Upholding diversity and supporting your employees are two vital pillars of a healthy workplace. However, supporting diversity requires a genuine deep dive into the employee experience to uncover problem areas. A great way to see how your people are feeling is by sending out diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) surveys.
Read on to learn how you can incorporate DEIB surveys into your day-to-day to create a positive and thriving corporate culture.
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DEIB stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging: the four pillars of building strong teams that support an organization's success. A DEIB survey — sometimes referred to simply as a diversity and inclusion survey — aims to collect data and insights on your organization's employee experience by looking at the reality of different demographics.
Understand the 11 pillars of employee experience to build an EX strategy tailored to your diverse workforce.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion survey questions usually involve a mix of multiple-choice, rating, and open-ended questions for feedback on your organization's practices.
Let's recap these key components:
Companies leverage the insights of DEIB questions to measure current policies and weed out areas that need improvement. If you ask pointed questions, you can only access a true, holistic view of your workplace environment to measure diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Diversity and inclusion surveys help managers gain more helpful results, which leads to more responsive action. Vague survey questions warrant unhelpful responses, but targeted queries focusing on employee sentiment and experience will help you measure inclusion and boost diversity.
Workleap Officevibe data found that 37% of employees don't feel close to their managers — highlighting the fact that a disconnect between leaders and their teams is not uncommon. Without diversity and inclusion surveys, managers might not even be aware of diversity and inclusion issues, unconscious biases, or other inclusion gaps.
While many DEIB practices can apply to all cases, creating an inclusive work environment also has its industry-specific challenges. As a manager, you're deeply connected to your field and might not recognize the widespread diversity and inclusion issues within your industry.
Researchers Paul J. Hickey and Qingbin Cui found that female and LGBTQ employees in construction and engineering fields suffer striking workplace discrimination rates within traditionally male-dominated industries. Male or heteronormative managers may not be aware of this since they do not experience the same reality.
Here, find diversity, equity, and inclusion survey questions to use as examples. Personalize them so they align with your own company's needs and goals.
Diversity questions like these aim to assess and enhance the diverse richness of your workplace environment. Personalize these questions to align with your company's unique context:
You might stare at numbers and percentages all day and think your workforce boasts decent diversity. However, this means little if your employees disagree. Sometimes straightforward questions offer the most transparent and helpful results.
Using a rating system or a check-all-that-apply response for this question can help you identify which groups your company should work harder on including.
The people a company hires are a crucial indicator of its diversity and inclusion status. Ask your employees about their experiences with the hiring process and whether or not they felt it honors diversity.
You might have a variety of people making up your workforce, but that doesn't mean your company treats each person the same, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Learning who does or doesn't feel appreciated or valued for their skills at work can help you discover where you might need to increase recognition efforts.
Sometimes coworkers, bosses, or business community members might unintentionally circulate biased and prejudicial opinions. Uncovering subtle diverse microaggressions helps reveal what goes on behind the scenes.
Everyone should feel comfortable and confident talking about who they are, and that extends to the workplace. Of course, conversations at the office should stay professional, but it's important to connect with your peers on a human level for interpersonal support.
Open-ended, idea-based questions are remarkable opportunities for improvement. Your employees are the bedrock of your organization and will help you identify any diversity issues they may be facing, and will likely have ideas on how to resolve them.
Equity survey questions focus on unearthing possibly unnoticed inequalities within the workplace. Asking direct questions often helps you discover which employees experience unfair treatment and how you can address those issues:
Managers offer opportunities to their employees in many ways, like selecting who will present a sales pitch, dedicating a new client to a certain employee, or picking someone as their go-to associate. Use this survey question to gauge whether or not your workforce perceives that your management allocates opportunities equally.
While everyone's professional trajectories and ambitions take different shapes, companies should offer equitable opportunities for all employees and offer incentives to boost employee engagement like promotions, raises, and bonuses. Ask your team this question to ensure that you're promoting employees fairly.
Sometimes, asking straightforward questions can help you receive the best survey results. You could use an open-ended answer for employees to discuss how they feel about fairness or offer a rating scale to gather quantifiable data on equity.
💡 We recommend leaving this survey question anonymous so that employees feel at ease answering transparently.
Favoritism is a privilege and comes in many forms; most managers often don't realize they're doing it. Maybe you tend to pick the same people repeatedly for the most sought-after tasks or never consider certain people for projects with big payoffs. Other team members are likely to be aware of this, hence why diverse opinions matter.
Equity requires supplying each person with the tools they need to succeed, regardless of who they are and what abilities or disadvantages they might have. Providing differently-abled persons on your team with the necessary support creates a more accessible and equitable work environment.
Each manager practices transparency and communication differently. Regardless of your preferred methods, you want to ensure that everyone receives the same information. Use this question to determine the perceptions of how well your managers communicate with everyone on their teams.
Just like at the end of the diversity survey, we recommend offering an open-ended box where employees can offer ideas on possible and suggested equity improvements.
Inclusion survey questions aim to uncover how people feel about the company's entire environment, including their peers, managers, workload, projects, meetings, discussions, and more. Personalize your inclusion survey questions to assess current policies or initiatives.
Managers must take action on employee feedback surveys to show their commitment to change. Even if you don't think your organization has diversity and inclusion challenges, employees will still expect you to make constant positive strides toward improvement. Use this question to learn whether or not your team thinks your management prioritizes diversity and inclusion.
Feeling included means feeling comfortable enough to join conversations. Often, when someone feels shunned because of their race, gender, sexuality, or other identifying factors, it signifies an inadequate level of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
💡 You might consider offering an open text box where employees can add names of anyone they specifically don't feel comfortable speaking with to help you discover problem areas.
Often, a diversity and inclusion survey provides insight but no measurable results to compare against other metrics in the future. We recommend using a rating scale between 1 and 10 so you can quantify results and see how well any new policies improve diversity and inclusion survey scores.
Some employees might feel intimidated by their managers, especially if they hold a contrary opinion. Certain groups may feel less inclined to share their thoughts out of fear of retribution or discrimination.
The main goal of this question is to uncover discrimination in any possible area of the workplace. Discriminatory actions could include comments from other coworkers, clients, customers, interns, or any other stakeholder.
Again, we recommend closing your diversity and inclusion survey questions with an open-ended, qualitative idea response form. Let your employees offer their ideas and feel heard. You'll likely gather excellent information from their opinions.
Asking a general question about the survey itself can help improve your questions for the next survey. You may have missed a key question on sexual orientation, or perhaps employees would prefer a different rating scale to answer their questions. Letting your team advise you on future questionnaires can boost survey completion and employee engagement rates.
Belonging in the workplace is crucial for creating a supportive environment where employees feel accepted and valued. Personalize the following questions to how strongly your employees feel they belong within the company:
Sometimes, asking if an employee feels they belong might be too open-ended. Steering questions towards specific contexts that are linked to belongingness, such as asking about their experience with team activities and discussions, might reveal more insights
Gauging belongingness is not as straightforward as with other components of DEIB surveys. Think of creative questions that prompt different ways belonging (or lack of) can manifest in employees or present in how they experience work.
To complement employee insights on what could use improvement, include questions that assess what initiatives are working well. This allows decision-makers to assess what DEIB activities are having the most impact, and understand what to invest in more or less of.
It's good to use open-ended questions that allow employees to answer how they want. Some might provide a lot of insights, while some might be more reserved. Regardless, some answers may reveal surprising truths when not confined to pre-define multiple-choice answers.
Nudging your employees to take the time out of their day to answer survey questions can be challenging. We recommend using the tips below to boost employee engagement and participation rates across your surveys:
Every employee, every team, and every company is unique. Customize your diversity and inclusion surveys so that questions reflect the nuances of your business. You could ask questions about how recent industry trends have impacted employees on a day-to-day, or their opinion on a specific inclusion initiative at work.
Some topics can feel vulnerable, and anonymity allows employees to freely express themselves. At the end of the day, you want survey answers to be honest, not censored. Leverage the anonymity features of online surveys, which work like a digital anonymous feedback box.
Avoiding ambiguity here is key. When you provide context to employees, they can better understand the purpose behind the questions, which might encourage them to invest a little more in their answers. Something as simple as "We are exploring remote work scheme possibilities, and your insights would help us decide what's best collectively" does the job.
When days get busy, it's hard to find time for non-urgent tasks. DEIB surveys might get bumped back up the pipeline if employees have to prioritize client calls or project deadlines, so make sure you help employees schedule time to complete the survey without stress.
Some employees might feel uneasy answering questions — and even more so if it's mandatory. Employees are entitled to privacy, so questions about personal life or sexual orientation should always be optional. Try open-ended questions, which allow employees to choose what aspects they want to answer unnecessary pressure.
Because people have different communication styles, one-size-fits-all inclusion surveys might not capture everyone's input effectively. Using a variety of response formats, like multiple choice or open-ended text boxes, allows you to collect both quantitative and qualitative data.
To create a culture of openness, transparency has to go both ways. Just like you include employees in collecting answers, include them in accessing insights, too. This could look like a post-survey recap once all data has been compiled.
Changes within companies are a never-ending journey. It's all about evolution! After implementing new DEIB policies, use follow-up surveys to gauge their effectiveness. This practice is part of a continuous improvement culture.
Creating effective and helpful diversity and inclusion survey questions isn't easy, but there are solutions out there designed to help you navigate the process.
Workleap Officevibe helps build safe channels between employees and management teams with interactive and engaging survey questions, private responses, and powerful data insights with tools that make tracking data easy.
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