Improving Data Literacy Within Your Organization

Data literacy should empower your employees at a fundamental level, by ensuring teams are up to speed on the tools required to read, understand, and interpret data-driven information. Democratizing data in this fashion means to implement the capacity for information to be accessible to the end-user on their own terms — ideally without an abundance of specialized training.  

In that regard, people should feel confident when applying their understanding in the context of their roles. This happens more readily when data flows directly and seamlessly to those who need to accurately inform their decisions. This in turn, makes it more likely appropriate action will be taken. It also positions workers to complete tasks in less time and to a greater degree of precision.  

The Importance of Data Democratization 

Data is only as useful as an organization’s ability to interpret, understand, and leverage it correctly. When that is the case, the resulting cross-functionally engenders both speedy and agile determination making.  In your organizational hierarchy, this means the goal of data democratization should be to allow non-specialists to gather and analyze data without requiring external help. Useful data enables you to conclude why a new strategy worked out or didn’t work out. Data-driven insights facilitate the avoidance of repeat mistakes. 

Data Literacy Should be the Default Standard  

Companies and organizations seeking to improve data literacy across their workforces must understand the types of accessible, applicable data and the potential use by different employee groups. Organizations must assess individual workers’ ability to comfortably and effectively use the data to execute their jobs. After collecting all the intelligence needed, an organization should draft its data literacy plan. The scheme should encompass employee education and training, as well as development strategies and policies.  

It should also include: 

• Implementation of information acquisition 
• System transformation 

• Analytics 
• Visualization solutions 
• Troubleshooting and support 

These solutions will accomplish most of the required work before the data reaches an employee, ensuring it is as relevant, simple, and actionable as possible. 

The Data Literacy Project 

An excellent place to begin is with a perusal of the information at The Data Literacy Project. This organization has resources for both the assessment of data literacy and online courses and community forums. 

Because data generation is a continuous process, ensuring it is reliable, beneficial, and actionable can present a significant challenge. Accountability is the word by which to help begin improving data literacy within your organization. It’s important to ensure there is at least one identifiable owner for each data segment. 

Encourage Questions About Data Interpretation 

Getting a wide range of perspectives will always bolster and validate the insights gleaned from the information.  

Great questions to ask include 

• What have we missed here? 
• How does this assist in achieving our objectives? 
• Can everyone see the same thing?  

Ultimately, data literacy empowers employees and team members to be more successful in their roles, by making make cross-functional collaboration more manageable and meaningful. There are endless ways to encourage employees to engage with and navigate through data-driven insights. Still, the most important thing is ensuring your leaders emphasize data literacy as a critical aspect of your company’s culture across all divisions.  

Make it Cultural 

Create concise and impactful policies, practices, and procedures that help enforce and allocate employee-training initiatives to learn essential data handling skills. To make it easier for your people to adopt this mindset, offer tuition reimbursement and reward programs for those who seek to level-up their skills outside of traditional work hours. These polices will go a long way toward improving data literacy within your organization.