Promoting staff surveys within your organisation

We use surveys as a way of collecting data to inform us to work towards a goal. Organisations across the country create surveys for their staff to understand their perspectives and work on their feedback to improve the way the organisation operates. Annual staff surveys are quite common within organisations and participation is encouraged to ensure positive change and progress.

Our RACE Report team have been promoting a staff perceptions survey to help us understand staff perceptions on diversity, inclusion and equality within their organisations. Within your organisation, you might also be using a staff survey to collect the data needed for your submission to the main diversity data for The RACE Report.

Encouraging staff to participate in surveys, can be tricky. We’ve pulled together some tips and tricks to help with encouraging staff to take part:

• Revealing an estimated time to finish the survey
• Highlighting why the survey is important for the organisation
• Communicating the wider purposes of the survey and data collection, where relevant (for example with The RACE Report, taking part contributes to sector-wide commitment and action)
• Explaining how their data will be used and why
• Outlining what the organisation plans to do after the survey is complete
• Giving staff the opportunity to share their feedback anonymously
• Offering an incentive to your staff once they have completed the survey

At SOS-UK, we have been asking staff to complete our survey as a reminder during team meetings, through internal communication channels and by email, making sure we emphasise why it is important and how they will be helping drive diversity and inclusion by taking part.

We’ve also collected insights from other organisations who’ve been taking part in The RACE Report this year - either the main data submission or the Staff Perceptions Survey.

"…it was important to me to make it clear why we were asking UK staff to take part in the survey and also to let them know roughly how long it would take.  I used your template in MS Forms which advised that the survey would take around 6 minutes to complete”. ‍

Corinna from Compassion in World Farming (CIWF)