This is the first of a two-part series about unlocking the power of inclusion in your organization. This article: Research reveals the pernicious inclusion gap between workforce diversity and inclusive decision making in enterprises. The next article: Best practices for improving outcomes and speeding up innovation cycles by measuring and closing the inclusion gap.
The Impact of Measuring Inclusion
The mix of ages, genders, geographies, skills, and experiences you see across your company can make communication more difficult and increase the risk of conflict. But diversity also provides potential energy that represents an opportunity for innovation and higher performance. It offers an opportunity for inclusive decision-making to spark kinetic action that will improve your business results.
However, our recent research has found that there is a gap between companies’ diversity potential and their ability to unlock that potential. We call this the inclusion gap, which is a measure of how often diverse perspectives are directly included in business decision-making processes.
Who doesn’t want equality? The executives I’ve spoken with all have said something to the effect of: “You know, we believe that inclusive teams make much better decisions. The more diverse they are, the better.” But the desire for diversity doesn’t guarantee inclusion. Without inclusion, companies leave the potential energy of diversity unused.
A foundational problem is that organizations haven’t developed the technological infrastructure to measure and improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace. While it isn’t challenging to measure diversity with basic HR systems, it is more difficult than it should be to see the inclusion problem in most businesses. Without hard data, you’re making decisions with an unmeasured view of the world. You may be cultivating a diverse workforce–or already have one–but the inclusion gap is likely much bigger than you expect it to be.
The Pernicious Inclusion Gap
We’ve done extensive research into the remarkable persistence of an inclusion gap between men and women in medium and large companies, a gap that sticks around even as gender diversity increases.
For instance, consider the employee base of two companies. Company A is 70 percent male and 30 percent female, which translates to a 20 percent diversity gap. Company B has an equal 50/50 gender mix, or zero diversity gap:
The diversity gap is relatively easy to measure.
Most executives expect that if more women are working in a company, then more women will be included in decision making. In other words, a more diverse company would have a much smaller inclusion gap. With an equal gender mix, how could the gap it be anything but zero? But in an extensive survey of over 500 companies, our research shows that in reality, the inclusion gap looks more like this:
The inclusion gap is perniciously persistent.
According to Cloverpop data, the average decision-making inclusion gap is 32% even for companies whose workforce is half male and half female. In my experience, the only way to uncover this issue is to directly measure how decisions are made and who is involved in the process. Our perceptions do not match reality, and but clear metrics reveal the truth.
The Goal: 100% Inclusive Decision-Making
A diverse and inclusive workforce represents an enormous opportunity to improve decisions and thus business performance. For this reason, it is a strategic imperative that decision making is more broadly delegated to include a wider set of employee perspectives. The beauty of this approach is that more involvement in decisions will also increase your employees’ engagement and job satisfaction levels.
If we continue to push harder, we’ll reach 100% inclusion. Any organization can attain 100% inclusive decision-making. But companies will never get there without measuring decision-making practices and using that data to improve business results.
In part two of this series, we will discuss best practices for closing your organization’s inclusion gap, share examples of companies that did just that, and give you actionable next steps to drive high performance through better decision-making practices in your organization.
Erik Larson explores leadership and the decision revolution. Erik is CEO and founder of Cloverpop: The software platform for communicating, tracking and improving decisions across your organization.