The good news is that the future looks promising. One way to measure and adjust your D&I initiatives is to ask employees about their experience directly. Let’s say an organization’s 2015 headcount shows that the percentage of women shrinks significantly as they progress up the ranks. Similar technologies can help them optimize another critical resource: the people who work there―both how they feel and perform. To me, if a single school was like a toybox, then a consortium of schools was Toys “R” Us—and we would have to innovate as a group in order to survive. Figure 1 (below) shows a more comprehensive picture of where inclusion “lives” in the workplace. Which groups are under-represented in th… Inclusion, on the other hand, is relative to how everyone else is treated. Employees who opt-in (and, again, that is an essential pre-condition before an employer uses these tools) can receive a confidential report on their interactions over the past week, based on their e-mail headers and online calendar. Armed with these kinds of insights, companies can provide coaching and create projects that better level the playing field for men and women. But because Humanyze can match each person’s badge data with his or her demographics, it can look at subpopulations within the workforce. Combining traditional HR data and performance metrics with these newer data sources reveals workplace dynamics that were invisible to them even just a few years ago. Are employees who look and think differently more comfortable speaking up in a secluded meeting room than in the wide-open prairies that some companies refer to as “the dorm” or “the pit”? Caveat: The more sophisticated the technology becomes for collecting and analyzing employee data, the greater the imperative for companies to be completely transparent about their practices: what data they are collecting, along with how and why they are collecting it, how it will be managed, how it will protect individuals, and so on. But inclusion isn’t totally unquantifiable. A company’s demographic makeup has never been more relevant. How do we know if there is a problem around workplace inclusion? An organization may establish quantitative measures based on: Representation: What is the workforce profileof the organization? Companies must first spend substantial time in advance answering employee questions and allaying their fears. In exchange you’ll be the first to get the results! Here are some examples of tools that can help companies track inclusion and direct their efforts in a more targeted way: Organizational network analysis (ONA) enables companies to understand the web of connections between one or more individuals, between one or more groups, or between the organization and its external environment. ONA produces a visual map, like the one in Figure 2, showing not only the number of connections in a network but also their strength. Technology has really opened the door to measuring behavior and employee interactions that can detect whether patterns of behavior are inclusive. Caveat: Because diversity is much easier to measure than inclusion, companies sometimes think they are doing the latter when, in fact, they are not. But this tells us nothing about inclusion in any of its manifestations: inside people (their perceptions and feelings); between them (their behavior and relationships); or outside them (the organization or team’s culture, policies, and practices). You are invited to participate in a 3-minute survey that we are conducting about screens in the workplace. How can a company be inclusive if its people do not try to imagine what it might be like in someone else's shoes? There are few more vocal advocates for data protection than the CEO of Humanyze, Ben Waber. The bad news is that lack of inclusion is a real problem in the workplace. Now, more sophisticated tools, like Slack-based chatbots, are available that allow real-time feedback to raise issues that might otherwise go undetected, provide tips on how to modify behavior, and aggregate data to monitor company performance. Because it is driven by an endless series of actions, “it’s more of a verb than a noun,” says one corporate D&I leader. It quantifies and visually depicts the representation of easily measured aspects of diversity within a network. As employers get better at using technology, data, and analytics to understand the workplace, designers may play an increasingly important role in helping it become more inclusive. Measuring Inclusion Business leaders often ask us for specific suggestions on what they can do to increase diversity. Return to Work: A Leader’s Guide To Avoiding The Mental Health Crisis. Do introverts contribute more when their desks are located at the fringes of the agile-team’s space? Caveat: Doing this well requires reaching out to many different types of employees—not just members of employee resource groups. A company culture that doesn't value and reinforce empathy is at high risk of bias - intentional or not - against groups of its employees. 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