5 Metrics to Measure EDI in Your Organization
As your organization continues its efforts to achieve diversity and inclusion in your workplace, how are you tracking the success of your Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives? How do you know your business is making a real impact instead of simply checking a box?
While Black Canadians have reported progress in their employer’s commitment to be more inclusive and equitable, several Black Canadians have also reported that their employer hasn’t taken significant action.
If you don’t examine whether you’ve made any improvement with your EDI objectives, how do you know you’ve created an environment where all your employees feel welcome and valued?
Tracking the growth of your EDI strategy is important to understand if you’ve made meaningful change and to identify where you need to improve within your organization.
To measure your EDI progress, both qualitative and quantitative methods are beneficial. While quantitative data allows you to evaluate the development of your EDI objectives, understanding the experiences of your employees is essential to assessing the success of your strategies.
Here are five metrics your organization can measure to determine the progress of your EDI initiatives.
Diversity
Measuring diversity can be achieved by looking at a few different characteristics. If you aim to assess the progress on diversity in your organization, you can gather demographic information such as age, gender, race, sexual orientation, education, parental and marital status, and religion. Comparing the number of people who belong to a demographic compared to employees you hired previously is one way you can measure your improvement.
Another way to measure diversity in your organization is to compare your current employees to your applicant pool. If diversity is reflected in the applicant pool and not among the employees in your organization, then you need to review your hiring and selection process. Consider whether there are biases in the hiring process and evaluate the diversity among your hiring team.
2. Representation
While diversity is an important metric, if it isn't represented across all levels of your organization, how can you evaluate the growth of your diversity initiatives? When measuring representation, examine whether diversity is present across your organization. This metric is calculated by taking the percentage of employees from controlled groups and comparing it to company benchmarks.
When reviewing representation within your organization, consider if there has been an increase in leadership positions among underrepresented groups. Determine where racialized and female employees are missing in your organization. Diversity isn't achieved by simply recruiting diverse employees. If all your underrepresented employees are in entry-level roles, this indicates there is room for improvement.
3. Employee Retention
Employee retention and turnover are also useful metrics to examine whether your EDI initiatives are improving. Employee turnover might not offer a clear evaluation of why employees are leaving your organization, but it could indicate whether inclusion is a contributing factor.
If underrepresented employees are leaving at a higher rate than other employees, this is a good indicator of whether your EDI strategies need improvement. The turnover rate can be calculated by taking the number of employees based on a demographic and dividing it by the total number of employees in your organization.
4. Advancement and Promotion
Advancement and promotion rates can help you track whether your EDI strategy contributes to the development of underrepresented employees. Examine the promotion rates across different groups to understand who is receiving promotions and how. Are certain groups taking longer to get a promotion than others? What learning and development opportunities are offered to your underrepresented employees compared to other employees?
To calculate the promotion rate of different groups, take the number of employees in that group and divide it by the number of employees in your organization. Then compare the promotion rates of different groups to your average employee promotion rates. Consider the promotion rate of underrepresented groups and whether your EDI strategy addresses the promotion of diverse employees.
5. Inclusion
Measuring the success of your inclusion initiatives is more challenging than the other metrics because it doesn’t involve numbers. One of the most valuable methods to measure inclusion is gathering employee feedback completed through engagement surveys or qualitative interviews. Your surveys should be planned carefully to address the experiences of different groups. Incorporate questions that assess where employees have experienced exclusion.
Gartner developed an inclusion index that suggests seven dimensions you can use to assess inclusion. The index is based on qualitative interviews with more than 30 EDI executives. The seven dimensions include: fair treatment, integrating differences, decision-making, psychological safety, trust, belonging, and diversity.
Measuring your EDI initiatives and tracking the success of your strategies is essential to understanding where you’ve made progress and where you need to improve. Listening to your employees and gathering employee feedback are some of the most important steps you can take to achieve an inclusive and equitable workplace.