Lots of companies love to talk about improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). However, DEI commitments are meaningless virtue signaling without material changes to the way organizations hire, support, and promote candidates from diverse backgrounds. DEI is a big undertaking, but conducting a DEI audit is a great place to start.

DEI—just like any other business function—requires an evidence-based strategy, which starts with taking stock of your company’s current benchmarks.

What is a DEI audit?

A DEI audit is a tool that highlights how well your organization is supporting diverse and underrepresented employees. It identifies areas where you might be ahead of the curve but it also outlines any challenges or concerns that may exist.

DEI audits are typically structured processes that take an unbiased look at existing company DEI data along with  compiling employee surveys and assessments. The end product is a report that surfaces areas of opportunity and improvement to help your organization chart a path toward a more inclusive work environment.

What is DEI compliance?

DEI compliance can be looked at from two lenses: 1) legal compliance and 2) voluntary compliance with organizational DEI goals.

Legal DEI compliance ensures that your organization isn’t violating workplace discrimination rules and regulations. In the U.S. this includes anti-discrimination laws like  the Equal Pay Act, The Americans with Disabilities Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and more. But in this day and age, legal compliance only covers the bare minimum to create an inclusive and equitable workplace. 

Voluntary DEI compliance means making sure your organization is meeting DEI objectives that you’ve set out to achieve. For example, your goal might include increasing representation in leadership roles or attracting more diverse talent.  

The best way to make sure you’re meeting both goals? Conduct a DEI audit.

Why should you conduct a diversity, equity, and inclusion audit? 

Most organizations have the best intentions. It’s uncommon for companies to actively push back against DEI best practices. Yet many organizations are still falling short of DEI goals. 

As a leader, it’s often difficult to step back and look at your DEI objectives without bias. Many workplace barriers are invisible and require tackling underlying issues, which means they can easily be overlooked. An audit digs beneath the surface to identify challenges, so  you’re putting resources where they’ll make the biggest impact.

Because DEI success doesn’t happen overnight, DEI audits also create baseline benchmarks. By measuring your progress over time, you’ll have set metrics that help you determine if you’re making strides toward your goals.

Key areas to assess for DEI compliance

True diversity, equity, and inclusion should be integrated into every aspect of your business operations. However, there are some key areas to focus on when conducting a DEI audit.

1. Employee representation and diversity

Understanding representation at different levels of your organization is necessary to  improve workplace DEI. If your leadership table is primarily packed with cis-gendered white males, it’s likely a sign that there is work you can do to better elevate employees from underrepresented groups.

While racial diversity is important, representation isn’t always visible, which means you can’t just look around. For example, 50.4% of LGBT employees aren’t out to their supervisors and 10% of the U.S. population has an invisible disability. Anonymous surveys and DEI audits can help give you a better understanding of employee representation at different levels of the organization, without forcing employees to publicly disclose personal information.

And while representation is often top of mind around DEI, it still only scratches the surface when it comes to workplace DEI compliance.

2. Employee policies and company procedures

Policies and guidelines are some of the best ways to create consistency across your organization. When used correctly, they can go a long way in mitigating biases and supporting DEI goals.

However, many traditional workplaces often have policies or benefits that are inherently biased. So when policies are outdated, there’s a good chance that they’re excluding certain employee groups 

For example, consider remote. Many employees have adopted return-to-work policies. However, many LGBTQ+ and Black employees feel more comfortable and welcome in the workplace when they work from home, making these policies less inclusive.

Common company policies and procedures to assess from a DEI lens might include, but aren’t limited to:

• Dress codes
• Remote work policies
• Procedures for employee reviews and promotions
• Hiring policies and processes

3. Employee benefits and compensation

In 2023, women are still only earning 77 cents on average for every dollar earned by White men,with the amount falling further to 64 cents and 51 cents for Black Women and Native American Women respectively. Pay equity means that employees who perform the same roles and responsibilities are equally compensated for their work and time.

