Here is why measuring Inclusion will revolutionize workforce management

If you follow our work - or my writing on Forbes - you probably noticed that over the past year or so we have really been pushing the idea of focusing on inclusion as part of Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) efforts. This is a sharp departure from the typical approach to D&I: the vast majority of data supporting the value of D&I, as well as many of the D&I initiatives implemented by companies, focus strictly on the "D." Even when an initiative is designed to increase the sense of inclusion in a company, its impact is invariably measured in terms of its impact on diversity, and, more specifically on representation.

The strict and limited focus on diversity creates two major problems:

• Diversity is a lagging measure, meaning that what you do today may take months or years to have an impact on representation, because it simply takes a long time to cycle through sufficient numbers of people.
• Diversity is an indirect measure, because any initiative you undertake is only one of many factors that ultimately lead to changes in representation.

Even if we ignore the many other reasons why Diversity is not an ideal metric, the two points above can be show-stoppers for any business looking to understand the likely impact of their D&I investments.

In contrast, our human-centric, quantitative approach to D&I has led us to develop a unique way of measuring inclusion, one that can provide an immediate, direct measure of the impact of initiatives to create a more inclusive culture.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a positive impact on our work, not because of the increased demand for all things D&I, but because the switch from in-person to virtual workshops forced us to accelerate development of our software platform. What we had not realized was that the shift to virtual Inclusion Assessments would yield several major benefits:

1. We can collect much cleaner and more detailed data.
2. Anonymity is much easier to ensure, which allows participants to be more candid in their responses, even when their managers are in the same "virtual room."
3. We can scale our workshops to an arbitrarily large number of attendees.
4. We can generate high-level insights literally within minutes of conducting a workshop, and can provide more detailed results and recommendations in days.

Recently someone asked whether we have any proof that our approach yields measurable impact. I might be tempted to answer that, because this is very new work, there has not yet been time to see the long-term impact of our work. However, part of the whole point of what we do is to create the framework that is necessary to evaluate the impact of D&I initiatives. The actual impact will depend largely on what initiatives you implement, but what is revolutionary is that you will be able to measure that impact, and course-correct as needed. Nonetheless, we expect that within a year we will be able to report on projects in which our platform have helped companies quantify the impact of their initiatives (you will notice it when our prices increase sharply ;-) ).

What we are doing, in many ways, is akin to what programmatic advertising has done for marketing. Twenty years ago, advertisers would place ads on TV, newspaper, radio and billboards, and then track sales during the subsequent weeks or months and try to sort out how much each ad might have contributed to the change in sales - a classical example of a lagging, indirect metric. The advent of digital advertising suddenly made it possible to create a much more direct connection between advertising and sales; programmatic advertising evolved as a way of leveraging this new capability to optimize marketing plans, which led to seismic changes in advertising and media.

I am fully convinced that what we are doing today at Aleria will have the same impact on the way human capital is managed, but with one fundamental difference: whereas being able to diversify advertising campaigns is only of benefit to advertisers, being able to diversify the workforce will lead to much broader societal benefits.

If you want to learn more about our Inclusion Assessment, or if you want to join us on this D&I revolution, send me a message on LinkedIn (or an email if you have my address).