The “glass ceiling” was first named in the 1980s to describe the invisible barriers preventing women from advancing into leadership. Decades later, the concept remains valid, and its scope has expanded to include race, disability, age, gender identity, and socioeconomic background.
According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends research, belonging and inclusion are now top priorities for executives navigating hybrid and distributed workforces. Employees consistently rank inclusive culture as a deciding factor when choosing an employer.
So what does it actually take to create a sense of inclusivity in the workplace? And how does inclusivity differ from diversity?
This Process Street guide answers those questions with ten actionable strategies, each paired with a specific metric so you can measure what matters. Whether you run HR for a mid-market company or lead operations at an enterprise, these strategies translate directly into workflows you can enforce and track.
- Understanding inclusivity and diversity
- 10 strategies to increase inclusivity in the workplace and their metrics
- Further resources
Understanding inclusivity and diversity
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) are often treated as interchangeable, but they are codependent and distinct. You can have a diverse workforce that still feels exclusionary, and a homogeneous team that is genuinely inclusive toward every member. The goal is both: a diverse team where every person belongs.
“In simple terms, diversity is the mix and inclusion is getting the mix to work well together.” – Global Diversity Practice
Inclusion
Inclusion is a sense of belonging. It involves an organization-wide effort to ensure that people from different backgrounds are culturally and socially accepted, feel welcomed, and are treated equitably. These differences span national origin, age, race and ethnicity, religion, gender, marital status, socioeconomic status, educational background, training, sector experience, organizational tenure, and more.
Diversity
Diversity means respecting and valuing what differentiates groups and individuals from one another. In the working environment, it means embracing the religious and cultural differences, perspectives, and work and life experiences that each employee brings. The full power of a diverse workforce is only realized when these differences are recognized and the entire organization learns to value each individual regardless of background.
By building structured processes into your HR activities, you can ensure that diversity and inclusivity are embedded in every task: from onboarding to performance reviews, from AI-powered HR tools that flag bias in hiring to automated compliance workflows that enforce equitable treatment.
Process Street provides automated workflows to guide your HR teams through each process. Use these as they are or customize them to meet your organization’s requirements:
- Diverse Hiring Process
- Diverse Initiatives Quarterly Improvement Process
- Diversity Management Monthly Audit
- Diversity Questions Survey
- Diversity Training Process
10 strategies to increase inclusivity in the workplace and their metrics
1. Educate your leaders
Your organization’s leaders are instrumental in ensuring inclusivity. Leaders set the tone for the entire workforce, and their commitment to inclusion cascades through every business process and decision.
Amex provides a compelling example: in 2018, the company held mandatory training for vice-president-level employees and above. The sessions started with fundamentals (what inclusion actually is and why it matters) and moved into small focus groups to develop actionable strategies.
Dianne Campbell of Amex explained that HR practitioners often assume leaders already know how to be inclusive, when in reality, inclusive leadership is a skill that requires deliberate practice and structured training.
Metric: Customer diversity, inclusion, and loyalty
Description: Compare customer diversity with internal, market, and industry benchmarks. Track customer experience, inclusion, and loyalty across segments.
Strength: Identifies customer segments not sufficiently included in your business.
Metric: Supplier diversity
Description: Track the diversity of your suppliers by identity group. Measure the frequency of procurement from women-owned, minority-owned, and other underrepresented suppliers.
Strength: Reveals whether your commitment to inclusion extends beyond internal operations to your supply chain.
2. Introduce inclusivity at onboarding
Introducing inclusivity practices early is vital for two reasons:
- It shows employees going through the onboarding process that they are valued and included regardless of how they identify. Organizations lose around 20% of new employees within the first 45 days, so making people feel they belong from day one protects your retention.
- By weaving inclusivity into onboarding workflows, you instill the value of inclusion from the start rather than retroactively.
Today’s workforce is more mobile than ever. Younger employees, spanning both Millennials and Gen Z, are not afraid to switch jobs when they feel the culture does not match their values. Ensuring every employee feels welcome and safe is not optional for organizations that want to retain talent.
Metric: Retention
Description: Compare the average retention of employees from minority groups to the retention rate of the dominant group.
Strength: Identifies groups that may feel less included and are therefore less committed to the organization.
Metric: Exit interviews
Description: When an employee leaves, conduct a structured interview to capture the reasons for their departure and their experience of working for the organization.
Strength: A rich source of insight into the lived experiences of departing employees, revealing patterns that surveys miss.
3. Embrace employee differences
I remember at school getting “Christmas” and “Easter” holidays. The schooling system in the UK structured term times around these two Christian holidays. There was no equivalent break for Ramadan (Islamic), Diwali (Hindu), or Vesak (Buddhist).
That structural bias extends into the modern workplace. If you want to create genuine inclusivity, you need to challenge inherited calendar defaults, celebration norms, and cultural assumptions that favor one group over others.
Here are some ways to embrace employee differences:
- Potluck lunches where people bring food that showcases their culture.
- Recognize and celebrate days significant to different communities: Black History Month in February, Pride Month in June, Lunar New Year, Diwali, Eid, and others.
- Ensure employees of various backgrounds have a meaningful voice in your organization’s decision-making processes.
- Create channels for employees to share their stories and experiences of belonging (or exclusion) within the organization.
Metric: Time-off audit
Description: Audit your team’s time-off and vacation calendar. Does the structure favor a particular social group, culture, or religion? If so, change it.
Strength: Surfaces outdated policies and unconscious structural biases.
