Culture, diversity and inclusion

Celebrating diversity and uniting teams.

While ‘diversity and inclusion’ has been an area of increasing investment and energy for many organisations over the past few years, most continue to struggle to demonstrate meaningful success.

At Mercer, we encourage clients to avoid typical programmatic diversity initiatives to create forward-looking, strategic programs that integrate with the broader people and business strategy.

Our expert consultants have a wealth of experience from working with hundreds of employers to measure and optimise diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Celebrating diversity and aligning team values.

How Mercer can help

A leader in data-centric, insight-led, diversity and inclusion consulting, Mercer works with you to build diverse and inclusive workplaces that deliver measurable business outcomes in the areas of business growth, compliance, talent optimisation and innovation.

Mercer’s distinct approach to diversity and inclusion combines the latest scientific research with workforce analytics, world-class expertise in leadership and organisation performance, and peer-to-peer networking opportunities for our clients.

Our culture, diversity and inclusion consulting can help you to:

Get diversity and inclusion initiatives onto the strategic business agenda.
Review the internal forces that are affecting your people and standing in the way of your diverse and high performing workforce.
Build diversity programs and demonstrate return on investment.
Gain leadership commitment.
Develop inclusive leadership and management.
Provide sponsorship, talent management and career pathing programs.
Have cultural intelligence for internal and external success.
Create tailored learning programs.

Case Study: Evidence + Engagement + Partnership = Success

A professional services organisation praised for its diversity programs was not making any progress against its representation goals—and numbers looked weak relative to external benchmarks.

Analysis of its own workforce data and direct engagement with business leaders led to a series of interventions driven by HR to enable diversity:

Eliminating ratings in the first year for senior hires to prevent lateral turnover, particularly among diverse employees.
Pairing diverse talent with top-rated supervisors and mentors.
Proactively marketing critical cross-business and cross-geography experience (for example, training).
Conducting regular pay equity assessments to counter diverse exits.
Implementing leadership interventions after a maternity leave of absence.

These combined actions put the organisation back on its critical path, dramatically improving retention of diverse talent and accelerating its leadership pipeline.

Low or declining employee engagement, and inadequate diversity were two of the top human capital risks and concerns found by high-growth companies in 2019.

[Source: Mercer Global Talent Trends Study 2019]

World-class expertise to create diverse workforces.

Why partner with us

Mercer has found the most successful starting point for meaningful conversation with executives is to bring together the three elements of a diverse workforce:

An understanding of the legal and environmental contexts for diversity, which represent business imperatives for change.
Representation data by country, industry and occupation that highlight areas of opportunity and provoke action.
An examination of the organisation’s internal labour flow—the process by which an organisation attracts, develops, rewards and retains its talent—using Mercer’s proprietary Internal Labour Market (ILM®) tool, with the objective of identifying unique points of risk and areas of opportunity.

By taking this contextual approach, we will help you implement initiatives and actions that shift the needle on your inclusive culture and diversity objectives.