DEI Assessment: What Is It, and Why Should You Run One?

By Camille Hogg, Ph.D.

Simply put: a DEI assessment is the most important tool your organization has in creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.

When done well, a DEI assessment gives you the data that signposts disparity in experience across your organization, helping you to prioritize where you need to focus your efforts to create a more equitable and inclusive organization, where all employees can feel they belong.

Over time, this not only means better employee retention, performance, and a better employee experience—but also that you’re creating an organization that will be attractive to a diverse workforce, creating a positive diversity feedback loop.

In this article, we’ll outline what a DEI assessment is, and why it’s important. You’ll learn:

• The goals of a DEI assessment

• What a DEI assessment measures

• The best tools for getting DEI insights

• What to do once you get the results from your DEI assessment

What is a DEI Assessment?

A DEI assessment — also known as a DEI audit — is the process of collecting data to understand how your organization is performing in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion, and ideally, belonging. It evaluates how well a company is supporting DEI through its policies, practices, and culture, helping to identify key strengths and areas for improvement.

A DEI assessment is an essential first step in building your wider DEI strategy because it gives you a data-driven baseline for exactly where you are on your journey, where to focus your efforts, and how to set meaningful goals that align with your organization’s unique size, stage, context, and culture.

What Are the Goals of a DEI Assessment?

Meaningful progress on DEI can’t happen without action. That’s why the core goal of any DEI assessment is to create a series of next steps and goals based on your unique data that will help you make impactful, sustainable changes across your organization.

In a nutshell, the goals of a DEI assessment are to:

• Establish a data-driven baseline for how your organization is performing on DEI

• Highlight what you’re already doing well

• Identify your key barriers to making progress

• Point to the most impactful next steps

• Inform your DEI strategy and decision-making to help you better allocate resources and budget to solve key challenges

Why is a DEI Assessment Important?

No two organizations are exactly the same. And although your organization’s key DEI challenges may feel similar to another company in your space, your path forward is likely to be very different once you actually take an in-depth look at your data collected via a DEI assessment.

Running a DEI assessment can help you understand this point of difference, and lead to easier prioritization and more impactful initiatives.

For example, Organization A and Organization B might both discover that they have an attrition issue among employees from underrepresented groups (URGs). But when each runs a DEI audit, Organization A discovers that URGs report lower levels of connection to their colleagues than majority groups. Organization B, on the other hand, discovers that URGs in the Engineering and Sales departments report getting less actionable feedback from their managers.

If both organizations take the same action based on their attrition data, neither is going to be able to craft a DEI strategy that actually solves their biggest inclusion and equity challenges — and great talent will continue to leave both organizations.

DEI Assessment Areas and Metrics

DEI impacts your whole organization — and it’s about far more than representation alone.

Many organizations make the mistake of focusing only on how to bring diverse talent in the door and fail to examine whether all employees have the opportunity to succeed.

To be effective, your DEI assessment needs to be comprehensive and evaluate all of the key processes, practices, and cultural foundations that impact employee engagement, development, and retention.

At a fundamental level, your DEI audit needs to uncover the gaps and disparities experienced by different employee populations across key aspects of your culture, practices, policies, and outcomes.

Some key assessment areas and metrics include:

1. Workforce demographics: Collecting data on your workforce’s current composition will give you a snapshot of how well-represented some employee populations are compared to others and, ideally, compared to relevant workforce benchmarks.

2. Talent acquisition: Measuring your recruitment processes, including sourcing, selection, and interviews, will help you narrow down how and where bias is impacting your hiring outcomes. Metrics here include candidate application and pass-through rates at each hiring stage. Segmenting your data by hiring stage will help identify if there are any inequities in the recruiter screen, hiring manager screen, or interview stages.

3. Performance management, compensation, and promotions: Research shows that employees from underrepresented groups are often subject to inequitable performance management, feedback, and promotion processes. Measuring promotion rates, management and leadership demographics, pay equity, and employee sentiment on performance management processes will help identify any barriers to advancement.

