How to measure Diversity and Inclusion for a stronger workplace

According to McKinsey, companies within the top quartile for diversity are 21% more likely to have good financial performance than companies in the bottom quartile—probably as a result of having a broader understanding of market needs. Diversity has also been correlated with higher rates of innovation. And companies are starting to pay attention.

Thirty-eight percent of the 12,543 working Americans we surveyed in 2018 said that it’s a high priority for their company, for business reasons and more importantly, for ethical ones. More and more companies have set diversity and inclusion related goals and committed to pursuing a more balanced workforce.

But unfortunately, these good intentions aren’t translating into employees’ real experiences. Many employees still feel that they don’t belong, and dozens of companies have made recent headlines for diversity and inclusion-related crises. In these workplaces, many female employees don’t feel respected (or sometimes even safe), minorities can be painfully underrepresented, people with disabilities often don’t have the resources they need to succeed, and so on.

No company wants to have a culture where not every employee feels like they can thrive, but it’s hard to address problems when you don’t know they exist. Without a way to measure inclusion, executives and HR teams have to rely on their own subjective perceptions of the culture at their organization—with varied level of accuracy.

But inclusion isn’t totally unquantifiable. If you want to know whether your employees’ experience aligns with your company’s ideals—at scale—you can just ask.

Surveys are the perfect tool for measuring the feelings and opinions of your workforce at scale.  When used correctly, they can raise red flags about potential problems within your company that you didn’t know about (and would never have thought to check for), and they can uncover opportunities to empower employees through internal programs.

There’s a ton to consider when you’re building diversity and inclusion into a company-wide initiative. We’ve broken this guide into navigable pieces so that you can skip around and focus on the areas most relevant to your business.

We recommend you start with 2 universal, overarching surveys: 1 for diversity and 1 for inclusion. These surveys give you a baseline breakdown of your current demographic makeup and whether or not employees of all backgrounds feel a sense of belonging.

From there, we’ll drill down into the specific areas where companies tend to struggle. You can read through all of them if you like, or skip to the areas that you think are the most relevant to your company, based on your results from the inclusion survey.

Then, we’ll cover different actions you can take to create change—including policies, programs, and strategies that promote diversity and inclusion. These strategies, which we’ve classified as either diversity-focused or inclusion-focused, are useful for every business.

Back to top

If you’re reading this guide, you already know that diversity is important, and you might be responsible for promoting it at your organization. As an HR professional (or passionate advocate) charged with improving D&I, collecting diversity metrics is important. Comparing yourself over time to benchmarks helps you set new goals and clearly track your progress against them.

Diversity numbers tell you the overall makeup of your population, and which groups are underrepresented. The first step toward building an inclusive culture is understanding more about the humans already behind your workforce.

Diversity tracking seems like it should be straightforward, but if you really want to support your employees work toward a more balanced workforce, you need to think beyond traditional demographics—which really comes down to asking more than the obvious questions.

True diversity means having people from all kinds of backgrounds and identities at every level of your organization. It means making a conscious effort to diversify teams and management, in addition to overall numbers. Diversity is especially important when it comes to hiring and advancing people from underrepresented groups.

The traditional concept of underrepresented groups includes women and people of color, but these are only a few of many internal communities with unique needs that require respect and support.

Does your organization include people with disabilities? People with different religious backgrounds? Members of the LGBTQ* community? Veterans? People over 60? True diversity is expansive, and the differences between people aren’t always visible.

That isn’t to say that hiring people of different ethnic backgrounds isn’t important. That’s still the area where businesses fall short. It just means that you need to be aware of those numbers in addition to some of the other areas that are typically overlooked.

When you have your results, you’ll know more about where to focus your hiring efforts and how to support the needs of the employees you already have in your workforce. You might also choose to publish some of your findings in an effort to be transparent and open about where your company is doing well or needs improvement. This is a great way to hold your org accountable for change.

At SurveyMonkey, we shared some of our diversity statistics for the first time publicly in 2017, and companies like Google, Coca Cola, and Michelin have done the same. Our annual diversity report gives us a benchmark to track against as we move toward our goal of achieving gender parity.

We recently had the pleasure of working with Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian for our recent webinar, “Your toughest D&I questions answered.” Aubrey shared insights about how Atlassian—a famously inclusive company—thinks about diversity.

One mistake that companies often make when they first start thinking about D&I is that they don’t think intersectionally. Each of your employees has layers—lots of different identities. And when many companies start thinking about diversity they say, ‘diversity equals more women.’ And that’s a great intention, but sometimes that means you don’t think about different groups of women within that group. You only build programs that speak to straight white cisgender economically privileged women.

But when you start to think beyond “meeting diversity metrics” and start to think about building balanced teams, those are potentially your strongest opportunities for impact.

