How DSG measure Diversity, Equality and Inclusion across the global maritime sector using Makerble

About DSG

DSG (Diversity Study Group) offers global DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) expertise to organisations in the shipping and maritime sectors. Their work includes consulting, benchmarking and industry events.

The Challenge

  • Organisations in the shipping and maritime sectors want to understand how they are doing towards diversity, equality and inclusion. They are particularly interested in how their performance changes year-on-year as well as how they compare to industry averages.

  • To meet this need, DSG created an annual survey for employees of organisations across the maritime sector.

  • The problem was that the process of creating, deploying and analysing those survey results was time-consuming and repetitive. This hampered DSG’s ability to expand its offering of surveys and grow the number of organisations it worked with.

  • For example, once surveys were completed, a data specialist had to

    • download the results

    • clean the data

    • upload results to a data analysis platform

    • consolidate and anonymise results from several shipping organisations so as to create a benchmark

    • customise the platform to provide filters that enabled the information to be analysed

  • DSG’s current process was not scalable. This prompted CEO Heidi Heseltine to reach out to Makerble.

The Solution

  • We worked with Heidi and her data specialist to understand their current process and identify how we could automate various aspects of it. We realised early on that Makerble Survey Website Builder would be the right product to achieve the user experience Heidi wanted to offer DSG’s clients. However in order to deliver on the benchmarking and anonymisation we needed to build a couple of custom features into the platform. These features - Compare and a rebuilt version of Signup Pages - are now available across the platform to all users of Makerble Surveys.

  • This allowed DSG to create a branded surveys platform containing their DEI surveys; it’s powered by Makerble Survey Website Builder.

  • Each organisation in the maritime sector is set up as a project and has their own unique survey link which they distribute to their employees.

    • The survey link is a Signup Page that collects demographic data and employee experience data

  • The link allows employees to complete the survey anonymously and if particular organisations have specific questions they want to add to or remove from the survey, DSG is able to make those adjustments.

    • This is possible due to the Waves feature within Makerble Surveys - no pun intended - which enables different versions of a survey to be created whilst still allowing the results of the common questions to be aggregated

  • Human Resources staff within each organisation have their own Makerble User Accounts which gives them access to a private dashboard showing their organisation’s results. They can see their year-on-year trends as well as how they compare to industry averages.

    • Results are displayed on a Progress Board and a customised view of the Compare Demographics page

The Result

  • DSG are now better positioned than ever before to lead the conversation around DEI across the global maritime and shipping sectors.

  • Their capability to deploy multi-national, multi-organisation DEI surveys at scale, gives DSG an industry-leading depth of insight into the employee experience of the global maritime workforce and the extent to which people’s experience at work differs on the basis of their gender, ethnicity or other protected characteristic.

  • These insights will lead to practical changes to HR policies, recruitment practices and workplace culture that ensure that no-one suffers at work as a result of their background, wherever in the world they work.

  • From an efficiency perspective, DSG is able to create, deploy and analyse surveys quicker than they could before. This is how Makerble is enabling DSG to change the world faster.