How to Run an Effective DEI Survey: A Comprehensive Guide

By Camille Hogg, Ph.D.

In today's competitive environment, most organizations know that fostering greater diversity, equity, and inclusion is a universal need to build better workplaces in the future. But the path each organization needs to take to get there is far from universal.

Your organization’s roadmap to a more diverse and engaged workplace is going to be unique to your size, stage, context and culture. What works to improve DEI at one organization may not have the same effect at another.

And without a clear understanding of your unique challenges and opportunities, it’s really easy to lose your way. Efforts to enhance DEI can quickly become a patchwork of well-intentioned, but disjointed actions that don't align with a central goal or drive substantial progress.

So how do you successfully navigate this complex journey? To build a successful DEI strategy that moves your organization forward, you first need to find out where you’re starting from. Conducting a DEI survey gives you that starting point. Let's explore how to make this powerful tool work for your organization.

What is a DEI survey, and why should you do one?

A DEI survey collects data on how your employees feel about working at your organization from a diversity, equity, and inclusion standpoint.

It’s not just about collecting demographic data and measuring your workforce diversity. Instead, it’s about understanding the experiences that different groups of people have at your organization, and how these contribute to how represented, fairly treated, included, and connected employees feel on a day-to-day basis.

When done well, a DEI survey gives you insight into how different employee populations experience the combination of processes, policies, behaviors, values, and norms that make up your company culture.

It helps you understand what you’re doing well so you can build on your strengths, as well as highlights where you can improve. Most importantly, a good DEI survey empowers you to craft targeted actions that address your organization's specific needs. By incorporating a DEI survey into your People strategy, you can establish a benchmark and measure your progress over time.

What types of questions should you include in a DEIB survey?

At a basic level, your DEI survey needs to include two core types of questions to surface meaningful and actionable insights:

• Demographic questions that collect information about the characteristics of your workforce, such as gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ status, disability and age. In order to create an equitable and inclusive workplace, it's crucial to understand how employees' experiences may differ based on these characteristics as both historically and today individuals face bias due to aspects of their identities. Collecting demographic data allows you to understand how these identities intersect with workplace experience. You should also collect role-related data, including level of seniority, office location, and department or business unit, to identify how and where bias may act within your company structure.

• Employee sentiment questions that identify how employees feel about working at your organization across the core components of DEIB: diversity representation, equity, inclusion and belonging. Remember that while data on sentiment may be seen as an individual’s subjective experiences, sentiment is objective data when viewed through the lens of the employee experience. Your employees are the experts on their own experiences at your organization.

Collecting both of these types of questions will enable you to segment your survey responses by different employee populations, helping you identify potential disparities in employee experience, and enriching your understanding of how employees feel about your workplace.

How to choose the right DEI survey questions

Launching a DEI survey is exciting, but it can also feel dauntting. The challenge lies in gathering the necessary insights to drive impactful change while avoiding survey fatigue among your employees and analysis overwhelm among your People team.

Here are our 3 best practice tips.

1. Be comprehensive and cover all aspects of DEIB

When organizations first get started on their DEI journey, many tend to focus their efforts on the ‘diversity’ part of DEI.

But diversity is only one aspect of your DEI strategy — and measuring it in isolation won’t help you identify why certain groups aren’t well represented at your organization in the first place. It won’t tell you, for example, if women or people of color feel fairly compensated or if they feel recognized for their contributions.

Building a comprehensive picture of your organization’s DEIB landscape means you need to consider factors beyond representation that contribute to an inclusive experience for all, and identify the root causes of disparity. Your survey should analyze how diversity interacts with equity, inclusion and belonging, and ask questions that directly identify how employees feel on each topic:

• Equity: Do all employeess feel that they are being developed, evaluated, promoted and compensated fairly?

• Inclusion: Do all employees feel supported, valued, and able to participate?

• Belonging: Do all employees feel connected to colleagues, able to be themselves, and psychologically safe?

Gaining insights into how your employees perceive diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is crucial for identifying the underlying reasons behind challenges in recruiting and retaining employees from underrepresented groups.

2. Link questions to actions from the beginning

When launching a DEI survey, it's natural to want to cover as much ground as possible. But just like asking too few questions won’t get you the level of insight you need, asking too many could harm response rates. Most importantly, if you’re asking questions without knowing why, you’re not going to be able to use your data effectively.

This is why you need to be intentional about choosing questions that directly link to potential actions. Consider what steps you could take based on the responses to each question.

For example, asking employees to respond to a statement like “I feel I belong” will give you an overall barometer for belonging—but it doesn’t point you to clear actions that will lead to meaningful progress on this measure. That’s because it doesn’t link to who or what the focus of the action is, such as leadership, managers, HR processes, or peers.

For more meaningful insights, make sure that each question's wording is specific and has a clear subject. For example, you can break down the broad topic of belonging into specific factors that influence belonging according to research, such as:

• My manager understands how my identity can impact my experiences at work.

• I feel personally connected to other people at this company.

• I can voice a contrary opinion without fear of negative consequences at this company.

Pair questions designed to indicate overall sentiment, such as “I feel I belong,” with questions that dig deeper into specific aspects of belonging and have clear action steps, such as providing manager training, ensuring all employees have opportunities for connection, or increasing psychological safety.

