‍

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

• Companies in the shipping and maritime sectors need to know how they are faring with regards to diversity, equality and inclusion; in particular, how their performance changes year-on-year as well as how their company compare to industry averages.
• To meet this need, DSG had created an annual survey for employees of organisations across the maritime sector.
• The difficulty they were facing was scalability. The process of creating, deploying and analysing those survey results was time-consuming and repetitive. This was hampering DSG’s ability to expand their offering of surveys and grow the number of organisations it worked with.
• For example, once surveys were completed, a data specialist was needed in order to:
  • download the results for each company
  • 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

The Solution

• We worked with DSG and their external data specialist to understand the current processes and identify where we could automate it. We realised early on that Makerble Surveys would be the right product to achieve the user experience DSG wanted to offer its clients. However, in order to deliver on the benchmarking and anonymisation requirements, we needed to build a several custom features into the platform. These features included a Comparison tool and enhancements to the survey functionality which are now available across the platform to all users of Makerble Surveys.
• These features allowed DSG to create a branded surveys platform containing their DEI surveys.
• Each company they work with in the maritime sector is set up as a project on Makerble Surveys and is given their own unique survey link which they distribute to their employees. The survey link enables the collection of both demographic data and employee experience data.

• The link allows employees to complete the survey anonymously and if companies have specific questions that they want to add to or remove from the survey, DSG is able to make those adjustments whilst still enabling the commonly used questions to be compared between companies.
• Human Resources staff within each organisation have their own Makerble User Accounts which enables them to access their own private dashboards containing their company's results. The dashboards display year-on-year trends as well as how the company's results compare to industry averages for each survey question.
• HR staff have access to a variety of analytics tools - including filters and segmentations - which enable them to notice the extent to which their employees' experiences at work differ based on their gender, ethnicity or other protected characteristic.

The Result

• DSG are now better positioned to lead the conversation around DEI across the  global maritime and shipping sectors.
• They have the capability to deploy multi-national, multi-organisation DEI surveys at scale and spot sector-wide trends affecting employee experience across the global maritime workforce.  
• These insights are leading 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.