Why and How to Create an Inclusion Index

Sarah Cordivano

Published in

DEI @ Work

11 min readJul 10, 2023

This blog builds on the learnings in previous blogs:

Summary of this blog:

An Inclusion Index is a score that represents the level of inclusion felt by your organization or a group within it. It allows you to compare the level of inclusion by groups or track changes in inclusion over time. This blog explains how you develop an index, calculate it and use it to gather insight about your organization.

Collecting Data & Understanding the Index

Before introducing the concept of the Inclusion Index, let’s first explore how to collect the data that will ultimately be used to calculate it. This data is collected through an Inclusion & Identity Survey.

Inclusion & Identity Surveys

We know an Inclusion and Identity survey allows you to explore complex questions about your organization such as:

How included do employees feel?
Do employees feel your organization is equitable?
Do employees feel they have a fair chance to succeed?
Is our organization diverse?
How does diversity vary by seniority level, location, department or role?

Simply conducting the survey is the first step in truly understanding your organization. Then you need to take some extra steps to dive into the data and extract accurate and nuanced conclusions.

The Intersection of Inclusion and Identity

The ability to combine identity data with feelings of inclusion will allow you to understand how communities within your organization feel included or excluded. This is where the power of the inclusion and identity survey lies. But why is this important? If you just have an inclusion survey that has no questions about identity, it’s impossible to understand how inclusion varies across the organization. Let’s assume 75% of your organization feels included (based on their responses to a series of questions), and 25% do not feel included. If you don’t know how identity intersects with inclusion, it’s very difficult to uncover systemic issues of exclusion, bias or discrimination. Often the experiences of the majority population of your organization (for example, white men) may mask the experiences of smaller communities within your company (such as Black women). You need to know more than just how the entire organization, on average, feels. You will need to understand how each community within your organization feels.

A survey that has questions about both identity and inclusion will allow you to look at the results of those questions individually and the intersection of those questions. For example, you will be able to answer the question: Do women at our organization feel more included than men? To learn more about creating your first Inclusion and Identity survey, check out this blog.

Let’s take this one step further: the Inclusion Index

Once you have conducted an Inclusion and Identity survey, you can now create an inclusion index that provides a single metric to understand the inclusion of different employee groups based on their complex, nuanced experiences within your organization.

So, what is an Inclusion index?
An inclusion index, in the context of the workplace, is a metric used to assess the level of inclusion within an organization. It quantifies the level of inclusion, belonging and equality felt by groups within your company.

An inclusion index allows you to associate the overall feeling of inclusion of a specific group with a single metric. Groups can be defined by an identity, a role, a geographic location or a business area. It also allows you to compare one group to another group. And importantly, it allows you to track change over time by repeating the survey and calculating the index again based on the answers to the same questions.

By measuring and tracking this index, you can identify gaps and areas for improvement, guiding your efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable workplace. Simply put, it allows you to see whether the changes you are making are actually having an impact felt by employee groups at your organization.

How to create your Inclusion Index

An index is a powerful tool but also requires thoughtfulness to develop. The following steps explain the process of creating the index and using it to gather meaningful insights.

Step 1: Choose a subset of questions

Let’s say your survey has 10 quantitative questions that ask about experiences related to inclusion, fairness, belonging, equity and opportunity. These questions may be general (about the perception of experiences across the entire organization) or personal (unique to one’s own experiences and interactions). To create the index, you will select 2–4 of these 10 questions that specifically assess personal experiences or interactions.

Review each question in your survey and select those that refer to the personal experiences of an employee, not their perception of other people’s experiences or the organization overall. To do this, ask yourself: does this question help us understand an individual’s unique, personal experience of inclusion? Additionally, avoid questions that may ask about personal experiences but are not directly related to the level of inclusion.

Mark each question regarding whether they would be suitable for the index. (The results of this exercise may be subjective depending on how you and the employees of your organization interpret and answer the questions in your survey).

Narrow down your list of survey questions to just 2–4 that represent these personal experiences. As an example, I’ve included several lists of quantitative questions you might have in the inclusion part of your survey. These questions are intended to be measured on a Likert Scale. I’ve indicated which questions would be a good fit to be used in the inclusion index. (Note: these questions were originally included in the appendix of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: How to Succeed at an Impossible Job.)

Belonging & Authenticity
1. I can be myself at work. (Index Question)
2. While at work, I am comfortable expressing opinions that are different from my team. (Index Question)
3. My opinion is valued. (Index Question)
4. In my team, people’s ideas are judged on their quality, not on the personal characteristics of those who express them.
5. I plan to be working at [Organization] two years from now.

Equity and Respectful Treatment
1. The people I work with are respectful to one another.
2. At [Organization], I am treated with respect. (Index Question)
3. Administrative tasks that don’t have a specific owner (e.g., taking notes in meetings, scheduling events, cleaning up shared spaces) are fairly divided at [Organization].

Inclusive Behavior
1. My manager demonstrates inclusive behavior.
2. Senior leadership are prepared to manage a diverse workforce.
3. I am included in any business decisions that impact my work. (Index Question)

Opportunity to Succeed
1. Everyone at [Organization] has a fair opportunity to succeed.
2. I have fair access to opportunities, projects and training that would allow me to grow professionally. (Index Question)
3. My job challenges me to learn and grow my skills.
4. Promotion decisions are fair at [Organization].
5. My job performance is evaluated fairly. (Index Question)
6. I believe that my total compensation is fair, relative to similar roles at [Organization].

Safety & Needs
1. I experience a safe working environment, without harassment and discrimination. (Index Question)
2. [Organization] demonstrates a strong commitment to meeting the needs of employees with disabilities.
3. I know how to report instances of harassment or discrimination.
4. I believe [Organization] would take appropriate action if an instance of harassment or discrimination was reported.

