Here are some survey results guaranteed to get people talking: Although organizations believe workplace diversity is important, only 30 percent can define what diversity is.

These findings are in the latest research report released this week by the Society for Human Resource Management. The “State of Workforce Diversity Management” report, done in conjunction with the American Institute for Managing Diversity Inc., is an in-depth look at the status of diversity in today’s workplace. You can find it here on the SHRM Web site, but you need to be a SHRM member to get behind the registration wall to read the report.

The survey findings aren’t all that surprising, but really, is it that hard to define diversity?  It’s true that the definition is changing (and becoming broader and more inclusive) , but one would think that if organizations believe diversity is important, they could also figure out just what it is.

We’ve written a quite a bit here at Workforce Management about what companies are doing to foster diversity. The work at Toyota and the diversification efforts at Denny’s are just two examples. But the big issue for most organizations trying to become more diverse is pretty simple: Can you link diversity to better business results?

This is the classic business dilemma—can you prove that your initiative is producing results? Are you willing to invest time and resources to demonstrate it? It’s probably why diversity efforts haven’t been more successful. If the business case for diversity could be more accurately measured and quantified, more organizations would not only embrace it, but would zero in and make diversity a bottom-line priority.

The SHRM workforce diversity study made this same point. When both HR professionals and diversity practitioners were asked an open-ended question about changes that could help foster greater diversity in the workplace, both groups had the same top response: a greater emphasis on the relationship between diversity and business results.

One contributor to the survey, Frank McCloskey, vice president of diversity at Georgia Power, had some pretty strong words about this. “The field is stuck, with little innovation in how we are tracking diversity,” he said. “There is lack of discipline and understanding of what diversity means beyond race and gender or how success is being defined, or not being defined, by most corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives.”

Anyone who dares to say that there’s a lack of strong, measurable business metrics for diversity efforts usually gets taken to task for it. But I can’t recall anyone actually producing something that showed the connection between diversity and bottom-line business results.

I wish they would. Maybe if someone did, diversity could become more of a strategic business practice and less of an elusive goal that, for most organizations, always seems just out of our reach.