Employee Engagement Surveys that Lead to Action
This conversation with Aparna Rae focuses on how organizations should implement and effectively manage workplace climate surveying.
Aparna Rae is a multi-startup founder, working at the intersection of Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity (DEI) and HR technology. As an award winning entrepreneur, Aparna understands the complexities for small and medium businesses working to have a positive impact on the world.
She's the Founder of Moving Beyond, a startup building solutions to solve complex DE&I and People challenges using real-time Employee Voice & Impact data, experiential e-learning and an innovative lab approach grounded in human-centered design. Prior to Moving Beyond, she grew Firki, India’s first online teacher education platform supporting teachers in 10 states, and in 2019 she launched Future for Us, a platform to advance women of color at work and grew a professional community of 11,000.
Flory Wilson: Aparna, let’s start with the basics. Why should organizations conduct workplace climate surveys – what are the risks of not conducting a survey and what are the benefits of doing one?
Aparna Rae: Before I talk about why an organization should do a climate survey, I want to just point out the difference between climate and culture. Organizations will say “we need better work culture” or “we want to transform organizational culture”. Culture can mean anything and everything – it's not a “thing” that's easy to measure. So when we think about employee voice from the point of view of climate – and climate is what is expected of employees, how people are supported at work, and how people are rewarded – and you know ideally you want to have an organization where what's rewarded is what is expected. So if people are expected to work 35 hour work weeks but the ones that are being rewarded are the ones that work 60 hour work weeks then there's a lack of alignment. At the end of the day, in order to build a diverse inclusive and equitable work environment for everybody, not just for a few people, we need to know what it takes to actually create that environment. Sitting in a leadership level or in any part of the organization, we don't know what contributes or distracts from equity and inclusion. Is it policies and practices? Is it the values and beliefs of certain individuals? We can't take steps to change our workplaces if we don't know what's making people behave the way they are.
Flory: Can you talk a little bit about the risks of not doing climate surveys? Do you have any specific risks or cautionary tales?
Aparna: The pro of doing surveying is you have actionable information. If you use a good instrument, if you ask good questions, if you collect demographic information which is absolutely critical, then you start to get some insights. The risk is if you collect this data and you do nothing. People are going to be really upset and it's going to show up on Glassdoor and LinkedIn and on social media. People’s dissatisfaction and discontentment grows with companies continuously asking them “hey what do you need? how are you feeling?” and then not taking action. If you're going to implement surveys, be ready to take some action, be ready to share back what you're learning otherwise, there's no point in doing.
Flory: What are the best practices for implementing a surveying approach?
Aparna: At Moving Beyond, we believe in good science and transparency. The good science part is, don't make up survey questions. There are people with PhDs that have spent years of their lives learning the science of survey construction and understanding how to make these tools reliable, so the first thing especially for smaller organizations that might be inclined to create their own survey is it’s not going to be reliable. Start with a good instrument – there are a lot out there including open source instruments that are free or cheap. Second, socialize it. Establish a purpose for doing it and what you're going to do with the data. Share this ahead of time – we always tell our customers that the day an engagement survey hits an employee's inbox should not be the first time they're hearing about it. Employees should have heard about the survey a couple of times so that when it hits their inbox, they're excited and they're going to share good information. It's also important to offer anonymity and confidentiality because the minute that you don't offer both anonymity and confidentiality you break trust with employees. Imagine if your workplace climate is not inclusive, maybe there's some funk – I don't want to use the word toxic but let's say just things are a little bumpy – in that environment especially it is important to offer confidentiality. If you're leading in a low trust environment, you want to outsource some of this work and you don't want to run it through your HRIS (human resources system) because that creates a back door way to individual’s responses.
There are employee listening tools like Perceptyx that are actually reading people's emails and slack messages. We don't talk enough about the fact that part of a standard employment contract is that companies can read any piece of communication that's on a company channel. In a healthy work environment those tools can be great, proactive tools but in most workplace environments, they’re going to cause issues. Employers need to be really clear about what their goal is and if the goal is “I want to hear from my employees directly” then crawling into their emails and making presumptions about what they're thinking can have negative consequences.
Flory: Can you talk about who should be involved in running a survey process and about budget – budget to implement the surveys and to fund whatever activities need to come out based on results.
Aparna: Budgets are an insight into a company's priorities. I have had clients that spend way more money on snacks, corporate swag or holiday parties than they do on DEI work – if you don't adequately resource something it's not going to go very far.
Regarding who should be involved, senior leaders, decision makers, HR and DEI leaders, all need to be involved and own the process. All of those individuals need to be in the room when the results come out. If leaders want their companies to be better for people not just for profitability then they can't be in the boardroom wanting one nice tidy slide with all of the information. They have to actually engage with the process end-to-end. Another risk is if leadership is not curious, if they're not asking the hard questions about why certain groups of people in their company are not faring so well, then the organization is not going to make progress on workplace climate.