You should also be looking beyond salary and pay. Whether intentional or not, many employee benefits are often susceptible to discrimination. Parental leave benefits are a common example. Historically, parental leave policies only consider birth parents or women. This means non-traditional couples or transgender folks are often unable to enjoy the same benefits as their cis-gendered counterparts. The same issues can also be  present in health benefits and workplace insurance policies.

4. Employee support and access

Your employees can’t and shouldn’t be expected to navigate their careers and work experience alone. As an employer, you should strive to create an environment where employees feel supported by their peers and the company at large.

An audit can identify opportunities to help better support your underrepresented employees, including:

• Access to opportunity: Do employees have equitable access to career opportunities? What about access to mentorship or sponsorship?
• Support networks: Do employees have access to Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) or networks that can help foster belonging?
• Transparency and open communication: Do employees from different demographics feel comfortable expressing concerns and perspectives?

Read more: Why your workplace DEI strategy needs a diversity sponsorship program

The DEI audit process

When you commit to a DEI audit , it’s important to have a plan in place that ensures actionable results.

Here’s a framework to  help you get started.

1. Loop in the right stakeholders

DEI starts at the top. Looping in leaders across your organization serves a few key purposes.

Not only does it improve transparency, it also holds leaders accountable for improving diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from the start.

And we’re not just talking about C-suite executives. Your core group of stakeholders should include leaders from most, if not all, departments and business functions. This will bring in a variety of perspectives—from gender, sexuality, race, educational attainment, socioeconomic status, disability, age, and other areas relevant to your business—and create a holistic view that will make your audit stronger and more effective. 

Demographics can also vary drastically from department to department, which makes getting  that representation even more critical. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020 data, women accounted for 66% of public relations professionals, and 91% of public relations professionals were white.

2. Select key DEI metrics to measure

Improving diversity is such a broad goal that it’s hard to gauge progress without narrowing your focus to a few key metrics and areas of assessment.

Here’s a list of 6 DEI metrics examples from Culture Amp that are a great place to start:

1. Hiring: Evaluate demographics and diversity in both your hiring panel and your talent pool. 
2. Representation: What do demographics look like across departments and seniority levels?
3. Retention: Lower retention rates or higher turnover rates, particularly in underrepresented groups, should be a red flag when it comes to DEI.
4. Advancement: What do promotions look like? Are there demographics that seem to be overlooked?
5. Job satisfaction and engagement: Strong DEI often drives higher rates of employee engagement.
6. Employee resource group (ERG) participation: If you have support resources, such as ERGs, are employees actively engaging and participating?

3. Ensure you’re using the right DEI audit tools

A DEI audit is about more than just sending out a survey and analyzing the results. While surveys and questionnaires are one way to gather insights from your employees, there are many other ways to assess your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Some commonly used tools in a DEI audit include:

• Equality impact assessments (EIA): An assessment that helps review if any policies or processes disadvantage any employees.
• Pay gap analysis: An in-depth salary review across your organization to identify any discrepancies in pay related to different demographics, including gender, race, or other identifying factors.
• Diversity and inclusion diagnostics: An assessment of employee experience in the workplace to identify barriers or challenges related to DEI. 

4. Include employee input in your DEI audit

A DEI audit can’t happen in an HR or leadership silo. A comprehensive DEI audit should include qualitative feedback from your employees—particularly those from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.

Underrepresented employees often have different lived experiences and invisible barriers. Their comments and stories offer insights into your employee’s daily work lives and can highlight areas for improvement. 

There are a few different methods to get valuable input from employees about their workplace experience.

One method is to conduct small focus groups or hold round-table discussions with employees. The small size format often helps employees feel more comfortable sharing feedback. Some companies will use employees of the same level when creating focus groups. Others will opt to mix employee seniority levels. 

‍Online surveys are another option. They allow companies to get feedback in a scaled format (ie. rate your hiring experience on a scale of one to 10) as well as open-ended feedback (ie. tell us about a time you felt your identity was disregarded or disrespected at work). 

