Improving equality data disclosure – how, what and why

This week I joined enei and their Behavioural Insights Team for an overview on diversity monitoring and ways to improve the quality of organisational diversity data.

For many of us working in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), understanding the impact of equality action plans is key to honing new approaches to tackling underrepresentation and discrimination in the workplace. Equality data, such as information on the demographics of our staff, is essential for identifying gaps in areas such as recruitment, pay and progression and assessing the impact of the actions we take to address these. In many organisations, disclosure rates for protected characteristics such as race or ethnicity, sexuality or religion can be extremely low.

The enei Behavioural Insights Team explained the importance of data and diversity monitoring before going on to consider the steps that can be taken to help improve participation levels by staff. In their experience, when employees have not acted on invitations to provide their diversity data, in the vast majority of cases this is due to practicalities. For example, the process to provide details may be unclear or difficult to find, or the questions and categories may be confusing. Many internal campaigns to improve disclosure of personal data focus on changing attitudes towards data collection, rather than addressing the key pain points in providing the data. It is also important of course to give clear reasoning on why data is being gathered to address attitudes, but this can be a relatively small reason for data not being provided. The greater the atmosphere of trust within an organisation the better but it is important to also remember that employees have every right not to share their data if they choose.

ENEI’s recommendations for collecting data are:

• Communicate. Speak to staff to understand their concerns about data disclosure and how this blocks their behaviour
• Keep it simple. Prioritise and address concerns as succinctly as possible while remaining transparent, for example by emphasising that few people have access to the data. Communications should be as short and clearly written as possible, sent out by a person not a general account. You can provide additional information as links
• Make it direct. Make the ‘call to action’ very prominent, link the disclosure to a particular campaign if there is one and always give a deadline (even if this is not a real deadline)
• Remove frictions. Make the disclosure process as easy as possible, for example include the link in an email and try the process out yourself to test it.
• Send reminders. Most people will click on the link straight away, or not at all. Send some reminders at different times but allow people to unsubscribe so they are not overwhelmed or irritated
• Use standardised questions (or test them first). The Office of National Statistics questions and responses have been heavily user tested, so it is good practice to use these, especially for a more nuanced dataset on disability. For outside the UK, you should comply with local legislation and use question sets that reflect the local community.

Reminding staff to provide data is just one side of the equation. You should also give careful thought to processes for monitoring and analysing that data.

The enei’s recommendations on getting data monitoring right are:

• Consider frequency. Establish the appropriate frequency for meaningful insight on progress for your organisation. For example, you might want to carry out an annual deep dive analysis of all data, but take a light touch approach for more monitoring regular processes, such as recruitment
• Expertise. Ensure that the people analysing the data have the right quantitative analysis skills and understand the EDI challenges well enough to interpret the findings in a meaningful way. Analysis should take account of trends, significance and benchmarking.
• Accountability. Accountability and responsibility for moving the needle on equality data should run right through from senior leaders with overall responsibility, to managers implementing actions at local levels.
• Action planning. Use insights from the data to inform and revise your EDI action plan on a regular basis
• Feedback. If you run staff surveys or gather EDI data, make sure you feed back to your employees in a timely way on what you have discovered (in an anonymised way), including how you will respond to these findings and when.
• Evaluate. Use data to understand the impact and progress of your EDI initiatives. Make sure you give time for actions to take effect and cross check your data from more than one source, for example by gathering qualitative data such as from focus groups, as well as quantitative data.

Following these common sense approaches can give a significant boost to the quality and quantity of your organisational data as well contributing to the effectiveness and impact of your EDI initiatives.