Start Where You Are: Part of the “Improving DE&I for SMBs” Series

Improving DE&I starts with assessing where you are, figuring out what needs work, then prioritizing, figuring out what to measure, and setting goals and targets.

Here is an excerpt from Salary.com's whitepaper: Identifying the Gaps, How to Conduct a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Audit, which explains the fundamentals of a DE&I Audit.

Audit Fundamentals

Leading an internal review of systems and culture through a DE&I lens anchors the conversation. It may catalyze productive conflict as leaders reflect on missed opportunities in the past, or it may lead to a feeling of well-earned satisfaction of a job well done. Regardless, a shared portrait of the state of the organization gives a clearer picture of the terrain, direction for strategic initiatives, and ways to measure progress.

Here are key areas of impact:

• Corporate Risk– With an increasing emphasis on equity and fairness across all corporate America, companies should mitigate or remedy the risk of pay disparities across gender, sexual orientation, and age.
• Hiring and recruiting– This is the front door to the organization. Ensure that you use hiring and recruiting to build diverse candidate pools.
• External perceptions and brand reputation– Today's buyers are highly politically and socially conscious and their purchasing habits reflect their beliefs.
• Compensation, benefits, and work conditions– Evaluate the extent to which your total rewards programs and working environments are equitable.
• Assessments and decision making – Analyze whether assessments of worker productivity and performance are honest and accurate. Also analyze whether decisions to transfer or promote workers are consistent with those assessments.
• Meetings and social connections– Look at the conditions in which workers interact and the extent to which everyone gets a chance to contribute.
• Learning and growth– Enhance productivity and performance by ensuring equal access to learning and growth, which are part of total rewards. These are the opportunities for one to advance in their career, and even gain a promotion.
• Using the data – Gather and analyze data about your employee population and compare it to external demographics, available from the US Census Bureau. Define your demographic as the market from which you recruit talented employees. Look at the DE&I numbers of your competitors and other companies. Then assess whether the composition of your internal demographics matchthe external population.

Scope of the DE&I Audit

Review policies, procedures, and practices:

• Gather data on the implementation and execution of these policies to determine how effective they are and what their impact is from a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective.
• Gather a diverse range of relevant employee data such as: compensation, education, experience, gender, job title, job description, etc. to be used to quantitatively examine the potential for pay disparity.
• Analyze the specific ways in which the policies, management, leadership, and culture are supporting or acting as barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Gather employee perceptions of how inclusive the overall climate is on your campuses and in the system.
• Evaluate attitudes and beliefs on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as existing support and willingness for embracing change.
• Gather data on the perceptions of the effectiveness of the services provided by the organization relative to diversity, equity, and inclusion (the “end-user experience”).
• Continuously consider and seek out best practices and evolving relative concepts.

Process to Follow

• Review policies, procedures, and practices from a legal and compliant perspective, as well as comparing them with other employers’ diversity, equity, and inclusion best practices to assist legal counsel in providing legal advice to the organization.
• Conduct a statistical assessment of differences in pay across gender, age, and education levels.
• Conduct focus group sessions with executives, managers, and staff at the organization and subsidiary levels.
• Carry out one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders (board members, senior leadership, department heads and staff, plus former employees).
• Conduct an online survey of benchmark companies.

The whitepaper has 18 audit questions to ask as you move through this process. You can download it here.