Tracking progress

What progress are you tracking?

The progress you need to track is linked to the objectives and outcomes you set at the start. The results of your survey will also help you decide on realistic goals you can set. It’s important to be open about these in your report.

Tracking progress is an opportunity to find out if your workplace is improving. It will help you see if your current plans are working and inform your next steps.

How are you tracking your progress?

At Scope, we believe that measuring progress keeps you accountable. It means you can make informed decisions and take action. Survey monitoring is not something you do once. It’s part of a process. You make improvement plans based on your findings. You work towards these plans. Then you monitor what progress you are making.

One of the ways to track that progress is to repeat surveys. But it’s not the only thing you should do.

Repeating surveys

How often should you repeat surveys?

It’s important to be strategic about when to repeat a survey. Between each survey, you need enough time to:

• analyse the data
• create action plans
• write reports
• implement changes
• engage with your staff in other ways

This process will probably take even longer after you run your first survey. And it also depends on the size of your organisation and your resources. For example, not all organisations have a dedicated Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team. Or a team for data and insight.

We would suggest that you shouldn’t run a survey more than once a year. It’s more effective not to ask people to share too often. It also works well if you have a report ready for your annual report.

If you don’t have enough capacity, you might want to get external help. Scope has a dedicated Strategy, Evidence and Insight team. If you would like to work with them to build your survey, you can contact our team: business@scope.org.uk

Changes in survey results

When it comes to diversity monitoring, a lot of identities are not going to change. Disability will be quite static. Some existing employees might become disabled. And some might start sharing because they feel safer or have seen your improvements. But the biggest difference will probably come from staff turnover.

There are situations when running a survey again about a specific area might be relevant. For example, let’s say one of your goals is to attract more disabled staff. You decide to take actions such as:

• running an internal awareness campaign
• advertising your roles on job boards for disabled people
• changing your recruitment practices
• becoming part of the guaranteed interview scheme

In this case, you might decide to gather statistical data more frequently. But this could be done via your HR system as a first way to make comparisons.

We also suggest encouraging staff to update their HR information. You can run an internal campaign to do this.

Asking the same questions

It’s very important to ask the same questions when you repeat a survey. Your approach should be consistent so that you can compare data effectively.

If you update your survey every time with different phrasing, it will lose credibility. This is why you should do testing before your first survey. You can make sure that:

• the survey is functional
• people will understand your questions

It’s helpful to test your survey with different groups of people. This should include people outside the organisation.