Case Studies

Recognising and developing talent within Experian's diverse employee population is vital to the Group's successful growth. The Experian Business Network is one of the ways in which the Group helps to ensure that individuals achieve their full potential. This development forum focuses on emerging talent by bringing together employees who have been identified as having 'high potential' so that they can develop their skills and network with peers and senior management. Participants are invited to join the forum for 12 months, during which time they are personally mentored by a senior business leader.

Izabella Jagiello-Marks, who works for Experian in Nottingham, UK, participated in the Experian Business Network during 2010. She said: "It was an opportunity to step back and review my career under expert guidance. The relationship with my mentor was invaluable, helping me to make an important career move during the period and to develop my business network. I came away from this experience on a real high, with even greater motivation and a desire to build a career with Experian for the long term".

Experian's global people survey, carried out every 18 months, provides valuable insights into the views of employees and their level of engagement with the business. The third survey in 2010 achieved 88% participation, 4% better than the previous survey.

The results demonstrated real progress in those areas that employees identified as a priority for improvement in the previous survey (particularly Senior Leadership and Talent Management). These became the focus of action plans at a global and regional level. Indeed, the question 'I believe that action has been taken on areas identified for improvement in the last (2009) survey' was a top five scoring item globally and Experian scored 7% higher on this item than the external benchmark of 'Global High Performing Organisations'.

Overall results from the 2010 survey showed a positive trend since the first 2007 survey, although the operational and cost pressures on the business were reflected in the employees' responses under categories such as 'Resources'.

The 2011 CR report described the development of some new Experian software, which infers people's ethnic origins from their name: Diversity Monitor. In 2011 Experian began to apply the product to help companies understand and manage the diversity of their workforces. A case study showing The Royal Free Hospital's use of the product can be reached here. It has also used the software to analyse its own UK workforce.

Experian's Diversity Monitor tool works by comparing a list of names with a database, containing millions of first and family names from around the world. By weighting the combinations of names it can provide a strong indicative analysis of the ethnic mix of the names on the list. It is a statistical tool, in that it is best applied to large numbers of names, rather than an individual, but it gives companies the ability to look quickly and easily at their staff mix, without the need for intrusive questionnaires. It can be used to understand how the patterns in the employee data reflect the organisation's structure, the diversity of its employee catchment pool and its customers.

Experian initially used it to profile its 1,600 people working in Nottingham. By analysing a set of employee records and comparing it to the local population the Human Resources (HR) team was able to see which groups of people might be under- or over-represented in the workforce. The answer was 'none' — the Experian employees matched the catchment very closely.

But there were immediate additional insights that came from the data, and the HR team took on a more detailed analysis, extending this to the whole of the Experian UK team. During the year they have been able to look much more deeply into the statistics: are all divisions equally diverse, or are there concentrations of particular groups of people in particular roles? How does ethnic and gender diversity relate? Are more recent recruits more or less diverse than the average; is Experian getting its recruitment right?

The answers are extremely valuable and confirm that Experian's employees show a strong mix of origins. They also found that Experian is becoming more diverse; younger people come from a much greater mix of backgrounds, which is a useful insight for the recruitment team.

The project is ongoing, and they have also shared the findings with a representative group of employees to ask for their reaction to this use of their records. Employees felt that as long as it was only their names that were used and these were only handled by internal HR staff, they had no issues and felt it was a service with huge benefits for companies and society as whole.