A simple test is: If you’re not sure what you would do if you found out the answer to a question, don’t ask it.

3. Only ask if you’re ready to act

It's essential to align launching a DEI survey with your organization's readiness to take action. Asking employees about their experiences and expectations regarding DEI without a genuine commitment to follow through can lead to skepticism, disengagement, and loss of trust.

Before launching a DEI survey, ensure that you have the support, leadership buy-in, and budget required to address identified issues and drive positive change. Remember, surveys should serve as a catalyst for action.

Building an anonymous, compliant DEI survey

The success of your DEI survey hinges on participation. But employees are only likely to participate if they actually trust you to keep their personal details and responses safe.

Creating policies and processes around how data is collected, who accesses it, and how it’s going to be used is vital from the very beginning. Disclosure of personal data must be an opt-in, voluntary process, and your survey format should be built in such a way that keeps employees’ identities and responses anonymous.

For organizations working across different geographical regions with their own data privacy laws, like GDPR, you’ll need to make sure employees have given their informed, explicit consent for you to collect and use their data.

You can maximize your response rate and keep employee trust high in a few key ways:

• Ensure your data collection methods are secure and anonymous. Using a tool like Google Forms, for example, may unintentionally require users to sign into their email account to use it, meaning anonymity becomes compromised.

• Use a survey administered by a third party, rather than a form built in-house. This will give employees more confidence that any data they provide will be treated impartially and anonymously.

• Tell employees exactly how the data will be collected, processed, analyzed, and accessed.

• Explain why this information is being collected. This is not only required in the case of GDPR, it’s also a great opportunity to communicate why this DEI survey is important to the organization.

• Make questions optional, so that employees can skip them if they don’t feel safe or comfortable responding.

By implementing these practices, you can enhance response rates, maintain employee trust, and ensure the integrity and confidentiality of your DEI survey data.

Analyzing and communicating the results of your DEI survey

Once your employees have done their part, it’s time to do yours, and analyze your data to identify patterns and trends among different employee populations so you can take action.

• Segment data by demographic groups. When it comes to DEIB, overall scores can be misleading. By definition, underrepresented employees have less opportunity to influence the overall score on any question because they are fewer in number. That’s why it’s critical to focus on differences by groups rather than only looking at overall scores. Measuring the difference in scores between majority and minority groups will help you identify the biggest disparities between groups, pointing you to root causes, opportunities to improve, and concrete actions.

• Integrate employee lifecycle data: Instead of viewing your DEI data in isolation, add extra nuance by viewing it in the context of other employee lifecycle data where possible — such as employee retention, promotion and compensation data. Qualitative data — such as responses from survey comment fields, or focus groups — can also add extra insight.

• Benchmark against your own progress: With all this data at our fingertips, it’s always tempting to see how we stack up against other similar organizations (or competitors). But instead of looking at industry benchmarks, use your data to continue tracking your own progress over time. The truth is that many industries are not doing well when it comes to DEIB, and they shouldn’t be anyone’s benchmark.

At this stage, remember that regular communication is critical to both building strategy, and maintaining employee trust. Make sure you communicate what happens once the survey has closed, and critically, when employees can expect to hear what actions you’re going to take as a result of the data you collected.

Creating a post-survey communication plan can help drive greater transparency, and align expectations across the whole organization:

• Limit access to raw data among carefully selected internal stakeholders, and manage what data is shared upwards and outwards.

• Create information ‘tiers’ that provide the right amount of information and context at each layer of your organization from senior leadership through to managers, and the workforce as a whole. Radical transparency works for some organizations if it’s already part of the culture— but communicating every result to your entire workforce may feel frustrating or demotivating.

• Communicate key findings to senior leaders and other senior stakeholders, and agree on action points. Align on how you will address key areas of opportunity, ownership, and a reasonable timeline.

• Communicate results honestly across the rest of the organization, including where you have areas for improvement and your plan to address them.

Transforming your DEI survey insights into an action plan

The end of your DEI survey is just the beginning for your DEI journey. Once you understand your organization’s DEI successes and opportunities, you have a data-driven foundation on which you can build your DEI strategy. What matters most now is how you use them to put a plan in place that builds towards making positive changes.

But remember that implementing your data is a long-term commitment, not a sprint. Your survey results may reveal that you need to change a lot of things about the way you currently hire, manage your workforce, and operate your business. Feeling overwhelmed at what you uncover — and a sense of urgency to fix it — is completely understandable.

To have the best chance for long-term impact, pick three to five key activities that will be most meaningful for your organization. These will help pave the way to measurable changes over time and sustainable progress.

Once you’re up and running on your DEI journey, it’s critical to remember that running a DEI survey shouldn’t be considered a one-and-done activity. As you continue to make changes across your organization’s processes and practices, it’s important to keep measuring the success of your actions, and adjust your strategy in response to new data from your employees.

Trusted by organizations including ThredUp, Lattice, and Classpass, Peoplism specializes in helping organizations develop and implement DEI strategy that deliver meaningful and sustainable progress.

If you’re ready to get started building a tailor-made DEI strategy and survey process that helps you understand your current DEI landscape, set goals, and take action to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization, then get in touch with our team.