Understanding inclusion
Many organisations believe that they already measure inclusion, often relying on a few questions embedded in a wider listening exercise, such as an annual employee engagement survey. In recent years engagement surveys have become a catch-all for understanding employee sentiment, measuring views on a whole host of important issues, from compensation to company strategy. There are myriad benefits to engagement surveys, however they can be a blunt instrument if what you really want to understand is inclusion.
Engagement surveys are often not precise enough to identify culture problems or negative sentiment within specific sub-groups or pockets of the business. Especially within larger organisations, important cultural truths can be hiding in plain sight, masked or obscured by ‘averages’. When leaders happily report that they have a 70% employee engagement score, we immediately have many questions about the 30%.
Additionally, engagement surveys often fail to identify actionable insights. Once you have identified a population that feels disengaged or excluded, how do you go about designing effective interventions? Simply knowing a population does not feel included is not enough; you will either need to conduct further listening to uncover the ‘why’ or implement interventions with a trial and error approach, which in many cases is costly and lacks impact. This is because inclusion is not just a fleeting sentiment; it is the outcome of interconnected systems, behaviours, and organisational processes that drive collaboration, innovation, and performance by ensuring all employees can contribute their full potential.
An effective measurement approach must therefore be able to disaggregate the many drivers that contribute to one’s feeling of inclusion, or lack thereof, so that it can more precisely identify areas for focus and improvement. At PwC, we think of inclusion as an equation made up of belonging, fairness and trust.