These days, there’s a lot of social conversations about diversity and inclusion. In the workplace, more organizations are striving to implement diversity policies and support an inclusive workforce; especially through hiring from underrepresented communities.
To stay on top of all of these conversations, it is important for businesses to conduct diversity and inclusion surveys regularly. Responses to these surveys would help you assess your D&I policies and identify any gaps hindering inclusion in your organization.
What is a Diversity Survey?
A diversity and inclusion survey allows organizations to track how far they have come with creating a workplace where everyone feels welcome. Data from diversity and inclusion surveys help organizations to reflect on their company culture and identify any shortcomings that exclude or limit a particular race or gender.
These surveys allow employees to anonymously share what they think about your company’s work culture in terms of how inclusive and fair it is. Diversity and Inclusion surveys can be part of your annual employee feedback or surveys, or you can make them the core of employee pulse surveys in your organization. What matters the most is you’re asking clear and actionable questions.
Many times, organizations believe they have created water-tight D&I policies; in reality, this may not be the case. Employees may have reservations about your work culture or uncomfortable experiences with your policies. But there’s no way to know any of these things without asking the right questions.
D&I surveys help organizations to identify shortcomings in their inclusion policies and provide actionable suggestions on how these gaps can be filled. You would understand how different groups experience your workplace and if they are comfortable with your present policies plus what you can do to fix things.
Why Conduct Diversity Surveys
- It helps organizations to evaluate their policies from the employees’ perspectives. D&I surveys show you the impact of your policies on employees’ experiences in the workplace.
- These surveys allow you to identify any shortcomings in your diversity and inclusion policies and how to fix them.
- D&I surveys provide in depth insights into whether your company is making people from different backgrounds to feel accepted without any form of discrimination.
- D&I surveys produce actionable, real-time data that organizations can leverage to define their workplace policies. Data from these surveys can be used to create a safe and inclusive environment for people of different backgrounds.
- By running a diversity and inclusion survey, you can know if your employees feel accepted, understood, and valued. It also shows you where your strengths and opportunities lie, and where you need to make improvements.
- It gives you better context on how to create a diverse workforce. For instance, employees can suggest observing less-popular holidays, diversifying meal options and honoring all religious holidays.
- It helps you to track and score your diversity and inclusion progress over a specific period. Pulse surveys can help you to constantly gather feedback from employees about what is working and how you can make things better.
- D&I surveys can be used to understand your employees better, and to create the right career growth plans unique to their experiences.
- With these surveys, organizations can easily identify and address any situations that make employees feel out of place at work.
11 Workplace Diversity and Inclusion Survey Questions
1. How would you rate diversity and inclusion in our organization?
- Excellent
- Average
- Poor
2. How would you describe your gender identity?
3. What race/ethnic group do you belong to?
4. Have you ever felt marginalized in the workplace as a result of your race? Please share your experience.
5. Do you identify as a person with disability? If yes, what kind?
6. Do you feel that this organization values your unique background and experiences?
- Yes
- No
7. Do you think this organization offers equal opportunities for career growth?
- Yes
- No
8. I feel supported in my role.
- Strongly agree
- Somewhat agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
9. People of all cultures and backgrounds are valued here.
- Strongly agree
- Somewhat agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
10. If I had a concern about harassment or racism, I know where to lay my complaints.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
11. When I speak up, my opinion is valued.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
How to Promote Workplace Diversity
- Develop an Inclusive Workplace Model: Get everyone involved and encourage employees to be they’d true selves as they engage in work. For example, employees from a Latino or Asian background should feel free to converse in their language in the workplace common areas.
- Create a Diverse Executive Team: Showing is the best way to lead, so go ahead to diversify your company’s C-level executives. If the top-level of your organization has people from different races and backgrounds, it becomes easier to convince the rest of your workforce that you are serious about diversity and inclusion
- Acknowledge Different Religious and Cultural Practices: Here, you should consider giving paid time off for even the less popular religious holidays. You can ask employees to feel a form where they will highlight different religious and cultural celebrations they’d love to observe with families. You can also give floating holiday benefits.
- Create a Diverse Company Culture: You need to create a company culture that allows everyone to be their authentic selves. Employees should be encouraged to freely express themselves. They should feel safe to share any concerns they have regardless of their age, gender, race and ethnicity.
- Drive Gender and Inclusion Conversations: Gender and inclusion conversations are sensitive but they need to happen if you want to create a truly diverse team for your organization. The best way to do this is to set up communication channels where employees can air any concerns or grievances they have with your inclusion policy.
11 School Diversity and Inclusion Survey Questions
1. I feel like my classmates really understand who I am.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
2. My school performance is evaluated fairly.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
3. I rarely feel like “I’m the only one”.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neutral
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
4. When I speak up in class, my opinions are valued.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
5. Have you ever experienced discrimination in this school as a result of your race or gender?
- Yes
- No
6. Have you ever been bullied as a result of your farce or gender?
- Yes
- No
7. The teacher uses examples of people like me during lessons and in our study materials.
- Always
- Usually
- Sometimes
- Rarely
- Never
8. My school helps me grow as a person.
- Always
- Usually
- Sometimes
- Rarely
- Never
9. I feel welcome to participate in different classroom and extracurricular activities.
- Always
- Usually
- Sometimes
- Rarely
- Never
10. I believe that discipline in this school is fair to everyone.
- Always
- Usually
- Sometimes
- Rarely
- Never
11. I recognize different forms of vias when I see them.
- Always
- Usually
- Sometimes
- Rarely
- Never
How to Promote School Diversity
- Encourage Diverse Thinking: Encourage students to think in culturally-diverse ways that promote inclusion. This encourages students to not only understand their own cultures, but to see how the cultures of others can improve their own learning experiences. Diverse thinking helps students to see the world beyond what they know.
- Set Up One-on-One Discussions: Apart from surveys, teachers should find time to have personal conversations with every student in their class. It helps to establish an open door policy that encourages employees to share how they feel about your organization whenever they want. Better still, you can set out a specific time of the week for this to happen.
- Incorporate Different Teaching Styles: There’s more than one way to teach so you should explore different methods in the classroom. You need to consider the unique needs of each student and then, create teaching methods that accommodate the different ways of learning.
- Celebrate Diversity: Encourage students to participate in different activities that celebrate diversity in the classroom. You can ask students to create presentations bothering on their culture, experiences and other diversity markers that other people can benefit from.
- Use Diverse Teaching and Learning Materials: From visual guides to books and charts, choose learning materials that emphasize diversity in the classroom, and show different views and perspectives. Think critically about material which touches upon things like nationality, race, political views, backgrounds, different languages, abilities, personalities, sexuality, age, current affairs, socio-economic matters, etc.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve looked at how diversity and inclusion surveys help organizations and teachers to create conducive environments for work and learning. We’ve also shared tips on how you can improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace by encouraging conversations and implementing inclusive workplace models.
Organizations can show a genuine commitment to diversity by recognizing different worldviews, and leveraging this for decision-making. Diversity and Inclusion surveys can help you monitor the pulse of your employees or students to know what they make of your policies and if it sends any wrong signals to them.