Deep Dive: Measuring the Impact of DEI in 2024

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DEI @ Work

10 min readJan 21, 2024

Last week, I joined Oana Iordachescu and Fathima Beckmann for a LinkedIn live chat about measuring DEI work’s effectiveness as we step into 2024. It was a great discussion — we got to the heart of why it’s so important to measure the impact of our DEI efforts and the different challenges we face in making DEI work impactful and visible to our stakeholders.

Building on the conversation, I created this blog with more insight and context! I included practical examples and tips (marked with the 💡) to make it as concrete as possible!

1. Why is it important to measure the impact of DEI work?

To me, there are three main reasons to measure the impact of the DEI work we do:

Figuring Out Where You're Headed
The first step in measuring DEI work’s impact is pretty straightforward: it’s about knowing your destination. So, when we start the discussion of how to measure the impact of our DEI work, we are prompted with an important question: “What are we aiming for in our DEI work?” This is a really valuable question to explore and answer. Importantly, it helps us and our stakeholders get on the same page before we dive into projects or initiatives. By talking about our overall goals from the start, everyone involved gets a clear picture of what we’re working towards. (💡Read more: Creating your Organization’s first D&I Strategy).

Seeing If Our Efforts Are Paying Off
After we’ve laid out our goals and kicked off some initiatives to get us there, the next part is seeing if what we’re doing is actually making a difference. This is so important because it helps us make sure our hard work and resources are paying off toward our overall goals. If we find out we’re spinning our wheels and not getting closer to achieving those goals, then it’s a heads-up that we need to change what we are doing. It’s all about making sure our actions have the impact we intend. Simply put, we need to answer one question: “Does this initiative help us make progress on our overall goals?” Measuring the impact of our work will help us answer that important question.

Keeping the Momentum Up
Finally, measuring the impact of our DEI efforts helps keep our momentum high and moving forward. In DEI work, sometimes the only feedback we get is when something goes wrong, so tracking our progress is super helpful. It shows us that we’re making strides, even if they’re small ones, and that can be a big boost. For long-haul projects, seeing those milestones can remind us why we started this journey in the first place and keep us motivated about where we’re going. It also helps us communicate that progress to our stakeholders so they see the impact over time.

2. Is there ever too much measurement?

Simply: yes. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of measuring everything under the sun, especially when we’re trying to show the impact of our work. It can also be very time-consuming — you can spend all your time designing and maintaining a dashboard, which takes your attention away from actually driving DEI initiatives. On top of that, unfortunately, our stakeholders are not always fluent in complex data metrics or able to parse many data points communicating different nuances. It can be difficult to connect many metrics back to the overall DEI goals you are trying to achieve.

💡 My advice: stick to one or two key metrics that capture the essence of your overall DEI goals. If you have conducted a global DEI survey, an Inclusion Index along with a measurement of the overall diversity of your organization is a safe approach. Then, for each of the initiatives you are driving, define one metric that helps you understand whether that initiative is having an impact on your overall goals. Instead of a live dashboard to maintain, prepare a quarterly email for your stakeholders that presents these metrics and how they’ve changed since the previous quarter. Include a short summary of the active initiatives and what’s coming in the next quarter.

3. What are some examples of well-defined measurements for the impact of DEI initiatives?

It all comes down to the impact you want your initiative to have. The focus shouldn’t just be on the volume of activity but on whether those activities are making a difference. This aspect is often harder to gauge, which might be why some people shy away from it.

💡 Let’s get practical. If you’ve launched an Inclusive Leadership Training for managers, simply tallying up attendance doesn’t give you the full picture of its effectiveness. You’re left wondering if the managers actually gained valuable insights from the training.

The key is to assess changes in behavior. You could measure the change in behavior through one of the following:

Survey the employees under these managers to see if they’ve noticed a more inclusive environment following the training
Check for a reduction in discrimination complaints
Observe if there’s been an improvement in retention of team members

Measuring the tangible outcomes of the training provides a clear indicator of its success, beyond just how many people participated.

4. If someone is new to their DEI role and doesn’t have an analytics team to support them, what is the minimum approach to take to measure impact?

Many DEI managers aim for the stars with a global DEI survey, viewing it as the pinnacle of what they should achieve. I’ve seen many DEI managers take this route. But pouring all your effort into a survey without your company’s full support can turn into a huge waste of time. You could end up spending a year on this project, only to face low response rates and widespread frustration among colleagues.

Instead, work with what you have, especially if you’re short on resources and time. Set a goal for yourself to evaluate each of your initiatives with one meaningful metric. Ask yourself, “What change am I hoping to see with this initiative?” and “How can I measure that impact, even in the simplest way?”

