Proxfinity in Action: How to Make Inclusion Happen in Real-Time
Recently, we’ve discussed some of the challenges companies face when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Namely, how hiring isn’t enough, and that diversity efforts extend far into the employee’s life cycle with the company. More simply put, how companies need to put a premium on inclusion and make employees feel a sense of value and belonging.
In our last post, we tugged on the simple yet helpful idea of starting small and on common ground. Making the everyday similarities between people apparent, be it favorite vacation destinations or types of movies, to breakdown the greater age, ethnicity, gender or background disparities people may feel. And, we’ve put that theory to work to show just how valuable it really is.
Recently, our CUE smart badge was used for a women leadership summit hosted by a Fortune 500 company to encourage attendees to build relationships with others from a variety of roles and departments across the company and its subsidiaries. For example, perhaps getting such a varied mix of people in the same room would help build a bridge between employees who nearly never interface, such as an attendee from the wholesale and retail branch with those in engineering. The goal? Create greater lateral cohesion across the broader parent company landscape.
The surveys we build for clients at the beginning of their Proxfinity journey inform how attendees will connect, and on what points of interest. As with most deployments, we included a few light-hearted, multiple-choice questions: what’s on their bucket list, and what would they most like to do during a weekend stay in Washington, D.C. In short, icebreakers. At the event, there were a total 6,620 total connections among 266 attendees and the icebreakers were the two top categories that got people talking. That means attendees were able to establish quick, easy similarities as an entry point to conversation - be it their desire to see the 7 wonders of the world, or spend a weekend in D.C. touring museums.
Turns out, when you find a fun, shared interest - interacting with someone new is far more comfortable, especially someone you may not perceive to have as much in common with at the onset. As part of this deployment, we measured attendee demographics and had them identify their ethnicity from the following categories: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, White, Two or More Races or Unknown. Once we received the data from the event, it was clear that no matter what ethnicity an attendee identified as, they all spent an equal amount of time interacting with attendees in all of the other categories.
What does this mean? Firstly, our client had done a great job building a diverse workforce, but we were ultimately able to achieve inclusion with simple, fun prompts that dovetail into greater topics. Icebreakers are a proven gateway to get people comfortable, so they can have the meaningful conversations that drive personal growth, and business value.
Overall, our client saw a 68% increase in conversation at this event using Proxfinity compared to those where they hadn’t deployed our technology, and each attendee had an average of 24 connections lasting 4 minutes on average. In context? That’s 25,536 minutes, or nearly 425 hours, or 18 days worth of team building, relationship strengthening and idea sharing - all because we broke the ice.
Interested in what Proxfinity can do for you? Be sure to check out some of the other case studies on our site to see how people have taken their events from “not working” to networking.