FAQs: Diversity and Inclusion Benchmarks for Surveys

Are there any benchmarks for Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) items to understand how my organization compares to others? 

Yes! Benchmarks are available in PDF format for our most popular D&I items. However, not all D&I items have benchmarks yet due to lower sample sizes. The benchmarks in the above PDF document represent data from all customers in our database who have used these items on an Engagement Survey. In addition, there are benchmarks available within Survey Analytics for certain industries and organization size categories for our most commonly used D&I items.

Why should I include D&I items in the Employee Engagement Survey? 

  • Many companies choose to conduct separate, in-depth surveys about Diversity & Inclusion. They want to ensure all employee voices are included and heard in their employee listening program and throughout their company. This approach allows organizations to take a deep-dive into issues of fairness, belonging, inclusion, and diversity throughout the employee experience.
  • However, other companies prefer to include D&I items as part of their Employee Engagement Survey. This is also appropriate, since employee perceptions of fairness and inclusion within their organization certainly have an impact on engagement. Thus, HR leaders may want to add a  few items that assess D&I to their engagement survey to examine correlates between the two.

Are there other ways I can compare or analyze our D&I results?  

  • If this is not your first time asking these questions, it is important to look at the change in responses over time. Is your organization improving year over year on these D&I items?
  • You may already be including items in your engagement survey that have benchmarks that measure aspects of D&I. For example, the item "My opinion seems to count at work," is an indicator of inclusion that has industry and company size benchmarks available. 

Why aren't there benchmarks for all D&I items?

Quantum Workplace has a strict standard for building a standard benchmark to ensure that we have a reliable benchmark for all items. In order to add a benchmark for a survey item, we require at least 10 organizations use that item on a survey with at least 1,000 responses. This is also true for industry-specific benchmarks and benchmarks based on company size. Therefore, we are still collecting responses to ensure the reliability of our benchmarks for these items.

What are the best D&I items to add to an Engagement Survey? 

We believe these four items are ideal to include in an Engagement Survey to understand the relationship between perceptions of D&I and engagement within your organization. These four items are: 

  • I trust this organization to be fair to all employees.
  • Senior leadership is prepared to effectively manage a diverse workforce.
  • I am included in decisions that affect my work. 
  • I feel like I belong here. 

Taken together, these items cover the aspects of D&I that are the most critical to the success of D&I within your organization: belonging, equity, fairness, inclusion, and diversity management. In addition, we recommend these four items because they tend to get a broad range of responses  (that is, these items are less likely than other D&I items to achieve a high percentage of strongly agree and agree responses).