Organisations across Ireland have shown improvements in fostering diverse and inclusive workplace cultures in the last two years, according to a study.
The Inclusion Score metric from the Irish Centre for Diversity also shows that organisations need to do more to improve their workplaces for certain groups, including disabled people; people of different race, colour, nationality, ethnicity or ethnic origin; and people of different ages.
The metric quantifies the sense of belonging and culture of inclusion within an organisation based on diversity and inclusion (D&I) benchmarking data gathered by the Irish Centre for Diversity.
The details have been compiled from more than 130 organisations across Ireland that between them employ more than 120,000 people across both the public and private sectors. The data is updated every 12 months.
According to latest findings, the national average Inclusion Score is 78%, with the insurance sector having the highest average of 81.7%.
Other sectors showing high Inclusion Scores include IT and technology with 80.8%, and construction and engineering with an average of 79.5%.
The average Inclusion Score for the public sector is 71.1%.
The Inclusion Score, which is being officially launched, enables organisations to compare their D&I performance both at a national level and against peers in similar sectors.
The Irish Centre for Diversity is a nationwide body headquartered in Waterford that works with public and private organisations in Ireland to help them embed diverse and inclusive workplace cultures.
"The data shows valuable advances when steps are taken to address workplace challenges - what gets measured gets done, and we have the data that is fundamental to support this progress," said Caroline Cummins, Managing Director of the Irish Centre for Diversity.
"We are seeing huge leaps in creating and fostering inclusive workplace cultures and evidence of this is that 100% of organisations that we re-survey are shown to have improved Inclusion Scores by up to 10%," Ms Cummins said.
