Building a Diverse Team Toolkit Web App
Legal & General is one of Europe’s largest insurance and management groups, globally helping over 10 million people with saving, investing, insuring and building retirement income. They exist to improve the lives of their customers, building a better society for the long term and creating value for shareholders.
Today’s insights are tomorrow’s future
The company approached Brightec to develop a web toolkit which provokes managers to think differently about their teams. Like many companies, Legal & General face the challenge of hiring more diversely within their teams, and they wanted us to develop a “Diversity and Inclusion” web app that would help address this.
The app had to be intuitive. It had to be able to walk a team leader through each stage of the selection process. The web toolkit needed to analyse complex data in a beautiful, user-friendly way.
Developing the Diversity & Inclusion Web App
The Brightec app development process is unique. As with many of our projects, we worked closely with legal & General throughout the process, working together to define a product that could give the company an accurate insight into their workforce.
Collaborating with Legal & General, the Brightec team developed the Diversity & Inclusion web app. Together, we digitised a process designed by an Occupational Psychology agency and Legal & General’s HR team.
There would be three parts to the web app process; “Diagnose Your Team”, “Define the Difference”, and “Planning for Action”. The MVP would be the first 2 stages. Each stage would capture the required data and educate the end user as to the value of having a diverse team.
A report from the captured data would then be provided to indicate where an end users team is lacking in diversity. An administration site allows senior business leaders to export reports for varying levels of the organisation.
Designing User-friendly Interfaces
Diversity in the workplace has never been more important. Companies that encourage diversity within their teams attract harder workers, highly qualified individuals and people committed to the success of the business.
At the start of this project, Legal & General requested the use of specific technologies their teams were familiar with and could easily maintain. Our app developers had to build a web toolkit that Legal & General staff could access within their internal network. As part of the app development, we had to define the reports and charting metrics that would provide the right information and enough instructional text to make the process self-explanatory.
Working closely with Legal & General, our app developers were able to create a user-friendly three-step process designed to challenge typical thought patterns regarding hiring, promoting and developing team members.
Step 1: Diagnose Your Team
Step 1 allows team leaders to answer integral questions about the strengths and weaknesses of their team. By determining the strengths and weaknesses, the app can diagnose how future proof the team is and what can be improved.
Step 2: Define the Difference
Step 2 uses diagnosis to teach the user about aptitudes to help improve team performance both now and in the future. Aptitudes are indiscriminate and occur equally across different demographics, therefore defining these can help improve team diversity. Discovering which aptitudes are strongest in a team will help identify where there are any weaknesses or areas that could be improved.
Step 3: Plan for Action
Step 3 lets the user work with the recruiting or HR team to develop a plan for hiring, promoting or developing the best people on the team, using the criteria defined by the app. It also provides a downloadable template to help teams work through their ideas together and successfully diversify their teams.
Diversifying to Drive Success
Deloitte research shows that ‘companies with inclusive cultures and diverse talent are 2 times more likely to meet or exceed financial targets, 3 times more likely to be high-performing and 6 times more likely to be innovative and agile’.
The Diversity and Inclusion app was delivered to Legal & General on time and has helped the company discover areas their business is lacking in diversity and the steps they could take to improve.
Developing this app wasn’t just about increasing company diversity, it was also important for Legal & General to educate their teams on the importance of diversity and how it can often drive success within a company.
Developing Apps in the Future
With the help of the Diversity and Inclusion app, Legal & General are now able to hire more diversely within their teams and enjoy a wide range of talent throughout their company.
Brightec are proud to still be working with Legal & General on app development projects. The next step with the app is to continue refining the scope and articulation of questions, making the reports more accurate and informative.
We are also hoping to develop the app into a product that can one day be used outside of Legal & General, but that’s in the future. For now, we are confident the app will continue to promote diversity within Legal & General as they strive for even more success in the future.