Monitoring Equality & Diversity in the workplace - General - Diversity and inclusion

1 Monitoring Equality & Diversity in the workplace

11 Oct, 2022 09:41

Hello,

I would be really interested to hear how other companies might track and monitor equality and diversity information.

We are currently discussing introducing equality & diversity monitoring forms for candidates, applying to our roles, to complete - should they wish to. This begs the question on how we track and monitor equality and diversity within the workplace. We would also look at rolling this out to current employees, perhaps completing an employee survey to gain data from our current workforce - as a reference point.

The form we are looking to roll out is a standard ACAS template which can be located here www.acas.org.uk/equality-and-diversity-monitoring-form-template.

Would you collate the data in an excel spreadsheet and if so, how? Any information/ thoughts/ ideas/ sites that could be shared for research, would be greatly appreciated.

Look forward to hearing any thoughts.

Thanks,

Claire

972 views

Kim | 0 Posts

12 Oct, 2022 08:10

Hi Claire,

I recommend your planning and consideration process be carried out through a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) - under the Data Protection Act 2018 this is a requirement for new or potentially risky (as in, a risk of impacting the rights and freedoms of individuals' privacy, potentially with some kind of significant, legal or negative outcome) data processing activities - particularly for special category data such as will be the case in D&I data.

The Information Commissioner's Office has a great deal of information and guidance on this legal requirement, including how to check if a DPIA is necessary, some checklists to help with deciding this, and a template DPIA form to download, which includes a risk assessment section:

ico.org.uk/.../

ico.org.uk/.../

ico.org.uk/.../dpia-template.docx

It's a good idea to always practice the principles of minimisation for D&I monitoring, ensuring the data collection itself is anonymous if possible, or at the very least severely restricting access to the raw data that links D&I data to identifiable individuals.

Using passwords that are not shared broadly amongst managers is advisable, and bear in mind that using pseudonyms, such as payroll or HRiS identification numbers, instead of employee names or role titles still runs a realistic risk of people being identified or identities inferred, so full anonymity is best.

Good luck with your project.

Kindest regards,
Kim
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