Employee surveys

Important issues to consider when including diversity in an employee survey include:

What are the objectives? – What do you really want to know about your organisation and your diversity programme?  Linking your objectives to the business case a will send an important message that the survey is about improving the performance of the whole organisation and not just “window dressing”.

Who will be surveyed? – Employers have the option of surveying the whole workforce or taking a sample.  Surveying all employees is usually the best option if the size of your workforce permits this.   This provides statistically robust data and allows detailed feedback of data to managers of employee attitudes at a local level. 

How do you get employee buy in? - Employee buy-in is critical to the success of the survey. If they believe that improvements will result from the survey, they are more likely to participate by completing it and will become actively involved in the follow-up improvement and action planning process. Communication is critical to getting this employee buy-in, and a communication plan should consider the key messages for employees before, during and after the survey programme.  Diversity questions can often touch on sensitive issues so employees need to understand why they are being asked, what will be done with the information and be assured that their responses will remain anonymous.

How do you get managers on board? – Managers’ attitudes will be crucial.   They should role model for their employees by taking the survey seriously and filling it in.  A separate strategy for engaging managers should be developed involving senior manager’s demonstrating their own commitment and briefing their expectations down the management chain.

Developing the survey questions on diversity

• Decide what you really need to know about your diversity initiatives.
• Each question must directly relate to, and be measured against these objectives
• The survey must only include questions that will provide relevant and actionable information to your organisation
• The survey should only include questions that employees can reasonably answer,
• If possible It should include questions that allow comparison of results with other external organisations
• It must strike the right balance between addressing the needs of employees and the needs of the organisation.
• It should  include questions that will allow employees to provide improvement ideas and suggestions in the form of verbatim comments

Diversity questions should explore a number of specific areas:

• Commitment and behaviour of leaders;
• Commitment and behaviour of manager;
• Commitment and behaviour of colleagues;
• Fairness and transparency of policies and processes (including recruitment appraisal promotion);
• Respect and value of different perspectives in decision making and problem solving;
• Fairness and transparency of pay processes.

Remember that it is not just the “diversity” question that can provide information on diversity.  When the survey results are disaggregated by gender or any other diversity dimension they can provide valuable insights into differences in attitudes and experiences between different employee groups. This can help develop diversity strategies and monitor the impact of these strategies over time.