Diversity and Inclusion is increasingly viewed as not just a societal imperative, but a business imperative. Workforce diversity’s relationship to broader issues of social justice, socioeconomic inclusion, and equal opportunity is no longer highlighted solely by activists, but is moving to the forefront of corporate agendas and the minds of employees and customers alike. There is a need for more technical metrics that can provide an enhanced understanding of workforce diversity beyond the percentage share metrics (e.g., minority share of the workforce) that are currently widely reported by many companies and used by sustainability rating and ranking organizations to compare companies with vastly different underlying demographic compositions. Context-based analysis of workforce diversity can help illuminate the intersection of a company’s workforce, its labor force, and its larger community, and serve as a more valuable input to strategic decision making. This research seeks to provide electric power companies with a practical foundation for utilizing a context-based analytical approach for measuring and interpreting performance on workforce diversity.
The results of the analysis on minority diversity are presented sequentially to better highlight the key pieces of information provided by each pilot metric and its corresponding conventional metric. The results highlight how accounting for context can change the interpretation of relative performance when viewing benchmarking results, particularly when analyzing minority and gender diversity, and that using all the metrics presented in this report together can provide more strategic insights than using any one in isolation.