Like any other aspect of employee engagement, diversity and inclusion have major impacts on your employees and business. Our diversity and inclusion survey questions can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
When you want to find out how your employees feel about a new company initiative, you conduct a survey to collect employee feedback and consider the results. Measuring your employees’ feelings on how your business handles diversity, equity, and inclusion is no different.
Employees care about social issues more than ever; and they value businesses who take the lead on social issues that matter to them. Such companies have stellar employee engagement because their values are aligned with their employees.
This is where diversity and inclusion survey questions come in handy. Using an internal communications tool, you can easily conduct employee surveys to find out how your employees feel about your business’ DEI efforts. Read on to learn how you can better address your employees’ values based on their feedback to improve diversity and inclusion at your workplace.
What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are principles that help us understand how we connect with others. These principles can highlight informal, implied, and unconscious biases we build into our relationships and organizations.
According to the eXtension Foundation Impact Collaborative, DEI can be broken down like this:
- Diversity is the presence of individuals of different identities including race, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age, or socioeconomic status.
- Equity is the presence of fairness, impartiality, and justice for all individuals regardless of identity. This is founded on understanding the root causes for inequality.
- Inclusion is an outcome to ensure that diverse people feel welcomed and participate in decision making processes.
Embracing DEI at the workplace means ensuring these principles are considered in every aspect of your business.
Why is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Important?
The importance of internal communication extends well beyond keeping employees informed. Your communications are designed to drive employee engagement and support diversity and inclusion.
DEI is a major aspect of internal communications and employee engagement; you can’t truly understand your employees if you don’t know what’s important to them. By conducting a diversity and inclusion survey, you can hear from all of your employees to make sure their concerns are being addressed.
When everyone is represented in the decision making processes at your business, you’re less likely to miss ideas that could go unexamined by an un-diverse decision making process. The wider range of perspectives you include, the more ideas you’ll come up with.
Quick Tip: Boost diversity and inclusion by harnessing some of the latest employee engagement trends.
How to promote diversity and inclusion
One of the most effective ways to promote the principles of DEI in your organization is to create a DEI strategy. A strategy will help you plan your efforts and track your progress.
A good strategy to promote diversity in the workplace should promote awareness of the importance and value of DEI, and encourage an inclusive environment. Management at your organization should take the lead on DEI initiatives, which will help make these values part of your company culture.
6 Best Survey Questions to Ask About Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The aim of your diversity and inclusion survey is to understand how your employees feel about their relationships with their workplace and coworkers. Use their feedback to identify areas to improve your organization in order to promote the principles of DEI.
The diversity employee questions you should include will differ from company to company. Consider how your company is structured, who makes decisions, and where your employees are located to assess which survey questions are most relevant for your organization.
Pro Tip: Organize and segment employee sending lists to target the right employees with the right questions using ContactMonkey’s list management tool.
Our example diversity, equity, and inclusion survey questions can help you get ideas for your own survey questions. You can also incorporate these questions as part of an employee exit survey, company culture questionnaire, or workplace engagement survey.
We’ve kept them fairly general in regards to DEI, but don’t be afraid to ask specific questions about how your employees feel about diversity, equity, and inclusion to help build an inclusive culture..
We’ll also explore what kind of survey questions you should use. For example, using ContactMonkey’s employee survey tool you can gather feedback using:
- Emoji reactions
- Star ratings
- Yes/No
- Thumbs up/down
You can also collect anonymous employee feedback using ContactMonkey’s pulse survey software. When building your DEI survey, turn on anonymous commenting to gather qualitative feedback from your employees:
By combining survey data with employee feedback, you can use your internal communications to get a holistic view of your employee engagement situation.
Question 1 – How do you feel our business upholds the principles of DEI?
This is a good opening question for your survey. This will give you an idea of how your recipient feels about DEI and your company’s efforts to uphold its principles.
For questions that require answer beyond a simple yes/no, we recommend including anonymous comments so employees can elaborate on their responses:
Note trends you detect in replies and devise follow up questions based on the feedback you received. Conducting annual or monthly surveys can help you chart your progress in increasing employee satisfaction with your company’s DEI efforts.
Question 2 – Do you feel included in decision-making processes relevant to you?
Employees who feel they have control over their work and responsibilities have higher levels of employee engagement and feel a greater sense of belonging than those who have no say in their duties. Ask your employees whether they feel included in decision making that affects them.
