conversation moved to where their interests converge and how they were finding more diversity among them.
Discovering that we have cultural diversity due to each one (several come from different regions of the country), they have a strong interest in languages. Music is that amalgam for them, even if they are very different tastes.
Once we detect the areas of diversity, we assign them a scale and assign a score. Within the highest scores was the area of training and music, followed by languages, which allows me to understand that our strengths are located in those three areas. The result itself is not what is essential, but the process of how they got to those 35 points.
In this team, I noticed that the decision-making was consensual, democratic, and started from the debate. It was an exercise in collaborative reflection that helped me understand the degree of natural leadership that some already have.
I consider it vitally important to know the level of mastery of soft and hard skills and the diversity level that our teams have to solve projects better. We have discovered that assigning the appropriate roles in the proper equipment gives extraordinary results.
Among the learnings that I took is that I continue to learn from them, I continue to know them a little more in each dynamic, how they react to reflection, debate, constructive criticism, and the roles they play when working as a team.
The next experiment that I would love to carry out is that at the end of the four teams, the diversity index makes a global diversity index of the team find the pattern, the most substantial area as a UX team. And after that, to join new groups with a sufficient degree of diversity to allow us to better tackle projects.
Among the results, he noticed more rapprochement between team members. There is a more direct and closer communication circle, which helps us address problems more quickly and in a preventive way, thereby preventing them from becoming fires or emergencies challenging to solve in the long term.
As for advice when carrying out this practice, it is to carry out some prior integration practice; in my case, it was Personal Maps since knowing each other a little more generates more debate on the criteria to choose, since the risk of not having contact before, is it can get very technical or generic as just technical skills and genre.
If you are still unclear about how diverse your team is, I invite you to carry out this Diversity Index dynamic. I assure you that you will be surprised. You will discover that it is possible to establish a metric that helps you make decisions over developing with precision to individual talent and as a team, creating a better environment in a fun and enjoyable way.