You’ll need to think carefully about whether you want employees to assign their names to the survey or if they can remain anonymous. Usually, a good compromise is to make names optional.

5. Create a data-driven plan to move forward

Now that you’ve collected the necessary data, the important work begins. It’s time to transform this information into actionable plans and policies.

This starts with analyzing and acknowledging where the company falls short. Then, you can  take these  insights and turn them into SMART goals and strategies to reach your DEI objectives. 

“Goals are an even more potent mechanism to achieve behavior change,” shared by HBR in How to Best Use Data to Meet Your DE&I Goals. “They serve to mobilize both the will (motivation) as well as the way (effort and strategies) of behavior change.”

Areas with the greatest statistical discrepancies often signal large opportunities for improvement. For example, if one department is all under 35 years old, or if recruiters aren’t reaching out to candidates who indicate a disability, that’s a potential opportunity to implement DEI training or processes around inclusive hiring.

Additionally, don’t forget to look beyond the data. Any audit reports and insights should also consider common concerns that have been outlined through employee feedback.

It’s also worth considering how transparent you plan to make the DEI audit, goals, and progress. By and large, diversity, equity, and inclusion goals should be readily available and accessible across the company to enable transparency. 

Many public and private companies have chosen to publish their diversity report publicly for accountability and go further by highlighting shortcomings and sharing their plans to improve.

Question to ask during the DEI audit process 

A DEI audit is an opportunity for organizations to reflect on their own priorities and goals. 

And like most employee experience strategies, there are many ways to approach a DEI audit. As you go through the process, it’s important to ask yourself questions that can help you establish the scope and focus on the right areas, so you can really uncover the current state of DEI within your teams.

Some questions to consider asking yourself as you go through the DEI audit process include:

• Who is responsible for the outcome of the audit?
• Are you creating unbiased opportunities for employees to provide feedback?
• How do you plan to act on the insights you’ve learned from your DEI audit?
• How will you prioritize action items post-audit?
• How will the organization remain accountable for your progress?

Your DEI audit checklist

DEI audits can be a large undertaking, but this 8-step checklist can help make sure you have everything you need to plan, execute, and report on your audit.

1. Identify overall objectives: What are you hoping to learn from your DEI audit?
2. Get leadership buy-in: Are all necessary stakeholders on board and included in the process?
3. Highlight key metrics and objectives: What metrics will you measure and track?
4. Determine areas of assessment: Based on the metrics, which areas of your business should you be focusing on?
5. Decide on the audit process and tools: What tools and methods will you use to gather data?
6. Gather employee feedback: Implement focus groups, surveys, or other methods to get employee DEI insight.
7. Summarize findings: Based on your audit, what are the biggest areas of improvement? And what are you doing well?‍
8. Outline next steps: What action items will help move the DEI needle forward?

Regular diversity, equity, and inclusion audits make your company stronger

Completing one audit is just the first step to championing DEI in your organization.

After some time has passed, it’s important to conduct another audit to see if progress has been made toward those goals. DEI audits are critical tools that, when done thoughtfully and consistently, can be a real conductor of organizational change. 

Investing in DEI fosters a workplace that embraces inclusivity, nurtures a sense of belonging, and amplifies opportunities for individuals from historically underrepresented backgrounds. This strategic commitment creates a stronger workforce that thrives on a diverse range of perspectives and a mosaic of varied life experiences.

Regular diversity, equity, and inclusion audits make your company stronger

Completing one audit is just the first step to championing DEI in your organization.

After some time has passed, it’s important to conduct another audit to see if progress has been made toward those goals. DEI audits are critical tools that, when done thoughtfully and consistently, can be a real conductor of organizational change. 

Investing in DEI fosters a workplace that embraces inclusivity, nurtures a sense of belonging, and amplifies opportunities for individuals from historically underrepresented backgrounds. This strategic commitment creates a stronger workforce that thrives on a diverse range of perspectives and a mosaic of varied life experiences.