This is also a useful exercise because it can help identify embedded biases in workplace power dynamics. Even the best managers can miss identifying instances where certain employees are excluded from decisions where other employees are included.
This can be a simple yes/no question, but you can also suggest employees leave a comment if they feel the need to elaborate their answer.
Question 3 – Are tasks and promotions awarded fairly amongst employees?
Every employee wants opportunities to advance their careers, and it’s important to ensure your employees feel their personal success is valued by leadership.
However, tasks and responsibilities aren’t always evenly distributed among employees. Sometimes employees who are more vocal than others will be awarded additional opportunities over others. While this isn’t an intentional bias, asking diversity employee survey questions like this is useful to identify employees who want to contribute more to your organization.
Some employees may feel more strongly about this issue than others, so consider using a survey question that allows a range of replies—like emoji reactions or star ratings. Be sure to turn on anonymous comments to let employees express themselves further.
Question 4 – When problems arise, are they handled in a fair and impartial manner?
Despite our best efforts, problems inevitably arise in the workplace. It’s important to deal with them in a standardized manner so as to avoid favouring certain employees over others. It’s important is how your employees feel about the process.
A simple question like this can reveal big issues in your problem resolution process, so it’s always worth including in your diversity and inclusion survey.
Question 5 – Do you feel comfortable voicing your opinions to coworkers or leadership?
This is a big one. How willing your employees are to raise their opinions at work has a huge impact on employee engagement. Employees who don’t feel comfortable sharing will be less likely to contribute in the future.
Similar to the question regarding the fair distribution of tasks, try using a survey featuring a range of replies rather than a simple yes/no. Since this question has such a big impact on engagement, consider measuring how your employees respond to this over time and aim to improve it.
Question 6 – How can we improve our efforts to uphold the principles of DEI?
Other than questions to learn about the current condition of your workplace, try asking questions that can gather information you can use to improve your DEI efforts.
These questions are invaluable. They can provide solutions that are guaranteed to address your employees’ needs—because they come from your employees themselves.
Obviously, a question like this requires that your employees be able to respond with comments to your question. Using ContactMonkey’s survey tool, your employees can respond with anonymous feedback directly from their email inboxes, no matter what device or email service they use.
Discover more ways you can use ContactMonkey for internal communications and boost employee engagement.
How to Create a Diversity and Inclusion Survey (with CM)
We recommend creating a survey template to work from in order to save time on your digital workplace communications, like Mettler Toledo. Create a layout using ContactMonkey’s drag-and-drop email template builder. or choose from our template library and just add your content in:
Select what kind of survey you’d like to build using the survey tile. Drag it where you’d like it to appear on your email and then drag a text tile on top of it to add your question. Repeat this process for however many questions you wish to include.
Enable comments by clicking on the comments button at the top of the page. Once you’re happy with your design, open your email inbox and your newly-created email template will appear in the ContactMonkey toolbar:
Add personalized text to the subject line or body copy using merge tags—this will increase the percentage of employees that engage with your email. Either send it immediately or schedule it for a future date and wait for the replies to roll in.
You can also organize and segment employee sending lists to target the right employees with the right information with ContactMonkey’s Human Resource Information System (HRIS) integration.
How to measure diversity, equity, and inclusion with your survey results
Your survey replies can be viewed via your analytics dashboard within ContactMonkey’s email tracking. How your employees responded to the survey and their anonymous comments can be viewed on the analytics page:
We recommend recording your survey results in a regular interval. This will give you an idea of how your DEI efforts are doing as well as your overall employee engagement picture.
Make Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion a Top Priority
Your employees are the strength of your organization Ensure that they feel safe and included at your business. This contributes directly to employee engagement and satisfaction.
With a dedicated employee engagement tool like ContactMonkey you can create, send, and track diversity and inclusion surveys. Save time on your internal communications with employee engagement ideas like multi-language emails, while increasing employee engagement with professional-quality internal emails—easily built in ContactMonkey’s email template builder.
Ensure that your DEI efforts are effective and long-lasting by taking a data-based approach to your internal communications. Connect with your employees to learn what really matters to them.
Building a DEI survey for the first time? Book a free demo with ContactMonkey to see how easy it is to build employee surveys and gather feedback:
