LaToya Lyn spent her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture pushing on a question that makes a lot of HR teams flinch. If your DEI work is really working, what would you measure to prove it? Most companies have answers about activities. They count training hours, ERG memberships, slates of diverse candidates. LaToya wants to know whether any of that actually changed how people are hired, paid, promoted, and retained, because that is where the strategy either earns its keep or quietly fails.
Her perspective comes from an unusual blend of disciplines. LaToya holds a dual master's in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and her career has spanned executive coaching and culture transformation work for global tech companies. As Vice President of Talent Strategy at Oscar, she sits at the intersection of HR practice, organizational science, and the operating realities of a fast-growing business. That combination shows up in her insistence that DEI metrics need the same rigor as any other strategic priority.
The Problem With Measuring DEI by Activity
The activity trap is what happens when DEI gets reduced to a list of programs. Programs are easy to launch, easy to count, and easy to mistake for progress. The trouble is that activities do not always change outcomes. A company can run unconscious-bias training every quarter and still promote at uneven rates. It can publish DEI commitments in every annual report and still pay similar roles differently across demographic groups. The math on activities versus outcomes is what LaToya keeps pulling people back to.
The research backs her up. Harvard Business Review research on DEI measurement found that meaningful progress only happens when organizations track outcomes, not effort, and hold leaders accountable for those outcomes. Tracking outcomes feels riskier because the numbers can be ugly. That is exactly why so few companies do it well.
What Outcomes Should HR Actually Track
LaToya's framing was practical. Pick metrics that map to real moments in the employee lifecycle and that have clear ownership. Then resist the temptation to pile on more.
Where do you start when you have no real data infrastructure?
Start with what your HRIS already collects. Demographic representation by level. Hiring funnel conversion rates by demographic group. Internal promotion rates. Voluntary turnover by demographic and tenure. Pay equity by job family. Most companies can pull all of that with the systems they have today, even if the dashboards are not pretty. The first month of staring at those numbers usually tells you more than the previous five years of activity reports.
How do you build trust in DEI data when employees are skeptical?
Publish the numbers, even when they are not flattering. HBR's recommended seven core DEI metrics include attrition, promotions, leadership pipeline, and pay equity, and the value of those metrics multiplies when they are shared internally. Transparency is what turns numbers into accountability. Hidden numbers turn into political weapons.
What Actually Works in DEI Strategy
Principle 1: Tie DEI metrics to the same operating reviews as everything else
If diversity progress only shows up in the annual diversity report, it will always lose to whatever is in the quarterly business review. LaToya argues for putting representation, promotion equity, and inclusion scores into the same operating dashboards leaders already use to run the business. Once a metric is part of the rhythm of business, it stops being an extra and starts being a job.
Principle 2: Use lifecycle data to find specific failure points
Aggregate diversity numbers hide problems. The leak might be in sourcing, in interview conversion, in time-to-promotion at the manager level, or in voluntary attrition at year three. Each leak has a different fix. Looking at the funnel by stage and by demographic is how teams catch the actual problem instead of running generic interventions that miss it.
Principle 3: Treat equity as a system, not a project
Equity is built into pay bands, calibration meetings, hiring rubrics, and the wording of job descriptions. It is not a quarterly initiative. Inclusion is similarly structural. People feel included when they have voice, access, and opportunity, all of which are produced or destroyed by ordinary HR processes. Strategy is the choice to fix those processes instead of adding new programs around them.
Where Employee Relations and Insights Fit
DEI metrics tell you what is happening at the population level. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as a function needs more than dashboards. It needs a way to surface what individual employees are experiencing, often before that experience shows up in attrition data. AllVoices' Data and Insights tooling and GPT for HR help leaders see signals across cases and surveys without sacrificing confidentiality.
How HR uses qualitative signals alongside quantitative ones
The companies that do this well treat employee feedback, ER cases, and DEI metrics as one connected dataset. They look for clusters of concerns by manager, location, or job family. They watch for changes over time. They publish themes back to the organization, not individual reports. That practice closes the gap between strategy and what employees are actually living through. It also catches the kind of systemic discrimination that does not show up in any single complaint but emerges when patterns are combined.
Frequently Asked Questions About Measuring DEI ROI
What is the single most important DEI metric to start with?
Voluntary turnover by demographic group. It is the cleanest signal that something in the day-to-day experience is not working, and it has direct cost implications that any CFO will pay attention to.
How often should DEI metrics be reviewed?
The same cadence as other strategic priorities. Most companies that take DEI seriously review the headline numbers monthly with the executive team and quarterly with the board, with deeper analysis run twice a year.
Should DEI goals be tied to executive compensation?
Tying compensation to outcomes drives focus, but it can also drive perverse behavior if metrics are poorly designed. The safer approach is to tie compensation to a portfolio of outcome metrics that are hard to game, such as voluntary attrition gaps, internal promotion rates, and pay equity across job families.
How do you keep DEI from becoming a compliance exercise?
Compliance and strategy answer different questions. Compliance asks whether you have followed the rules. Strategy asks whether you have produced different outcomes. Companies that conflate the two end up doing the minimum, slowly. Keep the two separate and make sure the strategy team is not buried inside legal.
How can smaller companies measure DEI when sample sizes are small?
Use multi-year rolling windows for any metric where small numbers create noise. Look at process outcomes, not just population outcomes. And do not ignore qualitative signals from employee feedback, exit interviews, and ER cases. Those signals are valid evidence even when the sample is too small for statistical claims.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
LaToya's central message is that DEI work is real strategy work. It needs the same data discipline, the same accountability, and the same operating cadence as any other priority that affects how a business performs. The companies that do this well are not the ones with the most programs. They are the ones with the cleanest connection between what they say they value and what their numbers show.
That connection is also what builds employee trust over time. Employees notice when DEI metrics are published, when leaders are held to them, and when the organization is honest about progress and gaps. They notice the opposite even faster. The work of measurement is the work of credibility, and credibility is the only platform on which a long-term DEI strategy can stand.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams turn DEI signals into outcomes leaders can act on.
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