Let’s start with equity – how do you measure it?
Equity is important because it represents how fair your organization is, and whether you are setting everyone up for success – especially people you’ve hired of historically marginalized identities. As we discussed in a previous blog post, if your organization is not equitable, you are causing people harm, and driving your business costs up exponentially.
Measuring equity is about understanding the gaps in your organization – opportunity gaps, pay gaps, raise gaps, and recognition gaps. If we take the gender pay gap as an example, the value is a ratio of the difference between the pay for women and men in the same position and level at your company. The smaller the gap, the more equitable your organization when it comes to gender. Going beyond gender, is your organization equitable across race/ethnicities, age, ability, sexual orientation, etc.? The following are some metrics that help surface inequities that may have developed over time.
- Compensation equity: Are employees being paid fairly, regardless of their identity?
- Raise equity: Closely related to compensation equity; are employees being given fair compensation increases, for example among those with the same performance evaluation scores?
- Promotion rate equity: Is there a gap in how quickly you are promoting one group over another?
- Recognition equity: Are all employees being recognized equitably?
Does a one-time audit suffice?
A one-time pay audit and adjustment is a great start, but it is not enough. Your teams are constantly changing – promotion cycles likely happen more than once a year, employees leave, and you are actively hiring new employees who identify as Black, Latine, women, neurodivergent, etc. For this reason, Progressary computes your equity metrics continuously and automatically through integrations with your existing HRIS systems, so you have updated equity values available in real-time, as things are changing.
Let’s talk about how to measure inclusion next, starting with the difference between inclusion and the more easily recognized “engagement”:
What about inclusion? Let’s start with the (very important) difference between inclusion and engagement.
Engagement is a symptom, inclusion is the core issue. Allow me to illustrate:
Asking about engagement is like asking whether your head hurts. Asking about inclusion is like getting a blood test or MRI and finding a tumor – the cause of the headaches.
If you’re primarily focusing on engagement, you’re likely spending a ton of time and resources on solutions that don’t necessarily address the core problems.
So, how exactly do you measure inclusion?
Because inclusion is most visible to those that are experiencing exclusion, and less so to those who enjoy inclusion, it’s important to listen to the voices of your employees and understand what inclusion looks like for different groups.
Just as there are different tests to run when you have a health issue (blood tests, scans, etc.), inclusion can and should be broken down into its subcomponents so you can pinpoint exactly what needs fixing. Garter’s Inclusion Index is one such subcategorization, breaking down the concept of inclusion into the following concepts:
- Psychological safety
- Fair treatment
- Integrating differences
- Decision making
- Trust
- Belonging
- Perception of diversity
For the sake of illustration, let’s dive a bit deeper into one of the subcomponents – psychological safety. This concept, coined by Harvard’s Dr. Amy Edmonson, is the belief that others will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for speaking up, either against a popular opinion or to point out a mistake.
The presence of psychological safety is critical in fostering collaboration, creativity, and innovation – especially necessary if you care to unlock the benefits of diversity of thought. It is also the responsibility of each individual leader to cultivate psychological safety within their working group. So, if you can measure it, it is clear when a team or department is struggling with psychological safety. This then presents an opportunity to coach leaders on creating more of it, and to hold them accountable to making that change.
Inclusion is complex, and it can change quickly. Which leads to the next point:
Is asking about inclusion in our yearly engagement survey enough?
No. If you are ill, you usually hope to talk to a doctor while you are still experiencing symptoms. If you wait until your yearly checkup, recalling how many headaches you’ve had over the course of the year and how severe they’ve been is not likely to be accurate. You might even forget to mention them. If this is the first time your doctor is hearing about it, they may start by simply prescribing you some painkillers. An eventual MRI may reveal that there was a brain tumor, but it’s now too large to remove.
Our recommendation at Progressary is a high-frequency feedback loop, asking employees for small amounts of feedback on a continual basis. This helps to remove any recency bias and ensure that every employee, whether they have been there for years or just joined two weeks ago has a voice, and that any issues are surfaced as they arise.
How to get your employees to participate in providing feedback
The next concern is likely to be – how do you get employees to participate and stay engaged in providing inclusion feedback? We’ve identified the following requirements for high participation rates:
- High confidence in anonymity: Your employees must be confident that none of their answers can be traced back to them. Your feedback collection mechanism must be a safe space for an employee’s voice to be heard. This can get tricky for a few reasons – 1) anonymity may not be possible without a third-party tool, 2) you must account for participation or sampling thresholds, and 3) when tracking inclusion longitudinally (over time), it also means making sure sudden changes in values cannot be traced back to recent employee additions or departures.
- High specificity and action: Each question should be a very specific question falling under one of the subcategories of inclusion, as seen above, and have an action plan attached. Don’t ask questions with answers you won’t know what to do with. At the end of the day, actions speak loudest.
- Transparent messaging: You must build trust with your employees, which may take time. Transparently explain why it is in their best interest to share this feedback, how it will impact their lives at work, and how you intend to use this information (especially instances where you may have to combine results to preserve anonymity).
- Results, rewards, and maybe a little extra motivation: Sharing the results of employee feedback is a great start in creating motivation to continue giving feedback. It doesn’t hurt to build in some extra motivation that adds to the employee experience. For example, Progressary gamifies this feedback process. Read more about this in the below section.
- Low friction, minimal effort: The more you can meet your employees where they are, the more likely they will participate. Progressary, for example, asks all inclusion questions through your main employee communication channel, like Slack.
- Amplify critical voices through segmentation: Again, inclusion is invisible to those that have it, so it’s critical that you can break down inclusion metrics for each group and hear what your employees of historically marginalized identities are telling you. This requires self-identification data. So, what if you don’t have good identification data?
Getting accurate self-identification data (and the art of gamification…)
Many organizations aren’t confident in their employee identification/demographic data. Yet, it’s a critical component to understanding both equity and inclusion.
The good news is many of the principles for increasing feedback participation (above) can be applied to encourage self-identification, too. Progressary not only helps you build trust through anonymity and cohesive value proposition messaging, but the platform goes one step further to create extra motivation. Stay tuned for our next blog on how the platform leverages gamification to encourage high (and distributed) participation.
Measuring equity and inclusion requires nuance and can be tricky. Leveraging DEI-centered technology can help you get ramped up quickly and set up to scale your team successfully. Ready to learn more? Let’s chat – email me at angela.lee@progressary.com or go ahead and grab a time on my calendar.