💡 Let’s get practical. You’ve launched a mentorship program to ultimately increase diversity in leadership. You might not have the tools to track the participants’ rate of promotion. Instead, a simple post-program survey can ask participants if they feel more confident about their next career move compared to how they felt before the program. This can offer valuable insights: you will get a good sense of how your efforts are making a difference, without needing access to complex HR data.

5. Let’s talk for a moment about a company that has been able to conduct a global DEI survey. What are the key metrics that an inclusion report should include?

Once you have conducted a Global D&I survey, you have access to rich data about the diversity and inclusion of your organization. The challenge then becomes how to communicate data to your stakeholders and your company broadly.

There are a couple of metrics that you should include in your inclusion report. Keep it simple: a good report might focus on just two or three main metrics. For starters, a measure of the organization’s diversity is key. Then, adding 💡an inclusion index highlights how included employees feel within the company.

If you’ve got the tech for an interactive dashboard, it’s helpful to drill down into these metrics for different parts of the company, be it by location, business unit, job type or level of seniority. This breakdown can show how inclusion varies across the company. Another important feature would be filtering the inclusion index by identity group. This way, you can explore differences in inclusion experiences among groups, for example, whether women feel more included than men.

Building on this would be a feature that allows you to explore and analyze open-ended text responses from the survey. Diving into these can unlock the “why” behind your metrics. AI can help you sift through hundreds of texts to conduct a sentiment analysis: revealing whether there’s generally a positive or negative vibe. Additionally, AI can help you pinpoint specific concerns that may explain why some scores are lower than others. Some of these are not as obvious as you may think.

💡Here’s a practical example: Once you analyze the open text of responses that had a low inclusion score, you may find that those responses are more dependent on frustration with compensation than specific feelings of exclusions. Why? If respondents did not have a specific question in the survey about compensation, their frustration around pay may have been targeted toward a question about inclusion or fairness.

Tip: Discovering the why behind frustration, dissatisfaction and exclusion (that will ultimately lead to attrition) can help you figure out what initiatives you need to put in place to counteract this!

6. What topics or skills should a DEI manager focus on to level up their skills in measuring impact?

A curious mind to question your data
It’s easy to accept data at face value.. but it requires some extra attention to dive deep and figure out what is really happening. When your data shows curious or intriguing patterns, the key is to dive deep and question what those patterns mean.

💡For example, if you notice a particular group at your company is scoring low on inclusion, it might be tempting to assume it’s all down to discrimination or a lack of inclusion. However, there could be other factors at play. Perhaps most of these employees work in a certain area of the business or geographic location, and their inclusion scores are more about the dynamics of that business area or location rather than the culture as a whole. Keep digging and asking “why” again and again to truly get to the heart of what your data is telling you. When possible, doing further analysis, and looking at additional intersections of data can bring more clarity.

GDPR and data privacy regulation
Wherever you are located, there are likely data privacy regulations (such as 💡Article 9 in GDPR) that impact how you can collect and store private data. Spend some time to get a handle on the regulations that are relevant to all of the geographic locations of your organization and how they impact your work. With some effort, you can determine the responsible ways to gather data, analyze and store data to be compliant.

7. How will the role of a DEI team evolve or shift focus in the coming years?

Reflecting on the past year, which had some pretty significant global events and milestones… I think we will see a shift in DEI work in 2024 and beyond, in two specific ways:

DEI integrated into business decisions and operations
The past year has convinced me that we cannot view DEI merely as the responsibility of an isolated team. In reality, DEI is embedded in everything a business does and it cannot function as an afterthought or a bandaid. In the future, it must become a key component of an organization’s overall strategy.

💡How to do this? Integrate DEI into your company’s annual goals and planning by requiring business areas to consider the DEI implications to their growth plans. Alternatively, have a DEI committee review strategic plans to identify challenges in advance. This way, it becomes an integral part of the broader agenda rather than a separate, isolated entity. In this future, DEI plays a role in significant business decisions, from expansion plans and crisis management to strategic business moves.

Recently, I’ve seen DEI teams take a more active role in helping companies navigate global crises, defining their stance on pressing issues. This is an especially challenging role because it prompts organizations to deeply consider their values and the positions they choose to take. I predict we will continue to see this way of incorporating DEI into a company’s expression of its values.

Defining the future of work
As I look to the future, the landscape of work and the types of jobs available are expected to undergo significant changes, especially with technological advancements in AI and automation. This shift will cause a unique challenge for the workforce and prompt us to reconsider the future of work. We will see this impact specifically on lower-paid or less-skilled jobs. The question arises: what next for those roles and the people who held them? This situation offers a chance to 💡explore reskilling to help individuals find new pathways within organizations as their traditional roles evolve or disappear. I predict we will see HR teams tasked with not only attracting external talent but also focusing on how we can facilitate the transition for internal talent.