How Thomson Reuters Made Self-Identification Initiatives Work for Its Employees

In the case of Thomson Reuters, three central pillars acted as drivers. Those binding goals were to increase the representation and professional growth of diverse talent across the organization, to operationalize B&D across the business, and, in turn, to create and nurture a workplace that has belonging at its core. In that way, Thomson Reuters wanted to promote change at every level of the business.

When outlining your own goals, it's important to tie B&D priorities to quantifiable metrics. Kendik further explained that at Thomson Reuters, those objectives and key results (OKRs) included doubling the amount of Black talent in leadership positions and increasing gender parity, aiming for 45% of leadership roles to be women. In order to reach such clearly delineated goals, Thomson Reuters first had to increase the reach and scope of its datasets.

Converting Unmeasured Data Into Measurable Insights

Thomson Reuters already had a range of datasets, but it didn't have the depth or breadth needed to further its B&D goals. "We were collecting gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability data in only some of the countries that we operated in, so we had to establish a global baseline of data," explains Nelson.

Collecting B&D data while maintaining privacy protections can be challenging. With goals established, Thomson Reuters' next step was to create a working group, spanning internal HR professionals, external HR consultants, legal representatives, and privacy lawyers. By prioritizing an agile approach to project and workforce management, sourcing talent from a pool of cross-functional teams, and breaking the project into sprints, the working group could tackle each day anew, focusing on a subset of countries and the corresponding legal reviews required. Or, as Nelson puts it: "How do you eat an elephant? You start one little piece at a time, right?"

Those little pieces not only refer to evaluating the global team on a country-by-country basis but also determining which data options to offer where. Rather than attempting to get every form option functional in all regions simultaneously, consider how you can make incremental progress in multiple different markets, while remaining respectful of cultural differences. And, most importantly, ask your employees what's relevant to them. Nelson explains that Thomson Reuters is now piloting a religion form option in seven countries based on the feedback that religion was a stronger factor in rebalancing representation than other demographic options the team was working on.