Measuring Progress on DEI: How to Evaluate Your Company's Diversity Metrics
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are only as effective as the systems in place to track them. While many organizations express a commitment to DEI, how can they know if they’re making real progress? Without measurement, it’s easy to assume that policies and initiatives are working when, in reality, they may not be creating meaningful change.
Tracking metrics gives organizations the knowledge they need to move beyond assumptions and into data-driven, intentional actions. They can help uncover gaps in a variety of areas, and ensure that initiatives lead to real, lasting impact. That’s why we’re examining the metrics of DEI progress, why they are essential, and areas of particular interest to make your goals into reality.
Why Do We Recommend Metrics?
Imagine attending DEI training: you spend half a day with your colleagues talking about the organization’s commitments to DEI, the challenges marginalized employees face, and changes you could make today to improve the overall work environment. You spend the next couple weeks doing exactly what you learned in the DEI training session. This could mean a whole variety of things from taking accountability for your biases to modifying your language to ensure it is inclusive to all employees.
However, by week three things begin to slip back into the old, comfortable habits. It’s only natural that they do; it’s easy to slip backwards when progress is neither being enforced nor measured. Eventually, things are back to the status quo prior to the DEI training.
Metrics Create a Path, Not a Wall
With metrics, you can see the reasons why it is important to pave the way for new, more inclusive, habits. People don’t generally want to treat others poorly, but they also don’t know what they don’t know.
To start, a DEI-trained HR team or a consulting partner can distribute surveys with qualitative and quantitative questions. For best results, we recommend distributing surveys before and after training initiatives in order to get a robust picture of why DEI is needed throughout the organization as a whole. Having a better, more comprehensive picture of your organziation’s needs will help guide it towards true change.
But Why Do We Need Data?
Simply put, data is crucial to the success of DEI initiatives. The Harvard Business Review cited an audit of billable hours across a law firm. There, they found that white men averaged up to 225 more hours than all other groups, and up to 339 more hours than people of color. What does that tell us?
Well, it lets us know that marginalized employees either do not feel comfortable working more hours or are being given less work in general. Data like this can help steer organizations towards specific training initiatives, and can be shown to key stakeholders and leaders to help them understand the need for DEI throughout their industry.
The Bottom Line: You can’t improve what you don’t measure!
Without taking scheduled DEI metrics, companies will lack insight and visibility into the ins and outs of their DEI efforts effectiveness and necessity. Additionally, tracking the right data, both qualitatively and quantitatively, helps ensure DEI policies and procedures are actions, not aspirations.
Key Quantitative Metrics
Companies can utilize several quantitative metrics to effectively measure progress. Tracking these can help workplaces identify areas of improvement as well as hold themselves accountable for progress, resistance, and setbacks when it comes to DEI measures.
While diversity is a complex issue, companies can use several key metrics to measure progress. Tracking these metrics can help workplaces identify areas for improvement and hold themselves accountable for progress on diversity.
1. Overall Workforce Diversity
Here, organizations are reviewing their representation of marginalized and equity-deserving groups. You can do this via surveys, focus groups, interviews, and feedback forms.
This will not only give valuable insights into underrepresented groups, but also reveal groups that are missing or have been left unacknowledged. On top of that, learning the demographics of a workforce can help lead to other areas of need throughout an organization.
For example, if your team is primarily white, it may mean that the hiring team is suffering from a bias and may need additional training.
2. Pay Equity
Pay equity refers to the idea that equal work should mean equal pay for all, regardless of their employee’s race, gender, disability, and other factors of identity. Many organizations unknowingly have pay gaps due to historical inequities or unconscious bias, and having a measurement can help reveal these biases for the benefit of future employees.
This can be measured via a pay equity audit that analyzes:
Salaries across roles and demographic groups.
Comparing compensation levels between employees with similar roles.
Assessing who is getting promoted and the patterns that emerge there.
3. Employee Retention
Employee turnover can cripple organizations financially. This is because not only are you losing a skilled employee, but now you need to take time to hold interviews, review candidates, and onboarding and training.
When we say those costs add up, we mean they add up. Estimates vary, but depending on the level of employee this could be between 30% to over 150% of their salary cost. Expenses like this are huge, but the good news is that when laid out plainly these numbers can be leveraged to build new systems, policies, and procedures that ensure employees remain at an organization.
4. Promotions and Advancements
Reviewing who is in leadership positions demographically, as well as the employees who are being given the opportunity to advance is a great way to see where bias lies. When organizations are truly committed to DEI, they not only hire and retain diverse groups of employees, but they ensure they are compensated and advanced fairly across the organization as well.
