Measuring racial equity: Conducting a workplace anti-racism questionnaire
Data is vital in the journey to racial equity within your organisation. This data will be crucial in benchmarking where you are and measuring your progress going forward.
Regularly collecting data and measuring progress towards racial equity enables you to demonstrate improved performance. This means you can sustain the buy-in you’ve secured from key stakeholders and employees more efficiently. In turn, this feeds into the organisation’s motivation to continue its journey toward racial equity.
Why are racial equity questionnaires important?
A racial equity questionnaire will help reveal how your organisation is currently performing, especially when providing a benchmark for how your organisation performs year on year and against your industry. You’ll see whether progress is consistent and where there’s still room for improvement. While also discovering how you’re doing compared to your competitors to ensure you remain competitive as clients and consumers continue to demand better alignment to their social values.
So, how do you collect the data you need to demonstrate that your organisation’s efforts are making a difference?
Racial equity questionnaire essentials:
Getting the most accurate and representative data is crucial when conducting a racial equity questionnaire.
To do that, your questionnaire has to:
Be anonymous
Respondents have to feel comfortable and safe answering honestly.
Be conducted annually
There’s no quick fix when it comes to cultural transformation. However, conducting questionnaires on an annual basis gives any changes you’ve made to your racial equity strategy a chance to kick in.
Include the ethnicity and demographic data of the respondent, along with details of their department or team
It’s essential to drill down into the data to understand whether a problem lies with just one department or the entire organisation.
Include all employees, regardless of their ethnicity
The key is to get a picture of where your entire organisation stands in relation to your racial equity objectives.
Help you to find causative, not correlative links
Non-specific questions can lead to correlative links rather than discovering the root causes.
Let’s look at an example
Your questionnaire results show a statistically significant, positive correlation between Black employees feeling unmotivated at work and the finance department. As a result, you may start to believe that Black employees are being unfairly treated within that department.
However, what if more Black employees work in the finance department than in other departments? Perhaps, the finance manager is lacking as a leader. Maybe they aren’t motivating their employees, regardless of race and ethnicity?
You may conclude that you have a racial equity problem when, in fact, you have a leadership problem.
Asking the right questions in the right way helps avoid the issue of skewed data. As a result, you mitigate the risk of inaccurate assumptions and uncover genuine cause and effect instead.
>> Join over 100 organisations harnessing the power of data to advance racial equity. Click here to get started.
Making the most of your questionnaire results:
Before you dive headlong into sharing your questionnaire results, consider whether or not they change your organisation’s goals/objectives.
Reaffirm goals and SMART objectives
Armed with your questionnaire results, this is your opportunity to revisit your racial equity goals and objectives.
Are there issues you didn’t realise your organisation had?
Can you be more ambitious with any of your goals?
Are there areas that need more work than you initially thought?
Remember to keep your goals SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timebound); you can reassess and tweak them as necessary.
Need inspiration? - Here are a few racial equity goals:
At least 25% of our workforce will be racially diverse by 2025
We will have at least two racially diverse board members by 2025
In 12 months, we want 80% of our employees to say they are at least very satisfied with our organisation’s anti-racist efforts
Increase spending with racially diverse suppliers by 25% over the next three years
Create a targeted action plan
Now you’ve dialled in your goals and objectives, you can use this information to create an action plan. Your action plan will show your key stakeholders and employees how you’ll achieve these realigned goals and objectives.
Your action plan will break down each goal/objective into manageable steps. Let’s take the example of improving workforce racial diversity. You might plan to:
Examine the recruitment process to find out where you’re losing racially diverse candidates
Implement recruitment outreach to seek out diverse talent proactively
Interview a certain proportion of racially diverse candidates for each role
Implement strategies to keep diverse talent engaged and motivated while working for your organisation
Communicating your questionnaire results
When you have your action plan, you can sustain momentum and accountability by presenting your findings to key stakeholders and employees.
Keeping everyone informed of the organisation's racial equity progress and goals helps to create change, as everyone is aware of, and aligned with, the overarching objectives. In addition, clearly describing your steps encourages action and accountability.
Clearly outline why you launched the questionnaire, remind them of the data privacy involved, and what action will be taken from the results.
Share the feedback more widely
You may follow advice from organisations such as Change the Race Ratio and consider voluntarily declaring the information.
You should also publish your anti-racism pledges, racial equity action plans and annual diversity report findings on your organisation’s website.
The key is to be transparent about your organisation's achievements and how far you still have to go.
Gather further insights:
There are times when your questionnaire results, and subsequent action, may not be enough to rectify complex issues of systemic racism.
In these situations, it could be effective to complement the questionnaire data with qualitative employee-listening sessions to learn more about the experience of specific groups within your organisation.
You could involve employee groups and DE&I leaders within your organisation to help analyse and identify areas for action. These groups likely have a greater understanding of the experience of your employees and can help implement programs from the ground up.
The challenges faced by Black, Asian and other ethnically marginalised people in society can be overwhelming. However, within your organisation, you have the power to change the experience of your employee population and create a genuinely equitable organisation.
Or you could let FLAIR do some of the hard work for you…
Work with FLAIR:
With the data insights gathered from our science-backed questionnaire, we provide organisations with a targeted racial equity action plan. This gives them the power to know where to target their efforts and the best steps to get there.
FLAIR worked in conjunction with leading social scientists to design a questionnaire which enables organisations to measure the four key pillars of racially equitable cultures:
Racial awareness
Racist behaviours
Inclusion barriers
Racial diversity
Resulting in an accurate, anonymous and revealing questionnaire that tells you everything you need to know about your racial equity challenges and achievements. Book a demo to see how FLAIR can help you create a racially equitable organisation.