Flory: It is not legal for companies to require all of their employees to disclose identity characteristics such as sexual orientation, ability, race, ethnicity etc. How can companies collect this data while complying with legal limits and is it your recommendation that companies try to collect as much detailed identity data as possible?
Aparna: I have to give the disclaimer that I'm not an attorney, but it is completely legal to ask for demographic information as long as it's optional and it's shared willingly by the employee. Companies should not be tracking this data in their HRIS platform, it should be self-identified. Beyond that, it's important to say that the law was not written for equity and inclusion. We know that race, gender, zip code, whether you're an immigrant or first gen, whether you're a native english speaker – these are all identity characteristics that have an outsized impact on how we experience work. To not collect this information which offers real insights about why things are happening is a big miss.
Flory: Okay, so now we’ve run our workplace climate survey, we’ve got the data. What should happen next?
Aparna: So once you have the data, you need to draw the through line to insights. Data itself is useful but it doesn't tell you the whole story. For the story, you need context. This is another place where there are lots of myths and misconceptions around the process. We worked with several companies that were experiencing significant turnover and the context was that our customers were in the healthcare industry and were experiencing that churn as a result of COVID. So the context there is we know what was happening in the world.
In an ideal scenario you're going to prioritize your actions, you're going to say these are some quick fixes like, “people are saying they don't have transparency about KPIS” and that's a pretty easy fix. If there are issues around pay equity – that isn't a quick fix – because you have to have a budget to close pay gaps. Prioritize those actions and then share them with employees, with managers and decision makers. In a good company climate, equity and inclusion doesn't grow in the dark. Healthy companies that have closed the wage gap, have good benefits and policies and practices, they are talking about it! We have companies that make their pay data fully transparent – the ones that are doing a good job are not afraid to share it. When an organization is not sharing what's happening, well okay …..
Flory: Your company, Moving Beyond, is about to launch a new tool. Tell us about it.
Aparna: Our SaaS product is called Cimate for DEI. What is unique or different about our approach is that it's data backed but really it's reflective of today's workforce. We know that there are lots of great employee experience products on the market but most of them are built on pretty dated research – research from the 90s or even older. The populations that those tools were tested on were mostly white middle-class folks and so they reflect a different time and place and point of view. For instance, much of the research on leadership is focused on white men and so if we're going to measure great leadership we're measuring it vis-a-vis qualities of white men from the 90s. So when we set out to build this instrument, we said that we wanted to build and test it in a diverse environment. We worked with lots of organizations and community groups to over-index immigrants, LGBTQ+ folk, women of color – groups that we know are having a less positive experience at work and figuring out how to measure their experience in a reliable way.
It also looks at diversity, equity and inclusion in the context of the organizational and employee experience. Where do the values, beliefs and priorities cut across things like performance management and hiring, recruiting and manager support. We don’t want to measure things like belonging and fairness in isolation because they don’t happen in isolation. We wanted to build this product to simplify things– it’s not the responsibility of HR leaders or DEI leaders to be experts in survey design or analysis or drawing insights. We wanted to make it really simple and easy for them to pinpoint what's happening so we've built a tool that is intentionally simple, does not talk to an HRS because we want to protect employee anonymity. Our tool doesn't currently publicly report on the data in our system but one of the things that we are working towards is how do we democratize access to this kind of data. How do we make these tools open source so people can leverage them. We've lowered the bar for entry – it's free for small shops if you have a team of 10 or a company with 10 or fewer employees you can use it for free. If you're bigger, it's ten dollars per employee per year .
Flory: Many of the companies that have taken the Gender IDEAL assessment that aren't doing workplace surveying yet are concerned they’re too small and their populations of marginalized populations are very small. What's your advice for how a small organization can get started.
Aparna: A company may have a handful of people that are in a protected class, that are people of color and they don't need to share out those results. On our platform, we don't share back any data unless there's at least three people in an identity group. In a small company, there isn't a whole lot of anonymity for those three people but without collecting data and hearing directly from your employees, there really isn't accountability. If a leader tells me “we're doing good things” and I ask “how do you know?” Is it anecdotal evidence from a couple of conversations they've had? It’s good organization hygiene to have surveys as part of your rhythm of business. Don’t not collect workplace climate data because you think you're too small. You can build trust with employees if you're surveying in a safe way that protects those individuals.
Additional resources:
How to Measure Inclusion in the Workplace. HBR, 2021.
Fixing the Flawed Approach to Diversity, Boston Consulting Group
HBR, How to Best Use Data to Meet Your DE&I Goals
EY Using data for evidence based action on Diversity and Inclusion
Snap, Action to Catalyze Tech