Implementing inclusion into an organisation helps to embrace the concepts of awareness, acceptance, respect and understanding. Inclusion involves utilising everyone’s differences to benefit the organisation. Each member of an organisation must be valued for his or her skills, experience and perspectives to help create an environment where everyone feels comfortable and can work to the best of their ability. To achieve an inclusive culture within an organisation, employees must feel valued, listen to and respected by everyone at all levels within the business. For inclusion to work, leaders must challenge biases whilst being aware of their own unconscious biases and they must create an atmosphere which provides energy and commitment.
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) can be hard to measure when trying to implement new strategies into your organisation. However, once you get past the basics, you need to find out what metrics work in your company. Picking metrics that will help you keep track of your progress over time will benefit your organisation as they will be high quality metrics that will also help eliminate researcher bias.
Research diversity and inclusion metrics
Researching diversity and inclusion metrics is the first step to take when wanting to implement strategies within your organisation. Within the researching stage, there are 5 steps to consider ensuring that you can develop the diversity and inclusion metrics further and that the metrics you choose are the most effective for your company.
Identify
The first step you should take is by identifying what you want to accomplish from the diversity and inclusion metrics. Using prompt phrases such as “I want to produce a workplace that…”.
You can use prompt phrases like these for several goals that you want to achieve. You can either merge sentences together or keep them one sentence per goal, it all depends on what is best for you.
For example: “I want to produce a workplace where everyone feels valued, everyone can communicate effectively and can work to the best of their ability”.
Describe outcomes which show success
Secondly, is to define your goal on the outcome that shows that you have accomplished the goal. For example:
Pick relevant metrics
Choosing which metrics to use is extremely important because as time goes on and your situation changes, it will signal how well or poorly the outcome is coming along. The more outcomes you are looking to achieve, the more metrics you will need to use.
There are several metrics you can choose from but deciding which ones to use must be chosen with care as you want to pick metrics that are the most effective.
Improve and add metrics over time
If you achieve some of your goals through using metrics over time, then that’s great because it shows that what you’re doing is working and you’re achieving inclusion within the workplace.
Improving the metric would be the next step once you have achieved your first outcome as you will want to improve your company’s inclusiveness further. The key is to identify how everyone in the organisation feels and to understand what they want to see from their company. Implementing goals that you have created is a good way to start but including employees’ opinions will help to increase inclusion further.
Correlate metrics
Tracking multiple methods will help you to track the whole story of how you’ve made your organisation inclusive. Correlation metrics such as demographic and company will help you to get the full picture of how inclusive changes really are. If you don’t correlate metrics, it makes it easier for bias to creep into your research.
Collecting data from using these metrics helps you to keep track of your progress and your success of any project. It not only helps you paint a full picture, but it enables you to have a repeatable process that you know will evolve over time.
How to measure them
Ranked methods
Ranked method metrics are single statements that allows the respondents to answer on scale of 1 to 5, 1 being “strongly disagree” and 5 being “strongly agree”. This will help to identify how employees feel across the organisation.
Here are some examples of ranked method statements that you can use when selecting this metric:
Demographic
Using demographic metrics will help you to identify important areas in your company that may have problems. However demographic metrics should be focused on completely as it can build identity-based business decisions which can create resentment and can alienate different groups of people. Instead you should link demographic metrics to other metrics like ranked method data as it can be used more effectively this way.
Using diversity and inclusion metrics of this sort can be difficult to get a true picture as the questions are based on self-identification. To dismiss any potential issues, you should include a “prefer not to say” section on all questions asked. If you get this answer a lot throughout your questionnaire then there may be other issues within your company that you need to address if employees do not feel comfortable to answer the questions.
Company wide
Company wide metrics are used to show the impact of diversity and inclusion projects on a business and should be correlated to data available through other metrics. Company wide metrics that you can use within your organisation could be the following:
Correlational metrics
Correlational metrics are huge storytellers when it comes to being measured against ranked method and demographic metrics. They can be used to help an organisation with: