Everything you need to know about our EDI survey - Equality of Voice

What is an EDI survey?

Understanding your organisation’s current culture of equity, diversity and inclusion is a vital first step to creating a strategy that works for the individuals within your team. An EDI survey is the best way of doing this as it allows you to gather data both on the intersecting identities of the people within your organisation without compromising their privacy, while also understanding how accepted and supported your people feel within your organisation. 

The aim of any EDI survey should always be to create meaningful change within the culture of an organisation so that everyone can feel the freedom to be themselves at work, and encourage the personal and professional development of all team members regardless of gender, ethnicity, disability or sexuality. 

Our EDI survey, Equality of Voice

In order to ensure the success of your EDI programme, our EDI survey, Equality of Voice, has been designed by industry experts within the fields of EDI, HR and neuroscience. Each question will add to your understanding of the EDI culture within your organisation and give insights as to what actions should be taken to build on successes, bridge gaps and create an environment where everyone can survive and thrive. 

Alongside Equality of Voice, which gives a more general picture of your EDI landscape, our platform also offers access to our Advancing Racial Equity survey. This dives deeper into the racial aspect and gives you specific insights into this vital area of concern. 

What questions are included in our EDI survey?

Our EDI survey includes demographic questions so you can really understand the makeup of your workforce while maintaining confidentiality. This area of the survey is really important because it allows you to understand how your people identify. Often there are still taboos around disclosing some of this demographic information within the workplace. Having a third-party to collect and anonymise this data is really helpful in gathering accurate information. 

The survey also includes 5 questions that cover the key drivers of happiness and engagement that intersect with EDI programming. These are safety, freedom, relationships and acknowledgement. These questions are measured on a 1-10 scale in order to collect qualitative data on how your people think and feel about EDI within your organisation. 

It’s also vital to collect qualitative data from your team, that’s why we’ve included open text boxes alongside each question to give people space to provide context to their numerical answers. We also include a question that asks your people to share what meaningful action you can take to improve EDI within your organisation. Many of our customers find this vital in getting meaningful, actionable insights. 

What are the benefits of our EDI survey?

There are so many studies and stats that have proved time and time again why investing in EDI is so important. Here are a few powerful ones: 

• 34% higher profits in organisations with more women in C-suite positions representing the business - FastCompany

• 67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities - Glassdoor

• 26% higher profits in organisations with higher ethnic and cultural diversity - Mckinsey

• Only 19% of employers are capturing ethnicity pay gap data - UK Parliament

As these stats clearly show, investing in EDI is great for your people and for your organisation. Our EDI survey allows you to make sure you’re investing your time and money in the places that are going to work hardest for the unique needs of your organisation. 

What are the limitations of our EDI survey?

We believe that involving a third party will help you to get better feedback from your people because of the built in layer of anonymity. When you add in our extra layers of protection, this is drastically improved. However, before you can start asking about sensitive topics, you need to build trust in your listening survey. It’s possible that diving straight in with an EDI survey may not result in the feedback you had hoped for without laying important groundwork. That’s where our onboarding packages, and expert Customer Success Managers come in to support your HR and People teams. 

We often find that customers come to us with specific issues in mind. They may be struggling with retention or find they have a lack of diversity within their senior positions. It’s important to remember that a one-off survey isn’t going to “fix” any EDI problems you’re currently having. You need to build a culture of listening and trust within your organisation. EDI issues tend to go deep, so it may also be useful to think about running other surveys such as our Cultural Assessment and Employee Voice to give you greater context around the strengths and weaknesses of your organisational culture. 

Lastly, it’s important to remember actions speak louder than words. There is no quicker way to sour relationships within your organisation than to run an EDI survey and then do nothing with the data. Any survey needs a comprehensive action plan to support it, but with something as sensitive as EDI this need is magnified. We provide plenty of action planning support in our extensive knowledge hub and your customer success manager will also be on hand to support. It might, however, be helpful to include some of our bolt on extras such as more in-depth reporting, or consulting. 

Why should you use our EDI survey?

Our Equality of Voice survey allows you to dive deeper than your standard EDI survey. Here are our top 5 benefits from using our survey for your organisation: 

1. Gather demographic data about your people: Understand how your people identify in a range of fields such as disability, gender and sexuality, religion and ethnicity. This will help you better understand the make-up of your organisation and the ways in which you can support the diversity already inherent within your team. 

2. Understand how your team think and feel: Our survey uses neuroscientific principles to help you unlock both the head and the heart. With a topic as personal and sensitive as EDI it’s so vital not to leave feelings out of the picture, which can often be done in traditional employee surveys. 

3. Back your decisions with science and data: Many organisations are building out their EDI programmes but you will see greater return on your investment if you base your programme on what your team wants and needs. Our survey gives you access to the science and data you need to succeed. 

4. Uncover actionable insights and build trust: Not taking action from your survey will erode trust in your listening programme. Our survey is designed to give you specific and actionable insight and our advanced reporting offering will further support this. 

5. Open up other surveys: As you build trust in THI and our platform, you can also roll out further surveys to help you create a workplace culture where everyone can survive and thrive. Plus using our always-on offering, Employee Voice, will allow you to continue to monitor the effects of your EDI programme to ensure success. 

What actionable insights might you gain from our EDI survey? 

Our Equality of Voice survey is designed to support you in creating an EDI programme that supports the engagement and happiness of your whole team. This means that some of the insights you might get are: 

1. Key strengths and weaknesses: Understanding not only where you might be falling short as an organisation, but also where you’re succeeding is vital. It’s important to share the wins with your team, and to communicate clearly what you’re going to do to help solve the problems they have flagged. 

2. Deeper understanding of employee happiness: Within an EDI context the happiness and emotional element are vital, by gaining a better understanding of this you will be able to support everyone in your organisation not only to survive but to thrive. 

3. Concrete suggestions from your team: Our survey has space for specific suggestions and feedback. This can be vital in identifying quick wins or areas for communications, as well as longer term projects in which you can involve individuals from across your organisation. 

4. Blockers to recruitment and retention: It’s highly likely that the anonymity of our survey will allow people to speak more candidly about why they might be leaving as well as issues they may have seen in recruitment. By properly understanding these you can take action to solve or mitigate these issues. 

5. Areas to explore further: You may find areas of weakness in particular drivers of employee happiness or in particular areas of diversity. This can lead to dedicated programmes or surveys to help you understand the context better. 

What impacts have our customers seen from using our EDI survey?

Here are some of the insights customers have gained using our Equality of Voice survey: 

• ‘Our Happiness Index and our diversity and pay equity research showed there were many areas we could improve on to reach our goal of continuously improving the health and wellbeing of our employees.’

• Following the analysis of results from their Equality of Voice Survey, one customer shared that their biggest action was to combat the lowest scoring question that people don't feel they can be their true selves. As a result, have implemented different actions such as; celebrating LGBT month, inviting speakers to raise awareness of diversity, and formalising career pathways so all have equal opportunities. 

How Can You Make Sure You’re Successful With Our EDI Survey?

Just running an EDI survey isn’t enough to guarantee return on investment. Here are some steps you should consider taking to get the results you and your organisation need. 

1. Create aculture of listening: Listening should be part of your culture, not just a one-off survey you run for a specific purpose. As you build out your culture, listening should be a key value that you instil at every stage of your processes. 

2. Take onboarding seriously: We provide you with all the materials and support you need to onboard your entire organisation and get the buy-in you need from every level of your team, but if you don’t commit to communicating exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how your team will play its part you won’t get the response rates or data quality you need to succeed. 

3. Lead from the top: - One of the most important aspects to getting buy-in from your team is getting your leadership on board. If everyone can see that those with the power to make change are on board, they’ll be more likely to commit to feedback and asking for the changes they want and need.

4. Commit to a communication and actions plan: - Communicating throughout the feedback process and then committing to an action plan is vital for success. If you don’t do this then your EDI survey will in all likelihood do more harm than good. 

5. Invest in psychological safety: EDI topics are closely linked to psychological safety. This is why spending time and money in understanding how safe your people feel around their safety can make a huge difference in your EDI outcomes. 

For more information about building an EDI culture that works for everyone, why not check out our eBook: Equity, diversity and inclusion: Creating balance and belonging.

What other surveys should you run with our EDI survey?

We’re confident Equality of Voice will give your organisation invaluable insights. But to maximise impact, we recommend using it alongside some of our other employee surveys. The most popular to use to improve EDI outcomes for your organisation are:

• Racial Equity:  Dive deeper into the issue of racial equity with our survey designed with  HR Rewired by EDI and neuroscience experts to help you to empower all your people to discuss racial diversity and equity subjects. 

• Employee Voice: Stay proactive and agile to the needs of your team by using our always-on listening offering.

• Cultural Assessment: Gain a better understanding of how everyone in your organisation feels about your workplace culture more generally.

If you want to learn more about how our EDI survey, Equality of Voice, could supercharge your organisation’s culture, why not chat to one of our experts? Book in a call today.