DE&I metrics help to hold companies accountable

The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion for corporations didn't start with the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, although it was after that incident that demand by employees, customers and other stakeholders for DE&I transparency increased. Several companies began to make DE&I pledges, and many started to share their DE&I data publicly, often as part of their environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports.

A few companies, including Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International and United Airlines, have tied executive and some manager-level compensation to DE&I results. Hyatt Hotels began that practice in 2017, but in 2020 "enhanced the weighting of DE&I in the corporate annual incentive plan by asking all incentive-eligible colleagues to create measurable individual goals focused on DE&I," Hyatt global VP of diversity, equity and inclusion Tyronne Stoudemire wrote in an email. In addition, the company linked executive stock compensation to its progress on DE&I, specifically its commitments in terms of who Hyatt hires and promotes.

"The last two years we started to openly talk about data in a disaggregated and transparent way," said Delta Air Lines VP and chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer Keyra Lynn Johnson. "People want to know better the brands they engage with. One way is to not just share commitment-making but also the real specific actions to meet those commitments. We felt the best way to meet those was to be even more transparent with our data."

There are also business benefits to DE&I information. Attention to DE&I can enhance a company's products and services, its public image and its profits, according to a spring 2022 Harvard Business Review report.

"We see in general as we look at research that more diverse companies perform better, with profitability and customer service scores," said American Airlines managing director of global DE&I Kevin Williams. "For our business, one thing we see is that having a more diverse workforce does impact customer sentiments" and can help to reduce friction. "We work with the customer service team to see if there is anything we can do to support them from a DE&I perspective, and to make sure leadership is reflective of team members."

BTN reached out to several travel suppliers to discuss their DE&I data, what buyers are looking for regarding it, and how they are addressing gaps in representation. While all those approached have some type of DE&I programme, getting them to discuss what is behind their metrics was a challenge, with United – which is being sued by a former diversity manager over discrimination – declining to be interviewed. Others spoke only on a surface level, sharing platitudes like, "DE&I is in our DNA."

Travel buyer DE&I demand

Some suppliers, however, were upfront with where they stood and how much work remains to be done. "DE&I is a journey," said a few. Those are the suppliers that could benefit from their transparency, because in our BTN survey of travel buyers, 41 per cent of 163 respondents said their organisations already assess the DE&I goals and initiatives of potential travel suppliers in their sourcing processes. Further, 21 per cent of 96 respondents noted their companies planned to do the same starting within the next 12 months.

The top three types of suppliers assessed were airlines, hotels and travel management companies. Nearly one in three respondents said they awarded business to suppliers because their DE&I strategies were a differentiator when other offerings were comparable. About 16 per cent have ruled out suppliers due to incompatibility with their own organisation's DE&I strategies.

Still, nearly one in three respondents did not have any supplier partnership selections based on DE&I efforts.

Several suppliers acknowledged that they have seen an increase in questions from travel buyers about their DE&I data and initiatives during the sourcing process. 

Southwest Airlines, which shared its first DE&I report in April, recently held a virtual roundtable for corporate partners with more than 300 participants, said Southwest VP of DE&I Juan Suarez. "The entire topic was about community and DE&I. Those corporate partners wanted to understand where we stood from a DE&I perspective and what efforts we were making to advance programmes." They also asked about diversity reporting in the supply chain, he added.

Hilton Worldwide, which was named to DiversityInc's Hall of Fame in early May, not only has travel buyers asking about its diversity and inclusion objectives but also "several have invited us to speak on the progress we've made for their own programmes," said Hilton global head of diversity, equity, inclusion and recognition DeShaun Wise Porter. "How can they take best practices we've established, and how can we grow from those opportunities."

Metrics diversity and best practices

Exactly what DE&I data is shared varies from entity to entity. "Vanguard companies on data sharing are showing everything," said Korn Ferry senior client partner Andrés Tapia. "Others are more cagey, and are like, 'These are the people of colour numbers,' which is a terrible thing to share. It hides so many things. If you have Asian, Black and Latino under 'people of colour,' you could be a tech company where 80 per cent are Asian, so that's not addressing the Black and Latino underrepresentation. You can tell me in aggregate, but the next sentence should [include the breakdown]. Otherwise, it's a lack of transparency."

Tapia added that putting women and people of colour in the same count is another poor choice. Or if a company reports it has 55 per cent women make up its workforce, "where is your breakdown by senior executive, manager, etc?," he said. "If women and people of colour are all at the bottom, it's not diversity."

In addition, Tapia said the best data also shows how well that talent is moving. "At Korn Ferry, we do talent flow analysis, which is more telling than status," he said. "What is the hiring rate, the promotion rate, the exit rate, the lateral rate? To answer those questions and do the sophisticated analysis requires really good data capture, and too many companies report static data. It's a snapshot, but they have no idea what is happening."

Some travel suppliers follow Tapia's best data practices and even include some statistics on other elements of DE&I beyond race, ethnicity and gender, such as veteran hiring status. Others still focus only on gender, or they'll share the breakdown of their workforce by race and ethnicity, but then won't show the changes from the prior year or won't include statistics on who is filling management roles.

Some organisations can be limited by privacy rules specific to their home nation dictating how data can be shared. "Gender is the easiest to do, because across the globe it is generally permitted to report that data," said Yvette Bryant, SVP of diversity and inclusion for BCD Travel, which was recently named on the 2022 Women Impact Tech 100 list.

"Although limited by laws in various markets, we have made a significant investment to start to gather additional diversity data to help us identify what gaps we have and to formulate plans to close those gaps," she said. For instance, the company is looking at the mid-management and senior management levels to understand what is happening if women aren't progressing, and to address those gaps before getting to the VP data.

