Assessment: The Final Pillar
How do you know your TGX+ Inclusion efforts are working?
Assessment. This is the 4th and final pillar of TGX+ Workplace Inclusion.
In order to understand how our efforts in the first three pillars (education, policy, and engagement) are working, we have to assess their impact.
Lily Zheng (they/them), a renowned diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, says organizations that seek to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion as measurable outcomes know the importance of metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in their efforts.
“Stakeholders are no longer only interested in representational data; they increasingly want to know if an organization is funding effective DEI work, eliminating discrimination and resolving incidents fairly, and ensuring that its operations don’t disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Collecting metrics on a variety of outcome types and disaggregating each of them by demographics allows your organization to gauge progress on DEI in a similarly holistic and multifaceted way as your stakeholders do, and improve the likelihood that when you report success, your stakeholders agree.”
So how do we measure the impact of our TGX+ inclusion efforts?
This can happen through simple methods like pre- and post-evaluations to measure learning outcomes of TGX+ inclusion training all the way to more holistic measures like creating long term strategic plans that include tracking data around TGX+ attrition, leadership, pay equity, and other metrics.
There is a unique challenge in collecting data about the TGX+ community, as more than half of transgender employees say they are not comfortable being out at work.
What does this mean for collecting TGX+ metrics?
It means that we need to ensure our systems are set up to intake and measure data about the TGX+ community and we may need to employ special methods in order to ensure we’re gathering accurate data.
By collecting metrics specific to TGX+ folks, we communicate our commitment to the TGX+ community, which allows for more trust and more impactful data sets to be gathered over time.
One of the simplest things you can do to start is to add TGX+ identities to the metrics you’re already collecting. For example, if you collect metrics on employment numbers for men and women, add nonbinary people for those same metric categories.
This isn’t a final solution for gathering data to measure the impact of your TGX+ inclusion efforts. The reality is that assessment is a long-term strategic process.
However, it is an action you can take to lay the first brick while working toward a solid foundation of TGX+ Workplace Inclusion.
Want to learn more about the 4 Pillars of TGX+ Workplace Inclusion? Sign up for our monthly TGX+ Inclusion Roundtable for HR, DEI, and ERG leaders.