HBR research has proven that diverse teams perform better, but you only get those benefits if each team has a variety of different viewpoints represented. You can hit a certain number for gender goals, but if all your women and nonbinary people are in HR and marketing, you’re not actually getting the rewards.

At Atlassian, we’ve moved away from the language of “diversity” to actively acknowledge that people often have a multitude of identities—not all of which are obvious. Instead, we try to build teams that incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints so we can support a wide variety of customers and really thrive as a business. Our goal is always to give every unique viewpoint a voice, and make everyone feel like they are valued.

Asking about race, gender, and sexual orientation in your surveys can feel personal and invasive, but respondents are rarely put off by them. The Census Bureau recently found that people are no more likely to skip these types of questions than any other.

People are conditioned to expect these types of questions from a survey, and as long as your options are “standard” or inclusive, you’re unlikely to lose responses just for asking. This applies to every template in this guide, not just the diversity survey. Don’t be shy about asking for demographics—even in HR surveys that aren’t directly related to diversity and inclusion. If you’re going to track D&I at all, they’re important to know.

If you’re worried about excluding anyone, include an “other” option in your demographic questions so that survey takers can write in their own identities.

We share more of our thinking around this and how to frame it for yourself in this blog post.

Where diversity is about variety, inclusion is about having a solid foundation for supporting employees and their different needs. Inclusion requires a culture where employees feel welcome, respected, and empowered to grow. Even the most diverse companies can’t be successful without inclusion.

“Inclusive” cultures don’t necessarily mean they are “fun.” In fact, companies that “work hard, play hard” can be decidedly non-inclusive. Instead, inclusive environments are nurturing and open-minded. Every employee feels that they belong and they have space to make mistakes and develop professionally.

Diversity is easy to break down into metrics—hiring numbers, promotion statistics, demographics. But many companies neglect the “I” part of “D&I” and risk alienating and disempowering their employees. Hiring people from underrepresented groups isn’t enough—those new hires need to feel safe and respected, and they need to genuinely believe they can have a successful career path at your company. According to SurveyMonkey research, many don’t.

In July of 2018, SurveyMonkey partnered with Paradigm, a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and inclusion. Together, we created a survey template designed to investigate the many different layers of inclusion in the workplace. We used the template to survey 843 working Americans, and the results were telling:

The business significance of these findings is profound. If employees are feeling stifled or disrespected, your retention will suffer and you may tarnish your chances to attract new hires. This type of environment will also affect your employees’ ability to perform—if people don’t feel empowered to voice contrary opinions, how can you trust that they’ll speak up about potential business mistakes? How many great ideas might never get raised? How many people may lose enthusiasm for their day-to-day work?

Many leaders have begun to argue that an inclusive culture is more impactful for retention than offering expensive perks. According to PR specialist Sarah Stoddard, of Glassdoor:

The importance of inclusion is easy to understand, but the layers of company culture that make up “inclusion” aren’t. Unlike diversity, inclusion is heavily rooted in employees’ individual experiences—which aren’t easy to monitor or quantify. And perception of culture can differ dramatically from person to person. Leaders, for example, might see things differently than the people who work for them: Our research for Harvard Business Review found that 83% of executives think they encourage curiosity at work, but only 52% of employees agreed.

The only way to address inclusivity in your organization is to turn it into a company-wide conversation. Our Inclusion and Belonging survey template is a comprehensive evaluation that helps you understand the foundations of inclusion within your workplace.

Expansive but still relatively quick to take, it focuses on the three key aspects of inclusion, according to research by Stanford University researchers Carol Dweck, Greg Walton, and Geoffrey Cohen. Here’s what each means at the most basic level.

Together these three areas define your employee experience, and you need all three if you want employees to feel comfortable and empowered. Most of the common diversity and inclusion challenges occur when employees’ experiences of objectivity, growth mindset, or sense of belonging are compromised.

Diversity and inclusion-related questions can be sensitive, so there are a few ways that you can make your survey more comfortable for employees.

Once you’ve finished your initial Diversity and Belonging and Inclusion surveys, you’ll be able to dig deeper into the parts of your culture where being conscious about D&I might be especially important.

The Diversity survey gives you baseline demographics, and the Belonging and Inclusion survey includes dozens of different dimensions for evaluating inclusion. Slicing and dicing these results can help you understand where you need to focus your efforts first.

The Inclusion template includes questions about demographics like gender, race, and age, so you can filter your results to see whether there are different answers among different groups.

When you’ve gotten a read on your company culture as a whole, it’s time to go deeper into specific areas of focus.

In part 2 of this guide, we cover some areas where companies commonly struggle with D&I along with specialized survey templates, advice, and/or original research to help you understand and address them. You can read each section, or go straight to the sections that are most relevant to your business.

You can also use the results of your Diversity and Belonging & Inclusion surveys to show you where to focus.

Back to top