By tracking, analyzing and reporting the successes and failures of your inclusion efforts, you can help drive improvements and dedicate resources where they’re most needed. But where do you start?

Here are some tips to help you determine what aspects of your workplace inclusion strategy you should be measuring, and how to use the data you obtain to good effect.

Distinguish goals from metrics

Your inclusion efforts must begin with the end in mind. First, decide on your goals. Then, use metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge progress toward those objectives.

Metrics are relative and flexible. Two organizations with similar goals might employ different metrics or interpret the same metrics in contrasting ways. Metrics, like KPIs, should help leaders make informed decisions and provide insight into how well the company is or isn’t achieving its goals for inclusion. Goals tend to be fixed and absolute, as these represent the desired outcomes and objectives you are trying to achieve.

If you want to improve access to leadership opportunities and maintain fair consideration for advancement across your organization, you might use multiple metrics. For example, you could review how candidates progress through senior‑level hiring and promotion processes to identify potential barriers or inconsistencies.

Don’t confuse a strong performance on a single metric with achieving your goals. Equally, note that doing poorly on a metric can actually help you reach your goals, provided you use the insights gained to fix whatever is causing you to fall short of your objectives.

Work out where your baselines are

To assess how well you’re doing on the journey toward achieving your inclusion goals, you need to know where you started from. Therefore, one of your first tasks is to establish some baseline KPIs that measure your company’s current performance in areas like recruitment, retention and representation.

How accessible are the applicants pools to all types of candidates for your open positions? Do people with certain backgrounds, experiences or abilities tend to stay longer with your organization than others? Is your leadership team more or less diverse than the company as a whole? These are all frames of reference against which you can measure your progress.

See this post for more insight on the value of building an inclusive workforce.

Choose the right KPIs

Once you’ve set the goals or intended outcomes of your program, you can start attaching metrics to each one, establishing baselines as detailed above. For some KPIs, such as diversity of job applicants, you’ll analyze numerical data your human resources department likely already collects.

Use ranked or multiple-choice surveys for non-numerical items like employee perspectives and feelings. For example, you can ask workers to rank the statement, “I feel comfortable speaking up in team meetings” on a scale from one to four, where one is “not at all,” and four is “extremely comfortable.”

To help you get started, here are five tried-and-trusted KPIs:

  • Workforce composition trends — If you want to evaluate how effectively your processes support fair access and opportunity, it’s not enough to look only at talent pipelines. You also need to know how candidates progress from interview stages through hiring decisions, and whether any patterns suggest barriers within the process.
     
  • Retention levels by employee groups — Drill down into your retention data to discover whether certain groups of employees are more likely to quit than others. If you identify a group with particularly high levels of turnover, you can take actions such as setting up mentorship programs to help these workers feel more included and engaged. For deeper insights into why members of a group are leaving, combine retention rate data with exit interview results.
     
  • Diversity of leadership roles — If entry-level and mid-ranking employees from underrepresented groups struggle to rise in your organization, that’s an invaluable roadblock to identify and demolish. Senior executives are the public faces of your organization, and if all those faces look the same, that could impact your employer brand and ability to attract values-driven talent. To explore whether unconscious bias or other aspects of your organizational culture could be holding back certain employees, combine this KPI with related metrics such as the demographic breakdown of workers applying for promotions.
     
  • Number of incident reports — It is important to require and analyze robust data before drawing wide conclusions. Most leaders will instinctively want to see reports of discrimination, microaggressions and other toxic practices decline against your baselines. However, if your organization has a history or culture of underreporting incidents, you may prefer to see this number rise in the short term and use the data to promote initiatives such as cultural awareness training. Remember that for every incident reported, a few instances were likely not. Take this data seriously.

If you want to foster an inclusive workplace, few things are more important than measuring your progress and performance over time.

Learn more about how companies can build an inclusive corporate culture that makes a difference inside and outside the workplace.

Read about Robert Half's committment to creating and advancing a workplace culture of inclusion.