Guest column from Cy Jordan

Director, Office of Equal Opportunity

For several weeks this spring and summer, a team has been working to summarize and display the Met Council workforce snapshot data in an online dashboard.

I’m pleased to announce this dashboard is now available. We encourage you to check it out.

As a planning agency, we value data and basing our decisions in data. Making this information available to you – our employees, equity change teams, and Council members – provides important context for you to make informed decisions. The information helps us understand where we are today as an organization, compared with the demographics of the region, and what aspects of our hiring, retention, and organizational culture we need to prioritize to be more reflective of the Twin Cities region.

This is one of the first broad applications of this dashboard infrastructure for the Met Council. We are working to update the visual presentation and release other dashboards.

This initial rollout presents the data in alignment with the Met Council’s Affirmative Action plan and shows progress toward the goals in the plan. Updating our Affirmative Action plan and creating this data dashboard provides an important framework to ground our work. We plan to create a tab that highlights the current Met Council workforce data, as well, in collaboration with Human Resources.

Our long-term goal is to release this dashboard for broader, public use through the Met Council’s website for greater community transparency and as information for future job seekers and partners.

This dashboard is a work in progress and we hope you will use it, ask questions that the data should be able to answer, and establish plans in your work areas based on what this tells us about our colleagues. You may also use this framework for viewing workforce data broadly to help you better understand what impacts we can make on regional disparities.

We have an opportunity to do our part to advance internal workforce equity, and also address regional disparities in race and ethnicity through our policies and operational practices.

We are responding to a call to action to separate out (or disaggregate) data for meaningful decision-making. This will help us provide greater transparency as an organization and make sure we are directing our efforts and resources to reduce disparities.

We hope this dashboard gives you a better understanding of where we can prioritize activities to help us meet our Affirmative Action and workforce equity expectations. We will be augmenting this dashboard in the coming weeks with more information about how you might be able to use this information more directly in your planning. A special thank you to the team in Information Services, Human Resources, and the Office of Equal Opportunity for putting this together so quickly.

And thank you to each of you – employees, equity change team members, and Council members – who have been asking for this data and calling for better clarity around our data and long-term expectations. We hope you will use this dashboard and send us your feedback about what works and where we could make improvements. We are beginning the process to assess how it can be modified and deployed on our public website for community use, as well, and your feedback will also guide that process.