I encourage companies to embrace their internal data, from pay, to demographics to attrition rates, to stay competitive. You never know what you might uncover and learn. Although we are making positive strides in terms of equitable pay, there is still a lot of work to be done. Regardless of whether you're a part of a sales organization or not, leveraging data around pay should be a core pillar of diversity and inclusion programs.

Boosting diversity around hiring

According to the Harvard Business Review, men apply for a job when they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, but women will only apply when they meet 100 percent of them. Removing gender-centric language in job descriptions and using gender-neutral pronouns is a start to boosting diversity around hiring, but also focusing on how the roles and responsibilities are laid out can have a significant impact when it comes to attracting more women and broadening your talent pool.

For example, we moved from a simple roles and responsibilities section to job descriptions centered around specific skill sets. We also identified what projects an employee could expect to work on in the first 3, 6 and 9-month mark. In less than a year, we saw an uptick of 30% more female applicants and increased the number of female executives at the company.

Additionally, closely looking at the makeup of your hiring panels can have an impact on diversity. Finding ways to make your hiring team more heterogeneous in terms of gender, job functions, backgrounds, etc. can boost diversity during the decision-making process and your employee base in the long-term.

Fostering culture through affinity groups

For many organizations, building affinity groups is a challenge. One of the first things that you need is to ensure that you have executive support. To appropriately prioritize diversity and inclusion, leadership needs to be passionate and enthusiastically support internal initiatives.

Another mistake I commonly see is companies waiting until they have the resources to build affinity groups. One way that we have maneuvered this is by splitting up responsibilities and ownership between a handful of people who are already involved and engaged in the company culture. More often than not, you'll find that there are always people who want to be heard and feel like they are a part of the change.

Celebrating holidays and events for underrepresented minorities, like Black History Month or Pride Week, and making them a corporate-wide initiative can also bring attention and awareness to affinity groups.

Diversity and inclusion isn't just another target that companies need to meet. If done well, the short and long term impacts on engagement, performance and retention can be significant. Whether big or small, we must all remember that we have a role to play and can all embrace differences and build richer work environments.

Leanne Bernhardt is vice president of human resources at Xactly.