How HR Leaders Can Measure the Impact of DEI in the Workplace

Placing a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) can lead to a range of benefits for your business, including:

• A stronger employer brand
• Access to a broader range of skills, experience and insights in your workforce
• Higher levels of employee engagement and satisfaction
• Reduced staff turnover

Furthermore, research has shown clear connections between diversity and improved financial performance and innovation. The latest analysis by McKinsey - which has published three reports investigating the business case for DEI since 2015 - showed the most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to achieve higher profitability than their less inclusive peers.

If this is an area where you're committed to better performance in the coming years, one of the goals you need to focus on is measuring the impact of your DEI initiatives.

In short, how do you know if your efforts to improve diversity are delivering results?

Get feedback from the workforce

Your workforce is often the best source of insight you have into how you're performing from an HR perspective.

When you want to build a picture of inclusion and representation in your workplace, it's crucial to engage with your employees and to study people's feelings and opinions on this issue.

According to research by Gartner - which was based on interviews with more than 30 DEI executives and surveys of nearly 10,000 employees - the challenge of establishing the right metrics for inclusion and asking the most appropriate questions can be simplified by focusing on seven key dimensions:

1. Fair treatment: Do people who contribute to the company's performance and achievements of its goals get fair recognition and reward?
2. Integrating differences: Do employees respect and value all opinions from their fellow workers?
3. Decision making: Are ideas and suggestions from all team members taken into account when decisions are made?
4. Psychological safety: Do employees feel confident and secure enough to express their true thoughts and feelings at work?
5. Trust: Do workers feel they receive honest and open communication from the business?
6. Belonging: Do all employees - regardless of their background, demographic profile and other characteristics - feel their employer and co-workers care about them?
7. Diversity: Can employees see diverse representation at management level, as well as across the workforce as a whole?

The more positive answers you get to these questions in employee surveys and feedback sessions, the more confident you can feel that your DEI efforts are bearing fruit. On the other hand, negative responses and criticism in these areas will shed light on where you're currently falling short and a change of strategy is needed.

Analyze recruitment practices

One effective way to measure the effectiveness of your efforts to promote DEI in recruitment is by comparing the diversity of your typical applicant pool with your current employees.

If you find that your job ads are attracting applications from a wide range of individuals but representation on your teams is still lacking, it could be a sign that you need to raise DEI standards in your hiring cycle.

There are various measures you can introduce to promote inclusive recruitment, such as:

• Rethinking how you write job ads and describe roles to attract applications from the broadest possible range of candidates
• Designing your workplace policies to suit a variety of profiles (offering flexible schedules to help new mothers combine work with childcare, for example)
• Taking steps to eliminate bias from your hiring practices

Examine DEI at all levels

Building a truly diverse and equal workplace isn't just about recruitment - career progression, development pathways and promotion prospects are all important too.

To get a more full and accurate picture of diversity - and whether your work to improve DEI is generating results in all areas of the business - it's useful to look at levels of representation in senior positions.

You might find that entry-level roles and frontline teams are rich and varied but the company's leadership is quite the opposite, which would suggest underrepresented groups aren't getting fair opportunities to move up the ladder. If this is the case, think about what you can do to change the situation, such as setting a mandatory minimum number of applications from diverse candidates that must be met before any appointment is made.

Make sure there's accountability

To raise your DEI initiatives to a new level and improve your organization's ability to measure their impact, it's important to establish a certain level of responsibility and accountability for these activities.

Ideally, the drive to build a more diverse and inclusive company will have full support from the C-suite. This will make it more likely that a senior executive will be able to step up and sponsor DEI programs, which could lead to concrete actions such as:

• The introduction of training programs to improve analysis and measurement of your diversity performance
• More tools and technologies being made available to enable better data analytics
• Development of a clear system for DEI performance monitoring, including reporting on goals and outcomes

With key tools and provisions like these in place, you can feel confident of making steady progress in assessing your DEI initiatives and creating a more inclusive, representative and successful business.