In our previous episode, we discussed making a business case for DEI. In this episode, we cover some metrics and examples that you can apply to your own company.

Recognizing the intricacies in articulating the benefits of DEI initiatives, Michelle outlines actionable steps to illustrate the diverse and far-reaching impacts of inclusion on your organization’s bottom line. From evaluating internal metrics like engagement and turnover rates to tracking external community involvement and volunteering efforts, Michelle provides a comprehensive guide on how exactly to measure success and areas for improvement.

Michelle also discusses how to align DEI metrics with your organization’s values and goals, ensuring that initiatives are not just implemented, but are meaningfully integrated and sustained. Whether it’s through measuring Net Promoter Scores (NPS) or employee tenure, Michelle offers valuable insights and real-world examples that can help paint a clear picture for leadership and stakeholders.

For more information and to connect with Michelle, visit: https://www.equity-at-work.com/

Key Topics Discussed:

• Inclusion Metrics: Engagement, NPS, Tenure, and Turnover
• Tracking Leave of Absence and Career Progression Post-Leave
• Community Engagement and Volunteering Metrics
• Creating a Balanced Scorecard for DEI
• Tailoring Metrics to Specific Organizational Goals
• Real-World Examples of Successful DEI Implementation

I'm Michelle Bogan, founder and CEO of Equity at Work, and this is your DEI Minute, your go to podcast for leaders looking to navigate the ever evolving landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Whether you're just starting out with DEI or looking to sustain your long term successes, each episode will provide you with actions you can take to move DEI forward at your organization, all in 15 minutes or less. Welcome back to your DI minute for part 2 of how to build a business case for DEI. As a refresher, we went through, a number of things in the last one related to some of the research that's been done on the benefits of DEI, different ways for you to think about the impact you're looking to have across, you know, the breadth of your organization and the kinds of financial impact that you may wanna have as well. And we talked about some of the specific metrics that relate to diversity and equity from an internal and external perspective. So today, we're gonna finish that out by going deeper on inclusion, from an internal and external perspective, as well as take you through a number of examples that will help paint a good picture for how you can build a business case for your organization. In this episode on the benefits case, we are gonna reference a number of things from the previous episodes. If you haven't had a chance to listen to that yet, I would encourage you to go back and do that one first and then this will pick up from where we left off on the last one.

Let's get into it. The final piece is inclusion. And again, inclusion is really a measurement of, you know, how how well someone feels they belong at the organization, that they have opportunities to be really involved and participate, that they're they feel seen and heard and valued for who they are. Great indicators here in terms of metrics are around. And again, this is internally looking at your engagement scores. So engagement overall, but then again, slicing it similarly to how you look at the diversity data. See, are there comparisons by different groups of people, by level, by function, by line of reporting, location, etcetera, and doing that comparison. And there may even be specific questions within an engagement survey that are particularly relevant to DI work.

So if you are inserting questions in your engagement surveys to try to get gather that feedback, I would use those as good indicators. Another one related to that is an NPS score, which is a net promoter score, which really says it asks the question, you know, would you recommend to offender friend or family member working at this organization? Are you proud to work at this organization? Do you, identify with the values of this organization? You know, you can create your own NPS score rating, and index based on the kinds of questions you think are most important for your kind of organization and the industry that you're in. But those engagement and NPS scores are really good measures of inclusion. The other ones that I think also tell a really good story are the tenure at an organization. So how long are people typically staying and how consistent is that across different groups? Turnover, which of course is sort of the flip side of that, but seeing, you know, how fast are people turning over. And with that in particular, looking pretty deeply at the 1st 18 months that somebody's at an organization. If you've got high turnover in the first, you know, 6, 12, 18 months, that's an indicator that, you know, you may be you may have something off in terms of where you're recruiting, the messaging through recruiting, your onboarding process. And also if you've had it sort of a new venture into recruiting a broader demographic than what you've historically had, but those people are turning over more quickly, that usually means you've got some work to do in the equity and inclusion space within your organization.

So engagement, tenure engagement slash NPS, tenure turnover. And the last one related to all that is leave of absence and people returning from leaves of absence and not just returning, but it being able to pick up their career pathing and continue to get promoted. So the leave of absence can be for maternity or paternity leave. Ideally, organizations have moved to more parental leave or family leave, or caregiving need leave. It can also be for, you know, medical reasons or personal leave of absence. But we what we really wanna see is that those people come back and they can pick right back up in their careers if that's what they choose to do and have opportunities to continue to grow and develop and get promoted. So that's on the internal side. On the external side for inclusion, we're looking at things like community events.

