What Data Should You be Collecting for an Effective EDI Strategy?

What measures of success can be used?

Measuring EDI takes a balance of qualitative and quantitative metrics to get a true measure of the changes you’re making and their success.

Quantitative measures of EDI success

Quantitative measures can be an effective way of monitoring your workforce’s demographic, changes, and attitudes through numerical evidence. While alone this cannot give a full picture of your EDI strategy in motion, this can be a good starting point for evaluating the impact you’ve made, organising future initiatives, and reporting to key stakeholders. Some examples of quantitative EDI measures include:

• Representation metrics: by measuring your workforce demographics against industry and local benchmarks, you can ensure that your workforce is representative of the people they serve, as well as making sure you remain competitive within your sector.
  
  
• Improved recruitment data: through monitoring the diversity of your candidates, you can ensure equitable opportunities by accessing a wider talent pool and monitoring your talent pipeline to support each candidate journey.
  
  
• Promotion and retention rates: by monitoring employee success and turnover rates per demographic, you can track for trends that could highlight internal learning opportunities or required changes, providing equitable mobility and increasing retention.
  
  
• Pay equity analysis: reporting on internal pay gaps can help you identify bias, highlighting room for improvement and the requirement for systematic changes.
  
  
• Training participation: better understand your company’s attitudes through training completion rates and post-training assessments to highlight behavioural changes within your company, assess areas of enthusiasm, and ensure company-wide participation.

Qualitative measures of EDI success

Alongside numerical evidence, you will need qualitative measures to truly highlight the changes you’re wanting to see within your workforce. From employee behaviours and adoption rates to the real-life impact of your EDI changes, qualitative feedback is essential for highlighting the success of your approach. Some qualitative measures of EDI success include:

• Employee experience and inclusion surveys: feedback on workplace culture and belonging is essential to your EDI strategy. By understanding the opinions and attitudes of your workforce, even through anonymised surveys, you can better align your strategy to address gaps, as well as improve initiatives to have a real, tangible impact on your workforce.
  
  
• Focus groups and listening sessions: an open forum of discussion can help identify barriers or missed opportunities and explore the lived experience of your EDI strategy and approach.
  
  
• Exit interviews: these are valuable sources of information to understand your attrition levels, the working experience of your employees, and whether poor EDI initiatives or a lack of belonging have contributed to leavers.

Strategic and structural indicators of EDI success

The crucial data you can collect from your workforce doesn’t only support your business in creating EDI initiatives, but it can also be used to help identify the strategic and structural indicators of success. Some indicators of EDI success include:

• Leadership accountability: by aligning your EDI goals with performance reviews, with an emphasis on leadership accountability and training, you can ensure that the culture you’re creating is maintained at all levels.
  
  
• Policy and practice audits: frequently reviewing policies and procedures for bias can help ensure that your business is remaining loyal to your values and morals while continually adapting and updating for accessibility, accommodations, and belonging.
  
  
• Supplier diversity: who your business partners with is as essential to your EDI strategy as ensuring structural integrity within your organisation. By committing to supplier diversity, you can make sure that you’re drawing from a diverse talent pool and managing your EDI commitments at all stages of the recruitment and employment process.

How long does it take to see change?

How long it takes to see change can depend on your level of commitment and investment into your EDI strategy. For most businesses, you can expect to see:

• Short-term (0-12 months): increased awareness, boost in diverse applications, and the formation of EDI group activities and discussions. This is the time for laying the groundwork and signalling your commitment to equity, diversity, inclusivity and belonging.
  
  
• Medium-term (1-3 years): improved representation across hiring and social mobility, boosted retention, reduced pay gaps, and cultural shifts in accountability. This is the period where tangible changes can be felt within your business with structural and systemic shifts starting to create positive impacts.
  
  
• Long-term (3+ years): inclusive culture based on continual improvement, embedded EDI strategy that aligns closely with business goals and performance, equitable outcomes across entire employment lifeline. This is the time when your business becomes fully aligned with its EDI strategy, embodying the culture necessary with a strong EDI database of quantitative and qualitative feedback to support your improvements.

How to accelerate EDI success

The speed and success of your EDI strategy depends on the commitment and investment that you dedicate to it. Some ways of accelerating your EDI success and implementing core principles quickly include:

• SMART goals: you need to be setting measurable goals from the outset that align with your EDI objectives and business goals to see the impact of your changes and to identify gaps where change can be implemented quickly, e.g. reducing the gender pay gap within your business.
  
  
• Commitment for your senior leadership team: change comes from noticeable adjustment to the culture of your business. This requires your senior leadership teams to not only endorse EDI change, but also to actively participate and play a role in leading the change that is experienced and witnessed by colleagues across the business.
  
  
• Embed EDI into your processes: implement policies, processes, and procedures with EDI integrated from the outset to see actionable change within your day-to-day business, e.g. implementing anonymised CVs into your hiring process for more inclusive recruitment.
  
  
• Invest in education and training: internal initiatives aren’t the only way to encourage a better working culture and inclusive environment. Ensure that you’re partnering with EDI and recruitment specialists and investing in essential education and training for all levels of your business.

How to maintain momentum

An effective EDI strategy is a cultural and organisational shift, not a one-off initiative. This requires long-term commitment from all stakeholders to see reasonable change. To maintain momentum, you should:

• Regularly review your approach: through data-driven decision-making, collective workforce feedback, and internal policy reviews, you should be regularly updating and re-evaluating your approach to ensure change is continuing to be made.
  
  
• Keep EDI visible: it is essential that your business keeps EDI integrated into everything you do. From employee engagement to brand marketing, EDI should be one cornerstone of your business that holds all levels accountable.
  
  
• Celebrate milestones: from employee recognition to business awards, there are plenty of ways to celebrate the individual, team, and organisational success of your EDI strategy.

How recruiters and your recruitment agency can help

Whether you need support gathering meaningful feedback or guidance on the latest inclusive hiring and workforce management practices, there are plenty of ways that your recruitment agency can be a powerful partner. We have specialists within your sector committed to providing exceptional working experiences for all employees.

Looking to make measurable, lasting change? Learn how our advisors can support your EDI journey here.