Insights 🟰 Buy-In
Having these quantitative metrics available is a great way to help stakeholders, employees, and leadership teams invest more readily in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not only do they reveal where unconscious bias lies within the organization, but it helps pinpoint the areas of need when it comes to processes, policies and, ultimately, progress.
However, these are not the only kinds of metrics that help determine the value of DEI.
For more insights, see our Case Study on Building DEI Strategy from the Ground Up.
The Challenges of Qualitative Metrics
Measuring DEI progress is, without a doubt, a challenge. While tracking demographics is a valuable starting point, truly progressing isn’t just about a headcount. Rather, it’s about understanding the experiences of employees. In pursuit of a more inclusive workplace, organizations must move beyond numbers and explore the qualitative side of measuring DEI indicators.
This can include:
✅ Lived Experience: How do employees from all backgrounds gain access to equitable opportunities and positive workplace experiences?
✅ Feelings of Belonging: Do employees feel as if they are respected, valued, and included within workplace culture? Or, do they feel excluded?
✅ Overall Company Sentiment: How do employees perceive the overall commitment to DEI within the company? Do they believe it is from a genuine, real place, or do they feel it has been tacked on?
✅ Comfort with Participation: Do employees, especially marginalized ones, feel comfortable contributing their ideas and on new opportunities?
By integrating insights gained from qualitative questions with more traditional metrics (demographics, for example), organizations can gain a holistic understanding of their progress.
Resources for Benchmarking DEI Data
With the complexities of measuring progress in mind, any resources that can guide your organization’s efforts are not only valuable, but a key factor in progress. These include:
The Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Benchmarks by the Center for Global Inclusion (GDEIB)
The GDEIB is a free resource that assists organizations in measuring progress in DEI. Written by 112 panelists in the space, the GDEIB focuses not just on measuring progress, but using collected data to get results, create sustainable growth, and stay on track to meet your future goals.
The Corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Benchmarking Report: This report from Deloitte
With a yearly release, this collection of data provided by Deloitte unveils insights into how organizations are approaching and leading DEI within their various industries. It offers benchmarking data on topics such as diversity in leadership, employee resource groups (ERGs), and non-performative allyship.
CultureAlly’s Free DEI Resource Hub
Our very own research hub holds a collection of key resources to help your DEI journey thrive. Included in our collection is: information on collecting DEI data via surveys, tips and templates to create and/or improve your DEI policies, guides to writing a Land Acknowledgement statement, and more.
Strategies for Improving DEI Metrics
As you can see, improving DEI metrics means moving beyond the numbers and instead embedding aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion into workplace culture and policies. Organizations that successfully improve their diversity metrics do so by implementing intentional, measurable strategies that address representation and belonging.
Here are some key strategies:
Rethink Hiring Practices
Hiring equitably starts with intentionally removing barriers and biases. This could include:
👉 Setting clear diversity goals with targets that are measurable and achievable.
👉 Expanding recruitment sources beyond traditional networks.
👉 Create inclusive job descriptions with neutral, accessible language, avoiding unnecessary barriers, and offering accommodations whenever possible.
Invest in Training and Development
You have a solid team and you most definitely want to keep them, right? Well, employees with access to professional growth and development opportunities are always growing.
👉 Provide leadership development programs that focus especially on underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds.
👉 Offer DEI training on a regular basis in order to update knowledge and provide a foundation for employee development in a positive, inclusive direction.
Strengthen Inclusive Workplace Policies
An inclusive company culture is built on policies, procedures, and practices. These 3 areas should support all employees, and should be reviewed and revised as needed to keep things up to date. Companies can:
👉 Review benefits and work arrangements, offering alternatives whenever possible and according to accessibility needs.
👉 Design and create ERGs to create inclusive spaces for underrepresented employees.
👉 Continue to enforce anti-discrimination policies that work towards the maintenance of a safe and equitable work environment.
Moving from Data to Action
Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are part of an ongoing commitment to fostering a fair, inclusive, equitable workplace. Tracking and measuring DEI progress helps maintain this commitment, translating the work into measurable, meaningful actions with impact. Integrating quantitative and qualitative data helps uncover a holistic view of progress, uncovering more than just gaps, but how employees view their work, their progress, and their overall sense of belonging in their organization.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives serve as an ongoing commitment to creating a fair, inclusive, and equitable workplace. Measuring DEI progress ensures that this commitment translates into tangible actions with real impact, rather than remaining aspirational.
By integrating both quantitative and qualitative data, organizations gain a comprehensive understanding of their progress—not just in terms of representation gaps, but in how employees experience their workplace, their opportunities for growth, and their sense of belonging. With the right metrics in place, DEI efforts move beyond intentions and become sustainable, measurable change.
