March 15, 2018 •Summit Consulting
This post was written by Ed Dieterle and Claire Hempel.
Data visualization is one of Summit’s many areas of expertise. Below is a visualization we created to summarize some of the results from a 2017 Gartner study on pay equity. According to a Becker review of the report, firms committed to addressing pay equity have employees who are:
- “20 percent more likely to make extra effort when completing a job” and
- “24 percent less likely to actively look for a new job”.
These are interesting and important findings, but how can we best visualize them?
In addition to creating visualizations, it is important to work with researchers to understand what he or she sees (and doesn’t see) in the visual. Here is what we see. The first visual provides an example of a 100-employee firm that is not committed to addressing pay equity where 50% of employees are engaged, 32% do not make the extra effort, and 18% are actively looking for a new job. All of these are assumed baselines. The second visual shows how the same firm might look if it were committed to addressing pay equity, all else equal. Based on the findings outlined in the Gartner study, the firm could see approximately 10 additional engaged employees.
Visualization is a powerful way to convert words and numbers into graphics that help readers and decision makers better understand and remember research findings. Additionally, visualization provides an ability to (a) comprehend huge amounts of data, (b) perceive emergent properties in the data that were not anticipated, (c) detect problems with the data itself, (d) understanding of both large-scale and small-scale features of the data, and (e) facilitate hypothesis formation.1
If you need help developing visualizations, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
1. Ware, C. (2013). Information visualization: Perception for design (Third ed.). Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.