Five Measurable Ways to Assess Inclusion in Your Workplace Culture
Inclusion isn't a feeling, it's a commitment. Like any good business practice, it should be measurable to guarantee success. Whether you're planning company events, crafting travel experiences, or developing culture strategies, your efforts toward inclusion need more than good intentions and heart. They need data, reflection, and refinement.
Here are five measurable, meaningful ways to assess whether your workplace culture is truly inclusive - and what to do if it’s not.
1. Representation in Leadership
Who is holding the microphone at your events? Who is leading your retreats? Who is featured in internal comms?
If your speaker lineup, leadership panels, or planning committees are missing voices from historically marginalized communities, it’s a red flag. Visible diversity at the top matters - it sends a clear message about who has influence and who’s being heard/respected.
Diverse leadership and inclusive HR practices correlate with lower employee turnover. Employees' feelings of inclusion significantly influence their desire to stay with an organization, accounting for approximately 20% of their retention.
What to measure:
% of event speakers or panelists from underrepresented groups
Demographics of leadership and team leads
Don’t combine groups to weigh your stats: separate all communities in their rightful representations. Sometimes this isn’t pretty, but we need transparent honesty to make a change.
Representation in promotional materials or internal communications
Protip: Partner with inclusion consultants when planning events to ensure meaningful, not performative, representation.
2. Engagement and Feedback from Marginalized Groups
Representation is a start, but inclusion is about participation. Are all your employees showing up - and speaking up? If not: you pulled up the seat, but no one’s in it.
What to measure:
Event or program attendance rates by department and demographic
Event or program feedback from diverse voices
Sentiment analysis from post-event surveys or pulse checks
If only a specific subset of your team is engaging with your culture initiatives, events or programs, it’s important to find the underlying cause and solve for it. It’s just important to understand why people are taking the open seat as it is to provide the seat to begin with.
Protip: This can take time and requires trust. If people don’t sense security, they won’t provide honest feedback. You need to create a psychologically safe environment for them to provide their insights. That means anonymity, follow through and full transparency on your end too.
3. Accessibility of Experiences - In Person and Virtual
You can’t include people if they can’t fully participate. That goes for everything from seating arrangements and travel accommodations to your Zoom settings and captioning.
Inclusive corporate events ensure full participation by employees with disabilities, neurodiverse individuals, those with chronic illnesses, and others facing barriers. This is not a niche issue – roughly 1 in 4 U.S. adults has some form of disability.
What to measure:
% of events with accessibility features (e.g., ramps, captions, interpreters)
Website and intranet accessibility audit scores
Accommodations requested vs. provided
A 2020 survey of North American event venues revealed that almost one-third were either not fully ADA-compliant or uncertain of their compliance. Furthermore, over 80% of these venues reported that wheelchair-accessible seating constituted 10% or less of their total seating, and 85% acknowledged restricting wheelchair users to specific areas.
At Heritage Collective, we treat accessibility as a baseline - not an afterthought. It’s not just about ADA compliance; it’s about proactively removing barriers to connection
4. Inclusive Language in Communications and Materials
Language has the power to invite - or exclude. The words used in your invitations, onboarding docs, travel itineraries, and Slack messages matter more than many realize.
What to measure:
Frequency of gender-neutral, inclusive terms
Check comms like intake forms, name tags, onboarding docs, emails direct messaging (Slack/Teams)
% of decks, newsletters, websites or event materials using culturally inclusive imagery/examples (avoid only Western or heteronormative examples)
Frequency of references that go beyond the “default” cultural lens
Team familiarity with inclusive language practices (survey-based)
Examples: Swap “guys” for “team” or “folks.” Include pronoun fields in registration forms. Avoid cultural idioms that not everyone may relate to. Include timezones on all times.
5. Belonging and Psychological Safety Metrics
This is the heartbeat of inclusion. Do your people feel like they belong? Can they share ideas, concerns, and feedback without fear?
What to measure:
Employee survey responses to belonging-related questions (e.g., “I feel valued” or “My voice matters”)
Turnover (retention) and promotion data by demographic group
Participation in optional culture programming and team building
Inclusion isn’t sitting in the seat that’s offered- it’s feeling safe to speak once you’re there.
What to Do with What You Learn
Metrics are only helpful if you do something with them. This isn’t a one time deep dive into the data. Pull and review your data regularly. Share it transparently, where appropriate, and be willing to pivot. Inclusion is a living, breathing part of company culture - it evolves and grows with the people apart of it.
If you're unsure where to start or what to track, that's exactly where we come in.
How We Can Help
At Heritage Collective, we offer:
Culture Audits that highlight inclusion gaps
Inclusive Event Planning that embeds accessibility from the start
Team Workshops to build inclusive practices into everyday habits
People Ops Support for inclusive onboarding, comms, and employee experience
Let’s turn inclusion into something you do, not just something you say.
Contact us here to start your culture assessment.