4. Listen to all employees
Research from the University of Missouri found that the average person retains between 25% and 50% of what they hear. Passive listening is bad for productivity, and it is worse for workplace morale. A team that feels unheard will not work cohesively.
It falls on leaders to create an inclusive environment where all employees feel heard, whether that means structured feedback loops, anonymous pulse surveys, or dedicated listening sessions for underrepresented groups.
Metric: Employee engagement
Description: Compare employee engagement scores for individuals from minority groups with scores of those from majority groups. Segment by culture, gender, religion, disability status, and tenure.
Strength: Pinpoints which groups are experiencing inclusivity and which are not.
5. Hold more effective meetings
Research consistently shows that men are significantly more likely to interrupt women in meetings than they are other men, and that these interruptions often go unchallenged.
To address this, leaders should call out interruptions in real time and redirect the conversation back to the person who was speaking. Structured meeting protocols, round-robin speaking formats, and documented agendas all help level the playing field. Tools like real-time meeting analytics can track participation imbalances so leaders can act on data rather than intuition.
Metric: Interruptions and participation balance
Description: Track interruption frequency and speaking-time distribution per meeting, either manually or with meeting analytics tools.
Strength: Creates accountability for inclusive meeting behavior and surfaces patterns that subjective observation misses.
6. Communicate goals and measure progress
Metrics create accountability. Without measurement, inclusivity goals remain aspirational statements rather than operational commitments. This entire article is built on that premise: pairing every strategy with a specific, trackable metric.
Metric: Pay and benefits equity
Description: Compare financial and non-financial rewards across monitored identity groups with those of non-monitored groups.
Strength: Identifies bias in compensation and reward structures that verbal commitments to equity might miss.
7. Rethink policies
How does this tie to pay equity? Policies are the mechanisms that determine who gets paid what and why.
The gender pay gap persists. According to the Center for American Progress, women still earn approximately 84 cents for every dollar earned by men, with the gap widening further for women of color.
Creating genuine inclusivity may require creating new policies or retiring outdated ones entirely. When building compensation policies, ensure that pay reflects skill set and role. Gender, race, and sexual orientation should not factor into the equation.
Metric: Employer brand perception
Description: Compare the quality and strength of your employer brand among different identity groups through surveys and Glassdoor-style review analysis.
Strength: Identifies recruitment barriers before they become retention problems.
Metric: Recruitment pipeline diversity
Description: Compare the number of applicants from monitored groups against the potential pool from those groups in the labor market.
Strength: Surfaces barriers to entry, pipeline issues, and biased recruitment practices.
8. Make pronouns matter
Pronouns are part of everyday conversation. Gender pronouns (“she/her,” “he/him,” “they/them”) carry particular weight in inclusive workplaces because the way we interpret someone’s gender may not reflect their actual identity.
“Because gender identity is internal, an internal sense of one’s own gender, we don’t necessarily know a person’s correct gender pronoun by looking at them.” – Human Rights Campaign
Proper pronoun use should be a priority for all employers who value inclusivity. The experience of being misgendered is hurtful, and normalizing pronoun sharing removes the burden from individuals who would otherwise have to correct others repeatedly.
Here are actionable ways to normalize pronouns in your workplace:
- During the interview and onboarding process, provide a place for candidates and new hires to share their preferred name and pronouns.
- Encourage employees to add pronouns to their profiles on Slack, Zoom, email signatures, and other communication tools.
- Make pronoun sharing part of the introduction process. For example: “My name is Alex, I work in Marketing, and my pronouns are they/them.”
9. Be aware of unconscious bias
Unconscious bias is a social stereotype about a group of people that individuals form outside their conscious awareness. It can lead to exclusion, reduced productivity, and blocked career growth for affected employees.
In 2018, a Starbucks employee committed an act of racial discrimination against two African American men. In response, the company closed 8,000 US locations for a day of unconscious bias training attended by roughly 175,000 employees. The incident illustrates a critical point: it is far better to proactively address bias through structured training, diverse hiring, and inclusive processes than to react after harm has been done.
Be proactive, not reactive.
Metric: Representation
Description: Percentage of employees from minority groups compared with competitors or market and industry benchmarks.
Strength: Identifies underrepresented groups in your organization, whether caused by unconscious bias, structural barriers, or discriminatory practices.
10. Integrate inclusion strategies throughout all tasks
Inclusivity should be embedded in every process within your organization, not treated as a standalone initiative. Whether it is recruitment, training, performance management, or leadership assessment, inclusion should be a default, not an afterthought.
Ways to operationalize this:
- Build unconscious bias training and cultural awareness modules into your standard HR workflows.
- Conduct structural evaluations of your physical and virtual workplace. For example, ensure non-gendered restrooms and accessible meeting formats for remote employees.
- Maintain open communication channels where employees can voice opinions and concerns safely.
- Use compliance operations tools to track, enforce, and audit inclusivity practices across departments.
Metric: Development equity
Description: Track how employees develop and progress within your organization. Monitor which groups participate in training, mentorship, and leadership development activities.
Strength: Surfaces bias within development practices and promotion pipelines.
These ten strategies, each paired with a measurable metric, provide a structured framework for building genuine inclusivity. The key is consistency: measure regularly, act on what the data reveals, and embed inclusion into the processes that define how your organization operates every day.
Further resources
- 60+ Essential HR Processes for All Human Resource Teams – A comprehensive guide to HR processes you can operationalize with workflows.
- Human Resource Planning: Checklists and Workflows – Planning workflows that help fine-tune your HR operations.
- What is Diversity and Inclusion? – Global Diversity Practice’s foundational overview of D&I concepts and frameworks.