Before we talk about constructing the index, let’s get a quick reminder on how scoring of these questions in your survey works. When your questions are presented with a Likert Scale, employees can pick one of the five options for each question in the survey:

a. Strongly agree
b. Agree
c. Neither agree nor disagree
d. Disagree
e. Strongly disagree

Your survey provider will be able to give you a single score for the results of each question for a given employee group. The score is calculated by the frequency survey respondents select each of the five buckets.

This approach allows you to take questions that had multiple answers and distill those answers into a single score. It also allows you to compare the results of this question to other questions. Or you can use benchmark data to see how your organization answered a specific question compared to competitors in your industry. Below you can see an example of the scores for a single question for all employees and for two different employee groups:

All Employees — I can be myself at work: 76
Women at your organization — I can be myself at work: 72
Men at your organization — I can be myself at work: 78

In the next step, we will use the scores for the selected questions to develop the index.

Step 2: Decide how the index questions should be weighted

Let’s say you pick the following three questions for your index:

I can be myself at work.
At [Organization], I am treated with respect.
I have fair access to opportunities, projects and training that would allow me to grow professionally.

You can decide that these will be averaged with equal importance or weighted based on the individual relevance or importance of each question. For example, you could say “I am treated with respect” is weighted twice as important as the other two questions. Then, you can calculate a weighted average to develop a single metric for these questions.

For our purposes, we’ll consider each of these questions to be weighted equally and we will create an average of the scores of each question with no weighting.

Step 3: Calculate the Index per group and overall

In order to calculate the index, you will create the average (either weighted or not) of the scores of each question for a given group. See two examples below of acalculated Inclusion Index based on fictional data:

Entire Organization (5,000 employees)

I can be myself at work. — 75
At [Organization], I am treated with respect. — 72
I have fair access to opportunities, projects and training that would allow me to grow professionally. — 71

Inclusion Index for Entire Organization: 72.7

Employees who identify as LGBTQI+ (700 employees)

I can be myself at work. — 71
At [Organization], I am treated with respect. — 71
I have fair access to opportunities, projects and training that would allow me to grow professionally. — 68

Inclusion Index for LGBTQI+ employees: 70

You can see how experiences of inclusion differ for one group compared to the organization as a whole based on a single metric. The results can help you identify which community groups experience significantly lower or higher levels of inclusion than others.

Step 4: Explore interesting insights

Once you have established your inclusion index, you can begin to calculate the index for different groups in your organization. These groups can be defined by identity, location, business area, seniority, etc. You may come across some interesting insights by exploring this data. Be open to challenging your own assumptions on what the data will look like.

But beware: there may be situations where the data can be misleading. Here is one example of this:

An identity group is disproportionately concentrated in a specific geographic location of your business or specific business area. In this case, their experiences may be more related to that affiliation than their identity. Let’s consider a global company with office locations in Central America, North America and Europe and Asia. This company notices that employees who identify as Latino/Latina have a higher Inclusion Index than Employees who identified as white. This may be strictly based on their identity, or this could be referring to the typical experiences of employees working in the Central America office locations, where most Latina and Latino employees work. The organizational culture and opportunities in that location may be the driving force behind the experiences of those employees.

To better understand the data in this situation, you may want to include an additional identity question: “Does the race and ethnicity group or groups you selected above match the majority group where you live?” This question helps to better understand the marginalization of populations who are a minority where they live. It will let you disambiguate the experiences of Latino and Latinx employees who are in the majority where they live, compared to those who are a minority in a different geographic location.

Another example of this phenomenon is when a large portion of one identity group holds a specific type of role. For example: if most of your employees who identify as LGBTQI+ work in one part of the business (such as in technology roles), their index may be more related to the experience of technology workers than their LGBTQI+ identity.

And one final consideration: Generally, it’s good to see how intersectional identities impact the experiences of employees. But beware of using too small groups through intersecting datasets. Make sure your group size is large enough to develop a reliable index and not identify any individual employee. Surveys often have a threshold of a minimum number of employees in order to aggregate scores for that group, sometimes this is as low as 5 or as high as 25. Talk with your survey provider to find out what the right number is for your survey.

Step 5: Measure Change over Time

As you repeat your survey on an annual basis, you can measure changes to the inclusion index. You can look at the inclusion index for the same identity group, for example, Women, and see how the index score changes in the next survey. This is critical in understanding whether your initiatives intended to increase inclusion in the workplace are having a perceptible impact on a specific identity group.

As you are measuring change over time, again, keep in mind many factors may impact the results. Sometimes these results are less specific to inclusive behavior and more about situations within your organization or more broadly in society. An economic downturn or round of layoffs may create feelings of exclusion and uncertainty that be represented in the survey results. These may be felt differently by different community groups. But these results may not be directly related to initiatives you have put in place to create a more inclusive workplace.

Survey fatigue may also result in fewer employees taking subsequent surveys, especially employees who feel like there have not been substantial changes between surveys.

Closing Thoughts

When it comes to measuring inclusion in your organization, especially for underrepresented employees, an inclusion index is one of the most powerful tools in our toolbox. But, it is just one data point. You’ll need to track additional data to get a complete picture of your organization. This includes data on pay equity, the diversity of your hiring pipeline, attrition/retention and diversity in your promotions.

It’s important to note, one of the key benefits of the inclusion index is that it allows you to measure the impact of your work by providing a single metric that can be compared and measured over time. This helps us communicate with our stakeholders and the entire organization about the importance and impact of our work. And it creates a simplified way of understanding your progress. Seeing measurable improvements resulting from our work has an added benefit: it helps us focus on the projects that have the most impact and stay motivated by seeing tangible evidence of our work.