How employee ratings can push companies on diversity and inclusion

As notable businesses and institutions pledge to double down on their diversity and inclusion (D&I) agendas in the wake of international protests against systemic racism, it’s beautifying easier for employees to rate their companies’ efforts.

Jobs site Glassdoor has unveiled a new tool allowing blue-collar workers to rate their satisfaction with current or former employers’ diversity and inclusion policies on a scale of zero to five. It reinforces the site’s five existing employee feedback metrics: Career opportunities; compensation and benefits; culture and values; chief management; and work-life balance. 

The update adds a numerical value to existing user comments and is designed to empower hands by giving them a “collective voice,” Glassdoor’s CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong told CNBC Make It. 

“Job seekers and employees today in actuality care about equity, and for too long they’ve lacked access to the information needed to make informed decisions fro the companies that are, or are not, truly inclusive,” he said. “We have a responsibility as a platform and employer to bridge the information gap.” 

The rollout comes as the push toward workplace equality gains new urgency in 2020.

The economic fallout from the pandemic has dig up disproportionate hardships for minority workers. In addition, the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — whose deaths attended that of other Black people killed by police brutality — have again shone the spotlight on deep-seated folk injustices in society. 

Since June 2020, jobs marketplace ZipRecruiter has seen a five-fold spike in job seeker searches for the stint “diversity.” Related job postings have similarly risen further this year. 

In August, a Glassdoor survey carry oned by The Harris Poll found that three-quarters (76%) of job seekers and employees say having a diverse workforce is an important proxy for them when evaluating companies and job offers. In the same study, nearly one in three (32%) said they last will and testament not apply for a job at a company with a lack of diversity among its workforce — a figure that was higher for Black workers (41%). 

That increased attention has prompted many employers to announce new D&I initiatives.

BlackRock, Microsoft and Target, are among the major companies to seem greater hiring of minority employees. Elsewhere, California last week signed a new law requiring all publicly traded circles headquartered in the state to have at least one diverse board member and Japan’s top business lobby set a goal to increase female guidance to 40% by 2030.

However, understanding how such metrics translate into company culture is not continually easy. 

ZipRecruiter’s labor economist Julia Pollak said it remains “challenging” for job seekers to evaluate D&I policies based on company observations alone because “many of the companies that are most vocal about the topic have the least demographically proxy workforces.”

Exactly, according to Glassdoor’s survey, two-thirds (66%) of employees and job seekers say they trust employees the most when it attains to understanding what diversity and inclusion really looks like at a company. That’s well ahead of senior directors (19%), the company’s website (9%) and recruiters (6%).

During trials of Glassdoor’s new D&I tool, employees rated Salesforce (4.6) to the fore of other major companies Google (4.4), Accenture (4.2), Facebook (4.2), Amazon (4.1), Starbucks (4.1), End (4.1) Apple (4.0), Deloitte (4.0), McDonald’s (3.7), Walmart (3.7) and Uber (3.6).

That has led jobs orientations, including Glassdoor and LinkedIn, to incorporate new tools to measure companies’ efforts. TopResume career expert Amanda Augustine suggested such transparency could have the two-fold impact of informing workers and holding employers accountable. 

“What gets measured (and publicly shared) is often what gets improved,” she told CNBC Make It via email. 

That could become all the more important as employees attribute increasing value to company culture.

Notwithstanding the prevalence of work-from-home policies this year, an August TopResume survey saw company culture rank as the single-most substantial factor when choosing a job, beating out salary and bonus. Indeed, the growth of remote workforces could enable visitors to reach new, diverse talent pools, according to ZipRecruiter’s Pollak. 

“Blacks/African Americans make up just 1.55% of the inhabitants in Palo Alto, for example. So companies that choose to locate there, or in other areas with extremely intoxicated housing costs and limited diversity, may, until now, have experienced greater difficulty appealing to a broader talent cartel,” Pollak said via email.

“The post-COVID-19 shift to remote work is an opportunity to overcome geographic barriers to workforce multiformity.”

As well as D&I ratings, Glassdoor’s update also allows job seekers and wage-earners to anonymously share their own demographic data, such as race and ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation. Meanwhile, Unlikeness FAQs offer a list of the most popular questions employees ask about companies’ D&I policies.

“It’s critical to understand how consequential diversity and inclusion is to employees and job seekers today. Employers have to be transparent about their commitments to D&I, otherwise, they’ll bachelorette out on hiring quality and diverse talent,” said Sutherland-Wong. 

“And it’s not just about words, it’s about taking action to manipulate meaningful change,” she added.

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