TL;DR: Diversity surveys are a type of employee engagement survey. These surveys are an excellent way to get a pulse on how your company is doing when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion at work. It can be challenging to have these conversations with colleagues, so surveys help you get a high-level understanding of changes you can make. Besides, you’ll also gain insights into how to improve.
Did you know that only 55% of employees would agree that their workplace has policies that encourage diversity and inclusion? And that companies in the top quartile for diversity are 35% more likely to deliver better financial returns? These stats show that diversity isn’t just fun on paper. It creates tangible benefits for employers.
As generations become more diverse and the world finally begins to listen to underrepresented communities, we must take the time to understand and address issues related to diversity at work. Younger generations, in particular, want to see that your company can support them. And you must provide a diverse working environment to attract the best millennial and Gen-Z talent.
“If organizations don’t focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, they will be left behind. Hiring the best talent and keeping them engaged takes understanding how to relate to them and implementing those ideas.”
— Catharine Montgomery, social causes communications leader
Keep reading this people ops playbook to discover exactly how to run diversity surveys (or DEI surveys), analyze your data, and take action to support a more diverse workforce.
This playbook aims to inspire and educate people ops/HR professionals and company leaders who would like to understand how they can best support diversity and inclusion within their organization.
You can use this playbook at various stages of your organization’s growth, but it’s important to start your company’s diversity surveying as early as possible. If this data is collected early in your company’s history, you will have more historical data to work with as you focus on hiring more people from diverse backgrounds.
If you aren’t a people ops professional or company leader, this playbook can help you advocate for more insight into diversity within your company. Use this playbook to lay out the steps the organization needs to take to understand diversity and inclusion across your workplace.
Diversity topics can be touchy for your employees, so you might have to dig deeper. Use it as a jumping-off point for more conversations.
Building actionable plans will be challenging if your company can’t listen to the feedback it receives.
It’s difficult for employees from underrepresented groups to speak up if they fear they won’t be heard or their thoughts will be misconstrued. They have likely experienced much discrimination in their lives, and it can be hard to trust employers from the dominant culture.
It’s also not easy for leaders and employees to hear they may have been bad allies. Your company’s diversity survey will likely uncover harsh truths, and you need the right culture to act on criticism. Remember that feedback is meant to better your organization.
Before you create your survey, you need to understand why you are putting effort into this project. Understanding your goals can help you craft the best questions and processes for running your survey and securing a high participation rate.
There are several reasons you might want to host a diversity survey. Here are a few goals you could consider:
Once you’ve set 1–3 objectives for your survey, it’s time to go through the development process.
There are a couple of crucial things to consider when crafting your company’s diversity survey:
Once you’ve thought through a structure for your survey, it’s time to create a list of thoughtful, interesting questions. The best survey questions are repeatable. You shouldn’t build a diversity survey so specific that you can’t repeat the same questionnaire annually. Use open-ended questions to gather more detailed, timely information.
Your first diversity survey should serve as a baseline for your team. Then, each year you host a diversity survey, you can begin to layer, compare, and contrast to get a fuller picture of diversity at your company.
Here are some survey questions you might ask employees:
When crafting survey questions, think about the answer choices you want to get from respondents. Some of these questions might be best as a 0–10 scale (with optional comments for more context). By adding sliding scales, you can get more color into what employees think.
Don’t be afraid to ask a few demographic questions if they don’t break anonymity — and to keep anonymity top of mind, you need to have enough people in that group to ask the question.
We suggest splitting your organization’s demographic survey (where you can learn more about the makeup of your organization) from your diversity survey. When you attach demographic data to your diversity survey, you can unintentionally create a situation that jeopardizes anonymity.
For example, if there is a small number of respondents from a particular race and you ask employees to identify theirs, it might be easy to triangulate who said what inside of that underrepresented group. Will people ops leaders try to do this? Probably not, but it could lower survey completion rates.
As you send the survey, pick a deadline on when you’d like responses. Ideally, you want to give employees enough time to take the survey without rushing answers or letting it fall to the bottom of their to-do list. A typical survey deadline you’d likely see is 1–2 weeks from the initial outreach. Most of your responses will come in during the first few days.
You should send a reminder email (which can be automated with a survey tool) and share a reminder in the company’s Slack or all-hands meeting. Employees are busy, and they sometimes need to be reminded once or twice to check your survey off their to-do list.
You did it! You got information from your colleagues, but that’s only half the battle. The next step you have to take is analyzing the information. Take some time to analyze the data you got and make sure to highlight any important data or topics that need to be further explored or changed.
Don’t look at the surface information. Dig deeper to see any trends you can spot. For example, if you asked a demographic question, run the same analysis with a filter for those questions. You might find data for select groups that you don’t see in the cumulative data.
Last, follow up with an anonymous conversation (which a survey platform will allow you to do) if any part of the data feels unclear to you. It’s better to take a few minutes to clarify than miss an essential part of the results.
When analyzing survey results, you might have spotted an issue or two that needs immediate attention or action. Don’t be afraid to take some time to understand those results and take action where you need to. Connecting with other organization leaders to address major concerns is an immediate action you can take to show the worth of this survey process.
Catharine Montgomery is a leader in the strategic execution of communications services that blend the world’s differences in experiences and perspectives to achieve equality. She shared a bit about her own experience and learnings from running DEI surveys:
“After reviewing the data, I came away with concrete, actionable suggestions and solutions. I wasn’t sure exactly what learnings we would garner from the survey, but I knew I had to listen and find solutions to those learnings.
We specifically learned the importance of building open, honest two-way communication; being included in decision making; and fairness in promotions, raises, and pay equity.”
Employees and company leaders love to see the results of surveys they take. Summarize any key points in a brief report or presentation. If you asked for demographic data, make sure that managers and employees have access to the specific data that impact them most. Challenges might be very different across the organization, and a more granular view could help.
When you close the feedback loop and share results with employees, they will be much more likely to fill out your next survey.
The last follow-up best practice for diversity surveys is to make your final recommendations on what needs to happen next. Set these goals and make sure they align with where your organization wants to be in the future.
Here are some recommendations you might give based on the results you see in the survey:
⭐️ Would you like to learn more about how you can create an engagement action plan and use surveys to boost employee engagement and build a better workplace? Learn how to run an employee engagement survey and access our free pack with 72 employee engagement survey questions. 😉
Leapsome is the only platform that closes the loop between performance management, employee engagement, and learning.
Running a diversity survey in your company is an essential step to becoming a more inclusive environment. Watch this video to learn about the easy set-up process of survey questionnaires within Leapsome.
Diversity is a term coined to describe the state of being varied. Diversity comes in all shapes and sizes. You could be talking about gender identity, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, language, and so much more. When employees from different backgrounds come to one place to work, it creates an environment unlike any other. Diverse groups can consider a wide range of information and ideas, and that’s what makes diversity awesome.
DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It can be easy to mix these terms up or try to use them interchangeably. Each part of DEI is important to create an environment where underrepresented groups can thrive at your company. People ops/HR professionals use the term to describe all the activities that help organizations create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture at work.
There are other variations of this term like JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) or just D&I (Diversity and Inclusion). All of these acronyms hope to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace, even if they have different ways of saying it.
Great DEI can positively impact an organization. Diverse company cultures are more productive, innovative, and creative. Approaching DEI in a survey can seem tricky, but getting high-level numbers can help you understand where to drill in and spend 1:1 time or energy. Use your survey to understand the big picture and notice any immediate need for improvements. After that, work on the smaller work experiences that need more subtle enhancements. Before you know it, you’ll be creating a culture your team loves.
Diversity surveys can be wide-ranging depending on your survey goals and where your organization is. At the least, include questions about how leaders and employees handle diversity at work and get to know what employees think of your current diversity programs. Be sure to leave some open-ended space for notes, feedback, questions, and concerns.
Having an anonymous diversity survey is crucial. As your organization grows, you might not have a massive number of people in any minority group. By asking about further details like race, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc., you could create a situation where people’s answers are easily spotted. If employees feel like their privacy isn’t being considered, you might run into a low response rate, or staff members might give you answers that don’t get to the root of workplace issues.
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