“We know we have underrepresentation in manufacturing. We intuitively knew that, but now we have the data to back it up.”
- Vice President, U.S.-based manufacturer
As manufacturing companies navigate an increasingly shifting world, the approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has evolved in scope and purpose. The work for inclusivity continues, as many human resources and DEI leaders are aiming to foster a culture of inclusion and re-evaluate workplace connections with employee resource groups, DEI workshops, bias mitigation, and more. However, creating programs and initiatives is only one side of the story. More and more companies are looking to track their DEI metrics – tricky for those establishing guidelines and beginning the process.
Manufacturers Alliance worked with chief human resources officers and DEI leaders to dive into the various metrics they use to assess the effectiveness of DEI initiatives and to define demographics within their organizations. Through member surveys and interviews, we found that the number of metrics tracked is increasing, but teams are still facing challenges collecting complete information.
Key Metrics Tracked
Nearly all manufacturers have some type of demographic tracking in place. Whether required by law or because of contract requirements, all surveyed companies collect metrics on age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Additionally, most (93%) include veteran status. Yet, today’s climate has increased hesitation to disclose personal information, and our interviewees remarked how the low participation rate limits full insights into employee or potential employee data.
Top Metrics Tracked by Manufacturers to Gain Insights into Employee Diversity
Source: Manufacturers Alliance member research, 2024.
Following organization demographics, employee turnover and advancement/promotion rate are the next widely monitored and tracked data points by manufacturers, each at 93%. Fifty-three percent of respondents rated employee advancement/promotion rate as the number one most important metric to track the impact of inclusion efforts at their organization. Daimler Truck America is breaking this down across the organization with the ability to look at promotional and retention rates by career level, from the C-suite to the shop floor. While this level of divisional metric tracking is new, it gives direct feedback into where their human resources team should pinpoint as a focus area.
Additionally, more than half of surveyed companies are tracking job satisfaction and participation in employee resource groups. While the cadence varied, from assessing satisfaction and engagement rates with pulses three times a year to the full survey every other year, the importance of regular tracking was noted.
This continues outside of the office too. Manufacturers are increasingly tracking external diversity metrics, including community partnerships, supplier diversity, customer demographics, and competitors to assess organization-wide efforts in diversity and inclusion.
The collected insights aren’t staying within human resources or diversity departments either. All our interviewees shared how much of this data is being fed upwards to their leadership teams, along with results of engagement surveys and job satisfaction. This goes across the entirety of the organization too, not just regional segments. All our interviewees represent global manufacturers, and each remarked on the desired growth in their international metric capabilities. Gathering data by country adds some complexity with varying levels of laws and regulations about what data can be collected, but each interviewee expressed plans to continue and increase collecting metrics globally to further gauge employee diversity and the impact of evolving inclusion efforts.
W.R. Grace is currently building out their employee experience survey with the ability to break it out by demographic markers and assess where they should target resources. They’ve already started partnerships externally with Women in Chemicals and the Society of Women Engineers and continue to explore opportunities to leverage external groups to help support Grace’s talent needs and address inclusion challenges with direct insights from employees.
Top Metrics to Track the Impact of Inclusion Efforts
- Employee advancement/promotion rate
- Retention
- Demographic data
- Job satisfaction
Source: Manufacturers Alliance member research, 2024.
How are manufacturers collecting the data? Most respondents rely heavily on organization-wide HR platforms to regularly track internal demographics. With this information available, the platforms can perform trend analysis and greater data collection. In the survey, respondents noted that beyond their HRIS systems, they can gather additional data by using self-ID campaigns and engagement or satisfaction surveys. This provides teams with the opportunity to populate dashboards and actively target key metrics with information already available.
In practice, only 38% of those surveyed have conducted self-ID campaigns. Interviewees described a low participation rate and unfilled question blocks. Angie Maybury, Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Daimler Truck North America told us, “The challenging part about determining if we were successful or not was just the amount of change that we saw…and seeing if the unanswered survey questions were being answered, even if it’s no, or choose not to, or do not want to disclose.”