Gradual progress

All in all, where BTN could compare multiple reports, progress has been slow.

In the UK, companies with 250 employees or more are required to report gender-based pay comparisons, and certain sectors fare better than others. TMCs, on the whole, perform poorly against the universe of companies reporting data.

On average, UK companies report a 9.8 per cent gap in women's median hourly compensation versus men's. The gaps at major TMCs range from approximately 14 per cent at BCD and 17 per cent at Reed & Mackay to 20 per cent at CWT and 23 per cent at American Express Global Business Travel. The median hourly wage gap was nearly 26 per cent at Clarity and 28 per cent at Agiito.

The UK reporting does not control for men and women performing the same job. It does, however, show that males dominate the highest paid roles at TMCs while women overwhelmingly fill the lowest paid posts. The pay and seniority situation is worse at airlines, though several industry players pointed to furlough schemes that exacerbated those numbers during the pandemic. The most recent data, however, showed that the needle for BCD, CWT and GBT had improved since data was collected for the 2020/21 report.

In the US, DE&I disclosures are not required, but some companies volunteer them. Delta, which includes its DE&I data in its annual ESG report as well as in interim DE&I progress reports, acknowledged that even though its share of Black employees in 2021 increased by four percentage points year over year to 25 per cent, its most recent report released earlier this month showed Black officer representation now has fallen below 2020 levels.

However, the percentage of officers from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups has increased to 16 per cent in 2022 from 10 per cent in 2020, according to the company. In addition, Black external candidates now represent 33 per cent of new hires for general manager, director and managing director roles, up from 20 per cent in 2020.

One way Delta is trying to improve its progress is with its "skills-first" career growth programmes. In 2021, 94 per cent of the carrier's non-executive job openings that were filled externally did not require a college degree, according to the company.

"We don't want to see [diversity] only at the lower tiers of the organisation. Education [requirements] have been a barrier," Delta's Johnson said. "We are increasingly focused on skills, not just education pedigree and background," adding that the company has programmes to grow talent internally as well as the company's Analytics Academy, a three-semester programme in partnership with Georgia State University. "A lot of the talent is already here. We want to make sure employees who begin their careers on the frontline – gate agents, flight attendants, people working in loading bays – have career pathways to management. We also think this is an important part to closing wealth gaps."

In American's most recent ESG report, the company's gender breakdown of permanent employees dropped from 41 per cent in 2019 to 40 per cent in 2020. In its 10 employee categories, percentages of women in different roles generally stayed the same or moved up or down by about one percentage point. The company fared similarly when it came to the ethnic composition of its US employees, which it aggregates as "self-identified minority."

However, in January American shared a DE&I progress report on goals it set in early 2021. The company not only met its goal to increase Black representation at the director level and above by 50 per cent, "but after one year, we grew that population by 81 per cent," Williams said, adding that the company also met its goal of increasing Black representation among senior managers by 20 per cent.  

American is also "hyper-focused" on retention as well as onboarding, added Williams. "Sponsorship is important. Advocacy is important," he said. "Another piece we need to pay attention to and develop is [ensuring] we are supporting diverse levels at different points in careers. Studies show that one-third of minorities leave senior roles, specifically Black leaders, in the first three years. We don’t want to see that at American."

Pledges and beyond numbers

Marriott, which was named in DiversityInc's Hall of Fame last year, has accelerated its objectives to diversify its leadership and business opportunities, including aiming for global gender parity in company leadership by 2023, two years sooner than the original goal, increasing representation of people of colour in executive positions from 20.5 per cent to 25 per cent by 2025, and achieving 3,000 diverse- and women-owned hotels by 2025, Marriott SVP of HR Marisa Milton told BTN. In addition, the company is expanding its 12-months-long Emerging Leader Program to "bring an even sharper focus on the career development needs of our diverse leadership pipeline," Milton said.

Hilton has committed to gender parity in leadership roles and ethnic diversity of 25 per cent at US leadership levels by the end of 2027. The company is continuing to invest in mentoring and sponsorship programmes as well as in its nine "team member resource groups," Wise Porter said. "[The groups] are a phenomenal foundation for cultivating diverse talent," she said. They include not only race and ethnicity categories, but also disability, LGBTQ+, gender, military and generational categories. All are sponsored by Hilton senior leaders.

The company also partnered in January with Guild Education to offer employees the opportunity for debt-free education. The new benefit includes options such as high school completion, English-language learning, digital literacy, professional certifications in areas such as culinary, business, data analytics and technology, and college degrees, according to Hilton.

Importance of inclusion in DE&I reporting

While many DE&I reports focus more on the diversity of DE&I, inclusion action is a key component as well.

"It's not only who you invite, but that everyone who is here feels like they belong," said BCD Travel's Bryant. "We're raising awareness with leaders on how to lead more inclusively. On conducting meetings, are you allowing different voices to be heard? Who are you allocating projects to? Are you letting bias come into play when assigning to a man versus a woman?"

Hilton conducts an annual global employee survey, Wise Porter said. "Are they perceiving our efforts as they pertain to a feeling of inclusion, a sense of belonging?" she said. "Are they feeling recognised? You can have numbers, and even if they're growing, if people don’t feel a sense of belonging or community or opportunity, the true sentiment might be different. Those two go hand in hand."

All this may seem daunting to travel managers as they begin to assess their suppliers' DE&I reports. Even if a travel company does not publicly share DE&I data, it can't hurt to ask for it during the sourcing process. If they don’t have statistics to share, "ask for stories about what they are doing around diversity – are they addressing disability, LGBTQ..." said Korn Ferry's Tapia. "The qualitative answers will be valuable."