How Illoominus’ Reporting Helped Greenlight Level Up Their DEI Strategy

Greenlight is a fintech company dedicated to helping parents raise financially-responsible kids. Through its innovative money management platform and debit card for kids and teens, Greenlight empowers families to automate allowances, manage chores, set spending controls, and save for the future. With millions of users, Greenlight encourages financial literacy by teaching children to earn, save, spend wisely, give back, and invest, all under parental supervision.

Greenlight experienced a significant growth from 80 employees in 2019 to over 400 in 2022. During this period, the Chief People Officer, Ben Swartwout, prioritized recruitment efforts by implementing a more structured interview process to navigate market fluctuations effectively. However, they identified a diversity gap in their hiring process. They analyzed their recruiting funnel to make sure certain demographics weren't dropping out at specific points and identified, for example, that women weren't making it to the top of the funnel.

Goals

In 2019, the company lacked a formal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) strategy, instead relying on various individual initiatives and unconscious bias training. By 2021, they strengthened their commitment by hiring a DEI manager, diversifying their board, and implementing a roadmap fully supported by leadership. They set clear targets to increase the representation of underrepresented groups throughout the organization, including in management roles.

Despite these advancements, the company faced challenges in tracking and reporting diversity metrics effectively. Their HR software proved inadequate for comprehensive reporting, leaving gaps in understanding employee sentiment through engagement surveys and specific outcomes related to diversity, promotions, and employee turnover.

"As a metrics-driven company, how do we actually move any of these metrics or make improvements and understand the data?"  - Ben Swartwout, Chief People Officer

That's where Illoominus came in — to bring insights and metrics into those goals and give full transparency into the success of their strategy. 

“When we engaged the team, we immediately saw an opportunity to help them activate their DEI strategy. They had a road map and we came in to provide clarity around where to invest efforts moving forward to meet their priorities and metrics to see if they were working.” - Noelle London, CEO, Illoominus

Solution

Illoominus helped bring all the inclusion data into one place to understand what's happening in DEI across the employee journey, like who you are sourcing, hiring, retaining, and promoting.

After analyzing the company's data, the People Leader found that attrition rates vary across different teams. For example, while the customer service team is the most diverse, it also has the highest turnover rate. Certain underrepresented groups turnover, like Black women, more often than others, especially those outside engineering and product. By consolidating these insights, they gained a comprehensive view of employees' experiences and identified areas where targeted efforts could make the greatest difference.

“We were able to help move the team from manual reporting efforts to providing DEI data insights and metrics at their fingertips so they could spend their time focused on the initiatives that drive improvements,” - Noelle London, CEO, Illoominus

"What I like about Illoominus is that it's helping us to connect the dots. We can create a hypothesis from the data and try things to see what works and see what drives outcomes. That's been the hardest part with DEI everywhere that I've worked. You know what to do, but you don't have a way to connect any of those initiatives to actual outcomes. That's what I think Illoominus is helping us to do." - Ben Swartwout, Chief People Officer

Outcomes

By using Illoominus to improve and track their metric-driven DEI strategy, the company could go beyond overall representation numbers with powerful data points and make informed decisions to: 

• Increase employee engagement and productivity 

• Bring equity to pay, career development and promotion track 

• Create a safe, more inclusive work environment for everyone 

• See leadership red flags quicker to avoid collateral damage and high attrition

• Observe their recruiting funnel and see where the gaps are 

“Diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do and it's the right business decision to make. It helps us be more productive and be a better company. Before Illoominus, we weren't really able to report on any intersectional demographics or identities, so it's helped us to look at that more. Now, we can connect the actions we're taking on DEI to output numbers by seeing how they affect attrition and hiring representation.” - Ben Swartwout, Chief People Officer

Up next, the People team wants to implement segmented reports for executives quarterly that show representation, attrition, and promotions within their groups to start holding them accountable for driving improvements within their groups.

“The goal is to give every C-level executive a report to keep the DEI Strategy top of mind and task with areas of improvement. This will bring accountability at every level” - Ben Swartwout, Chief People Officer