If your business values inclusivity in the workplace, DEI metrics are about to become your best friend.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion aren’t passing trends – they’re facts of life. The world is a diverse place filled with people from all experiences and identities, and workplaces should reflect that.
But to achieve this utopian ideal, you’ll need the nuts and bolts to execute a successful DEI strategy.
That’s where DEI metrics come in.
In this article, we’ll define key DEI metrics and explain how you can set and analyze them to create a culture of belonging in your workplace.
What Are DEI Metrics?
DEI metrics are a measurement system for diversity, equity, and inclusion in your workplace.
Metrics for DEI include quantitative data like hiring rates and qualitative data like employee sentiment. These metrics help you measure your progress toward DEI goals, look for problem areas, prove your successes, and develop improvement strategies.
Take a look at our Oleeo Diversity Insights datasheet for a deeper understanding of DEI metrics.
Why Do DEI Metrics Matter?
DEI metrics matter to both business operations and workplace culture. Ideas are a good start, but they’re meaningless without guidance. DEI metrics give your business a measurable, actionable set of instructions and data to help prioritize, monitor, and improve DEI practices.
Here are some of the benefits of DEI metrics:
1. Accountability
Goals and metrics to measure their progress keep your business accountable. Tracking a metric proves a company-wide commitment to DEI, and holding your company to those metrics keeps decision-makers accountable for getting results.
2. Informed decision-making
Without information, it’s impossible to make informed decisions. DEI success metrics offer that information, measuring and providing important insights for decision-makers.
3. Transparency
Trust is an important part of workplace culture. PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey showed that a lack of trust in a business negatively impacted employees, customers, and investors.
Executives cited that trust levels impacted things like productivity, quality, efficiency, and profitability. Customer trust was also at stake, with the belief that customer trust in a company impacted engagement levels.
Trust can be earned through accountability and transparency. A company with transparent DEI metrics openly proves its commitment to better workplace inclusivity.
4. Improvement
Time and time again, DEI strategies have proven themselves valuable to business operations.
The 2023 “A Mature Approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” report by Enterprise Strategy Group and AWS proves the value of both DEI initiatives and DEI metrics.
It studied companies’ maturity of DEI strategies on a scale of leading, evolving, emerging, and nascent. The report measures maturity as how well a business communicates, builds on, defines, and measures its DEI program.
The report showed that leading companies were more successful at hitting revenue targets, beating their competitors to market, and engaging employees than their competitors. Emerging and evolving companies followed their leading competitors in these positive outcomes.
Improvements across this scale show how developing DEI strategies pays off over time. Measuring DEI metrics allows you to monitor and assess progress and make improvements that help you achieve your DEI goals.
12 Key DEI Metrics to Track For an Inclusive Workplace
Defining and measuring your DEI metrics can be overwhelming, but we’re here to help.
Let’s examine some DEI metrics examples. These are the most important metrics you should measure:
Diversity metrics
1. Hiring rates
DEI recruitment metrics include the number of applicants, interviews, and hires from diverse groups.
Diversity begins at the front door, so these metrics can tell you a lot about your recruitment and onboarding process and help you develop Blind Recruitment strategies for fairer hiring.
2. Representation
This metric measures the makeup of your workforce at every level, from new hires to leadership roles. You can look at the population at large to determine if your company has strong representation among different groups.
3. Promotion rates
Representation is important at every level. Understanding the makeup of your workforce allows you to measure which groups are getting promoted above others.
Promotions should be equal across the board. If one group is consistently promoted over others, your decision-makers might be biased.
4. Retention rates
If diverse groups are leaving or being let go at higher rates than non-diverse groups, your workplace might be discriminatory or inaccessible.
Equity metrics
5. Pay equity
Pay equity is easy to measure and shows how much your company values each employee.
6. Opportunity equity
Opportunity isn’t as easy to measure.
Looking at promotion rates among diverse groups can help. You can also examine training programs to assess the makeup of participants.
Employee surveys can help you assess sentiment regarding opportunities.
7. Performance evaluation equity
Look at performance reviews across each group in your workforce. If reviews are weighted exclusively against diverse groups, your performance evaluation process might contain biases.
Inclusion metrics
8. Employee engagement
Engagement can be measured through surveys, interviews, and informal chats.
You can also look at absentee patterns – employees who take a lot of time off or don’t show up. High levels of absenteeism in certain groups can indicate a hostile work environment, high levels of stress, or a lack of accessibility.
9. Sense of belonging
Measuring a sense of belonging is complicated but can tell you so much about the sentiment of diverse groups in your workforce. Employee surveys and interviews are the best approach.
10. Participation
Employees who feel excluded or disengaged are less likely to participate in work or informal activities.
Resources spent on DEI
11. Budget allocation
Budget allocation metrics include how much your company spends on diverse recruitment, DEI mentorship programs, employee support, and reshaping internal policies and operations to be more inclusive.
12. Mentorship programs
Mentorship programs are an important part of DEI Initiatives, so the amount of programs running at your business is a good DEI metric.
