As good employee engagement leads to better business performance, ongoing measurement, analysis, and improvement of your organization’s employee engagement should be a priority. Although employee wellness, stress management, and professional development are all powered by a healthy employee experience, a key part of successful employee engagement is building an inclusive culture. We outline how employee engagement feedback can help to support your diversity and inclusion initiatives.
The importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace
For many businesses, diversity and inclusion merely mean meeting compliance obligations. But beyond organizational compliance, a diverse and inclusive workplace is necessary for ensuring employees feel meaningfully engaged and have an overall sense of belonging.
An inclusive work environment and culture allows employees from across backgrounds to feel comfortable and safe enough to practice and express their cultural nuances, and this in turn leads to greater employee retention and successful diversity and inclusion programs.
But many organizations are challenged when it comes to developing and implementing diversity and inclusion initiatives, and could greatly benefit from employee engagement tools like feedback collection to help improve and develop these initiatives.
Why feedback is important for diversity and inclusion initiatives
Annual feedback reviews that are catch-all in nature and intended to tick a compliance-labeled checkbox, are no longer sufficient indicators of employee sentiment or company culture. Effective employee engagement insight tools provide regular and ongoing feedback from employees and are actively reviewed and adjusted by HR to ensure they remain relevant. Employee experience tools can glean both qualitative and quantitative data about how employees feel about their company, its environment, culture, and management, and also how well a company’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are going.
Good data collection tools enable a 360-degree employee experience because employers are able to tailor questions to specific teams or departments, encouraging more personalized and intricate feedback. Through using customizable feedback tools, the quality of data HR stands to gain can result in more meaningful and actionable insights that can support diversity and inclusion initiatives and employee engagement overall.
Identify issues through data, not hunches
When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, employers need to know how their organization compares to competitors and the market at large and gathering demographic intel is a valuable first step in developing and implementing your diversity and inclusion strategy. By getting an overall picture of what their workplace looks like, HR managers can identify existing issues that need addressing, rather than making assumptions based on current practice or loosely-applied compliance requirements.
For example, while a highly-targeted hiring program may focus on employing representatives of a certain demographic, like women, to a specific department, like IT, this approach isn’t balanced and may mean diversity and inclusion initiatives are not distributed across an organization. Active and holistic surveying can indicate if certain departments are more in need of diversification than others. From this point of view, effective engagement feedback can help inform diversity and inclusion goals in a meaningful way and measure these initiatives accurately on an ongoing basis.
From uncovering insights to inspiring action
Engagement discovery tools shouldn’t be run-of-the-mill or generalized; they should ask meaningful and engaging questions to give a real sense of your employee culture and how employees think and feel. Intelligent feedback tools are necessary here, as being able to uncover and understand cultural and behavioral insights and their impact means actionable steps can be identified and taken to ensure diversity and inclusion are being implemented effectively.
Once meaningful insights have been uncovered, you can drill down into specific areas of concern, and focus on taking the necessary steps for improvement. By being properly informed, HR managers and leadership can update and enhance policies, make internal communications more inclusive, and amend value propositions as needed to ensure every business touchpoint supports overall diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Intelligent experience management
Continuous listening, enabled by intelligent data collection, makes intelligent experience management possible, and this extends to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Effective employee engagement feedback can also benefit the employee experience lifecycle overall, as through these surveys, HR managers are positioned to listen to employees continuously, whether they be new recruits or tenured management.
Continuous listening enables increased employee engagement, as HR can identify the moments that matter most in the employee journey and ensure these are optimized for a pleasant overall employee experience that includes a sense of diversity and inclusion.
Intelligent surveying can give you perspective on your workforce’s sentiment towards growth opportunities, space for creative expression, and overall sense of belonging within your organization. And by asking various demographics how they feel about their place of work, you can get good insights into whether they feel adequately represented or if there are in fact issues of inequality or underrepresentation within pockets of your organization that require addressing.
How Tivian can help your diversity and inclusion initiatives
At Tivian, we’ve honed the practice of effective employee engagement with our cutting-edge data analytics and AI technology. Leveraging our solutions, companies gain invaluable insights into the various factors that influence their employee’s experience and job satisfaction, enabling them to effectively strategize and implement initiatives like diversity and inclusion to improve the employee experience overall.
>> Book a product demo with one of Tivian’s engagement experts
HR managers can draw on our flexible software, either for our pre-built modules or a custom-designed solution that fits unique business needs, to:
- Nurture and develop leaders across their organization
- Establish an engaging workplace culture that boosts retention and drives talent acquisition
- Create an informed diversity and inclusion strategy by discovering the inequalities and biases holding their company back
- Effectively manage talent through empowered leadership-employee conversations
- Measure, analyze, and continuously improve the employee experience
- Drive financial education amongst employees
- Streamline HR and onboarding processes
- Implement employee benefit and rewards programs
- Improve employee wellness physically and psychologically
Summary
Not only do progressive diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives empower the employee experience, but they also contribute to overall organizational performance and success. To navigate changing employee expectations and evolving workplace culture, companies need to prioritize diversity and inclusion, and to do this effectively, the importance of the right solution can’t be underestimated.
Tivian’s solutions can help you understand your employees and foster the right working environment that encourages tolerance and equality. Get in touch with our team to discuss your employee experience challenges and goals, and we can recommend the best course of action for your organization. Or you can book a demo of our employee engagement solutions.