4. Employee sentiment: Understanding how your processes work in relation to DEIB is important, but understanding how employees feel about those processes is equally as essential. Collecting employee sentiment data around core processes and experiences, like manager feedback, performance management, company culture, psychological safety, and experiences of bias will increase insights into how different employee populations experience the workplace.

DEI Assessment Tools and Analysis

To get the most out of your DEI assessment and build toward sustainable progress, you need to collect the right data.

Gathering quantitative data gives you information on how you’re performing on DEI across a range of factors, such as recruiting, hiring, promoting, compensating, and retaining employees. These are often the “hard numbers” that HR leaders need to report to their leadership teams and boards.

Meanwhile, qualitative data from your workforce will add the ‘why’ behind some of your scores to give you concrete examples of what you’re doing well, and what you need to work on.

Put together, these insights will point to a series of evidence-driven actions you can take to drive meaningful progress.

For a comprehensive process, you need four key data collection components:

• Demographic data: This can come from your HRIS, a separate self-identification survey, or even as part of an anonymous DEI survey. No matter how you do it, it’s critical to have an accurate picture of demographic representation at your organization.

• Surveys: DEI surveys help you collect quantitative data on your employees’ sentiments around key DEI issues, such as their experiences of bias, perception of benefits, and sense of belonging. This will help you outline clear next steps.

• Interviews and focus groups: Interviews and focus groups provide qualitative data on peoples’ experiences of your organization. This can illuminate the quantitative scores you see in the DEI survey and shape your understanding of what specifically led to those scores.

• Executive sessions: Senior leaders should provide the vision and sense of direction that shapes your DEI strategy.

Creating a DEI survey template will help you collect consistent data over time, meaning you have a reliable measure of your progress on DEI.

Some examples of effective DEI audit questions include:

How to Conduct a DEI Assessment

Creating a structured, consistent process around your DEI audit will ensure that you collect high-quality, valid data, time after time — meaning you can keep measuring and building on impactful changes to your DEI strategy.

Getting a DEI assessment right comes down to five key steps:

1. Run a DEI readiness assessment: An assessment before an assessment?! Yes! Knowing your motivation for running a comprehensive DEI audit will provide a ‘north star’ that will keep your efforts aligned throughout the process. At a basic level, you should aim to get a DEI snapshot of your organization: Where you think you are right now, what you hope to accomplish with your DEI audit, and what changes you hope to make.

2. Gather data on your workforce: Launch your DEI assessment process with a survey to gather demographic data and insights from your employees on their experience of working at your organization. Supplement your data with interviews and focus groups that provide extra nuance on employees’ individual experiences across different topics or processes relating to DEI.

3. Analyze your data: Once the results are in, analyze different aspects of your employee experience by demographic data to identify how different employee populations feel about your efforts on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Segment further by workforce metrics such as business unit, tenure, and attrition.

4. Identify key strengths and risks: Review your results in line with your key processes to identify where you’re doing well, and where you can make improvements. Don’t just look for gaps in representation — review your processes and policies to find root causes of bias across your organization.

5. Use your results to set sustainable, measurable goals: Use your risks as the basis to set some measurable goals to build sustainable progress. Make sure that goals are clear, specific, achievable, and measurable, and that they have clear ownership across your organization.

What Happens After a DEI Assessment?

Your DEI assessment is just the first step on your DEI journey. Once you’ve analyzed your data and identified your organization’s biggest challenges, you need to create a roadmap of priorities and next steps that build towards progress.

But remember that any actions you do take as a result of your DEI assessment need to form part of a continuous, long-term effort to improve DEI at your organization. As such, what matters most is that you continuously evaluate your progress with data, set new goals, clarify ownership and accountability, and adjust your strategy as needed over time.

Here’s where Peoplism can help.

Peoplism’s DEI strategy and assessment process helps organizations get started evaluating where they are on DEI and provides them with both an evidence-based, tailor-made roadmap and expert support to build a DEI strategy that leads to sustainable change.

Get in touch with our team to find out more.