So participation in community events, how often those are happening? Do you have consistent participation particularly when it's not mandatory? Are people feeling a sense of pride in that? Are they posting on social and talking about that? And kind of related to that is volunteering. So, you know, in the equity piece, we talked about financial giving. For inclusion, it's more about participating in ways to give back, through donating hours, donating time. So all of that together can give you a really nice kind of balanced scorecard that that you can use as fodder to build a benefits case. It does not mean that you have to track all of these things that can actually be quite overwhelming. But what I would do is, you know, if you've identified, you know, your top 2 or 3 issues that you feel like your DI work, is really focused on addressing, think through this list and pull out the correlating metrics, that will help you measure whether or not you're making improvement. So I'm gonna walk you through a couple examples quickly is to give you a better sense of how that works. So let's say your desired outcome is that you want increased representation of a demographic group or or groups.

So this is very much a diversity focused, exercise within DEI. So the kinds of things you're gonna track are your employee demographics, again, by a lot of the dimensions that I mentioned earlier in total, by level, by function, location, etcetera. I would also really encourage you to look at any differences between if you've got an hourly workforce, hourly and salaried. Also, if you do a lot of seasonal hiring or use a lot of part time folks, make sure you break those out separately from full time and just look at where the variances are. Where are there things where you feel like they're really good opportunities to do better? Those are your health indicators and goals. The variances across groups, looking at their retention, their promotion, their turnover, and their tenure that will help you understand, are we bringing the right people in? Do those people feel like they have a path forward here, career path forward? Are they staying? Are they getting supported? Are they, getting promoted and do they stay for a long time with their tenure or are they turning over? So that is one example of, you know, something very targeted that you're going after and how to align the metrics that way. Let's say instead you wanna focus on increasing your external impact. Maybe you're a smaller organization, and you don't feel like you've got as many things that you can maybe, you know, levers you can pull internally, maybe you don't have a lot of turnover, maybe you've got pretty good diversity internally and maybe people stay a long time, but you really wanna extend your DI principles out into the broader community.

The things I would track there are, you know, your spend with diverse suppliers, fundraising that you do, volunteering, are you sponsoring, you know, different people to come in? Are you creating apprenticeships or work programs? And then the goals and health indicators related to those are, you know, the percent the percent of, spend on divers suppliers versus in total. And you can and also you can look at the actual raw dollars for that as well. The money and time donated and jobs created for new people through the sponsorship and apprenticeship and other work programs. And then the final example I'll take you through is let's say you wanna take a very, you know, have a wide impact in terms of the total organization. And you're really just wanna start with increasing the knowledge and engagement in DEI in general. So the things you're gonna track there are, you know, what are the DEI programs that you have? Do you have employee resource groups or business resource groups or some kind of affinity group program for people to participate in? Which could be both for people who identify with that group as well as allies or people who wanna support members of that group. Do you have good cultural observances and DI holidays that you recognize? And again, are you doing a good engagement survey? So those are some of the things you're gonna track. And then the health indicators and goals related to that are looking at participation in all of the programs, the ERGs, and the observances, looking at your senior leader sponsorship and engagement in those things and the visibility of those senior leaders.

So not just that they're kind of sponsoring a name but really sponsoring an action. And then getting great survey data through your engagement survey and slicing and dicing that information so that you see not just in total what your results are but you can break it out by different different demographic group. And all of that will tell you a story around the opportunities, but also as you track those over time. And sometimes it makes sense to do it. Let's say you're focused very much on recruiting and retention, and you've got, you know, several times a year that you do very active recruiting. You may wanna report out on this or track it every 6 months and do a refresh. If you're looking at let's say you're doing, the middle one that impact your local community, that's probably something you can measure each year. Increased knowledge and engagement that I could see either way.

You might wanna do it 6 months if it's something new, you're rolling around new programming to get some responses rather than do a full engagement survey. You might do a pulse survey, which is a shorter, you know, 2, 3 key questions just to help gauge, are we on the right track? And then do a more formal effort around after a year. And then if you've been provided, funding to support any of this, you definitely wanna track, you know, how much you were given, how that money was spent, and then what the return on that investment is. So let's say you have retained and promoted more people from a particular group than you were able to historically and maybe that increased over a period of 3 years compared to historical data. There's a cost savings in with that comes from great retention. There may be, you know, new white space opportunities, new innovation that came from that. In consulting, which is what I come out of, we were able to correlate and increase focus on getting more women, into senior level roles with us getting new business and developing new services that we didn't have historically. And a lot of our current clients, we expanded those relationships and increased our profitability with them because we were able to bring a much broader set of ideas and innovations to them, which they then employed us to help deploy.

So I hope that gives you, you know, some different ways to think about a benefits case and think about some of the metrics that you really should track. I know this can feel very murky and overwhelming. So what I would encourage you to do is pick 1 or 2 that are very small and focused and just get used to starting to report out and pulling that data, telling a very succinct story, and then you can build from there. And that's a wrap for today. And that's a wrap. I'm Michelle Bogan, and that's your DEI minute for today. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and don't forget to leave us a review.

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