Diversity, Equality & Inclusivity and their importance at DVJ

Over the past months, I have heard these terms being used and misused in all kinds of situations. Without any doubt, these are important principles to build an organization and be successful. Over the past years, we have implemented these principles in our organization.

For me, this starts with equality and the way you organize yourself. In many organizations, you can see an organizational structure that is based on seniority and age. We have changed this by creating a structure that is based on equality and is not related to age. This gives young people the opportunity to grow faster and enables senior people to guide them without hierarchy. Besides this, we have created teams with people from different backgrounds leading to more than 15 nationalities at our office in Utrecht with a total of 75 people. The objective was to create an equal and diverse environment leading to an organization where everyone feels they are part of.

And we indeed make this objective come true by incorporating every employee into specific activities. As a research agency, we focus on content and innovation. By making all people responsible for contributing to content and innovation creation and distribution, we emphasize the nature of an equal and diverse environment even more. We hope that the result of this organizational structure will make our people happier which we measure every day with our Happy People Index to see if we are successful. An additional advantage of having a team that is equal, diverse and inclusive is that we are able to relate to a lot of countries and markets across the world. This means that we are truly a global company and not a global company in a patchwork of local entities.

Besides our own organization, we also hear these words more and more when it comes to conducting research. In this case, this term is more related to representativity. In research, this has become a discussion around a couple of variables like age, gender and education. Gradually, we realize that this is not true. It is related to all kinds of variables, like device usage, background, language knowledge, motoric capabilities and disabilities, etc. This also means that the recruitment of samples becomes more and more important.

By doing many validation studies, we have found that the focus of research is too much towards the source (the panel) which is not the best approach. In order to be representative (diverse and inclusive for everyone), other things need attention. Although we think there is a lot to learn, we focus a lot on using samples that are not only representative of age, gender and education but also on a lot of other characteristics. This means a different way of working, but it will definitely lead to more quality in the data.