To address their missing information, Daimler Truck has dialed in to focus on key missing metrics, rather than the entire aggregate. Disability and veteran status have the most unanswered survey information, something Angie Maybury and the Daimler Truck teams are using education campaigns to tackle.
“This year we’re focusing on educating employees, utilizing labor relation folks in the plant to help others sign up and show them how to fill out the surveys,” said Angie Maybury at Daimler Truck. “I’m hoping that we have a significant improvement, even if it’s just ‘I don’t want to answer.’”
Several companies shared that they have launched marketing campaigns highlighting the importance of the information, given access points to fill out unanswered questions, used technology to help employees make updates, and utilized on-site support to assist employees in understanding self-identification and survey completion.
One company used disability as an example of why education matters with self-identification. “We want people to log into Workday [HR management platform] and identify their disability, which is difficult. We really need to explain the importance behind what that metric is used for and why it is important to the organization."
Manufacturers are expanding their scope to track corporate employee data as well. A significant number of organizations are tracking pay and equity metrics to ensure fair compensation practices across diverse employee groups.
Case Study: Schneider Electric’s Global Pay Equity Initiative
Schneider Electric commits to, “…have set a clear target to attain and maintain pay equity at below 1% difference between females and males by 2025. By 2025, globally, Schneider Electric is committed to 50% women in hiring, 40% women in front-line management, 30% women in leadership teams, and 50 million people with access to green electricity.”
They promise to reach this target with a global approach that addresses and prevents gaps through:
- increased awareness and education for all decision-makers with improved analytics and reporting
- implementing a clear governance model
- integrating pay equity into our performance and salary review processes
- a global standard grouping positions on the basis of job family and level
- comparing the individual salaries to the median salary of a person’s group of the opposite gender.
Read more about their commitment.
Leveraging the Data
All our interviewees are in the early stages of utilizing their platforms to track and present the data beyond standard demographic information, determining what metrics are going to be the focus within DEI, and how the data will be shared with boards, business units, and managers. For W.R. Grace, one of the goals is to sort through the metrics and establish where they should apply resources. They also want to fill in the gaps to create better employee experiences, including going back into the initial hiring and talent sourcing steps to analyze the inputs and outputs of their talent acquisition funnel, enhancing leading indicators to be set up for greater diversity success within their workforce. Dan Ellerman, Global Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, W.R. Grace, “collaborates with the talent acquisition team so they understand the areas of opportunity within the organization across the business units, operations, and corporate functions.
“Someone’s going to ask, ‘Well, have you looked at it like this? Or can we do this?’ but we want to focus on how we’re bringing people in, developing, identifying, and promoting people, and how we’re creating a diverse representative workforce that’s reflective of the communities we work in,” said Ellerman.
Building dashboards allows leaders to visualize the data and customizing them provides details unique to each department and its goals. Interviewees shared how their dashboards have evolved over time. Corporate leaders can review the dashboards and make suggestions or ask for different views, which helps staff finetune the metrics and visualizations to keep progressing with the program. Generally, access to the full dashboards and metrics is kept within small teams, snippets of dashboards and slides are pulled from the HR systems to be presented more widely. The dashboards increasingly add the storyline to the data, which can be hard to interpret on its own.
Advanced technologies offer new opportunities to gain insights, improve accuracy, and foster a more inclusive work environment. Manufacturers are using external consultants and advanced analytics tools like Qualtrics, Culture Amp, and SuccessFactors to help with deeper analysis and reporting of DEI data. And in the future, machine learning or generative AI could be used to predict trends in employee turnover, promotion rates, and overall engagement, helping organizations proactively address potential issues.
At nVent, Jasmin Buckingham, Inclusion and Diversity Manager, shared that the collected Workday data is fed into Tableau, which allows the company to create dashboards. It's also overlaid with Microsoft Viva Glint, so all of their employee engagement and performance data is included.
“It helps us really analyze those engagement surveys from a racially diverse perspective, gender perspective, and age perspective, so we are able to drill into how each population of our employees feels," said Buckingham.
Adding to that, they have integrated Textio for the talent acquisition team, which helps ensure job descriptions are not using any inappropriate terminology. And finally, they were able to overlay that with their employee recognition system to help monitor the language in appreciation or recognition submissions.
