In this episode of DEI Minute, Jamey dives deep into how organizations can effectively gather and operationalize feedback related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. He discusses the crucial role feedback plays in advancing DEI initiatives and shaping decision-making processes that are responsive and inclusive.

Jamey offers tactical guidance on determining who to solicit feedback from, crafting the right questions, and incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data for well-rounded insights. He highlights best practices for making feedback a routine part of DEI work, exploring how representation, psychological safety, and transparency can improve response rates and trust. The advice is practical: keep feedback processes brief, use multiple channels, consider confidentiality, and share findings widely to promote organizational accountability and reinforce positive change.

To learn more and connect, visit: www.Equity-At-Work.com

To grab Michelle's new book, visit: Do DEI Right

Key Topics Discussed:

1. The importance of feedback in DEI processes
2. Quantitative vs. qualitative feedback: definitions and uses
3. Who should provide feedback: ensuring broad and representative participation
4. How to craft broad and specific feedback questions
5. Operationalizing feedback: best practices for collection and response
6. Maintaining consistency and psychological safety in feedback methods
7. The value of transparency and accountability in sharing feedback results
8. Tips for maximizing participation and quality of responses

I'm Jamie Applegate, Senior Director of DEI at EquityAtWork, and this is your DEI minute, your go to podcast for leaders looking to navigate the ever evolving landscape of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Whether you're just starting out with DEI or looking to sustain your long term successes, each episode will provide you with the actions you can take to move DEI forward at your organization, all in 15 minutes or less. Join us every other week as we break through the noise and help you do DEI Right. Let's get to it. Welcome.

Before we get started, this is Michelle Pfefferman and I'm really excited to let you know that my new book Do DEI Write is now available. This is your guide to the Equity at Work Maturity Model, which shows leaders how to make DEI part of every day and drive great results. You can get your copy through the link in the show notes or wherever books are sold.

Today we're going to talk about getting feedback around diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. We'll talk about who you should be getting feedback from, the kinds of questions you should ask when you're getting feedback, and just some best practices around operationalizing feedback. Before we get started, I just want to take us back to a previous episode where I talked about turning data into action and offered a bit of a guide to DEI analytics and goal setting. Part of that previous episode discussed how much data to collect and I mentioned that you you have to kind of strike the right balance between collecting all of the possible data points which will lead you to analysis paralysis and hinder your ability to make meaningful decisions. You'll spend too much time just sort of talking through. There's always data that can point in a different direction and then you'll also, you know, trying to find are you collecting too little data? So that leaves the organization without enough information to know what's actually happening and what could or should be done next to reinforce great things and address deficiencies. In that episode, I also talked about quantitative data and qualitative data. Just quick refresher.

Quantitative data is anything that is numerical, measurable or countable, usually focusing on things like how many, how much or how often. Qualitative data is more descriptive. It's usually non numerical and it focuses on things like qualities, characteristics and interpretations. And you're asking about people's perspectives, opinions and experiences. When we're talking about getting feedback around dei, it's important to remember both of those things. So when you're asking for feedback, you want to do so often enough and broadly enough that you collect sufficient information to drive your decision making, but not so often or so broad that the data becomes really noisy and useless and you kind of just get stuck looking at data as opposed to actually taking action. And we're also going to see that good feedback processes create both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data will allow us to show employee sentiment about specific items.

And the qualitative data will bring those numbers to life with perspectives and experiences and stories that underscore why employees are providing specific insights. So let's dive in to getting feedback on dei. To start, we're going to talk about who you should be getting feedback from. You should get feedback from the people who will be impacted by a given decision and or who will participate in a given program or activity. You should get feedback from as many people as possible. One note on that. It might not be feasible or manageable to get feedback from every single person who's going to be impacted by decision. Decision.

For example, if you work at a really large organization and let's say you're working on sort of a all staff DEI training program, if that's the case, you want to try to get as representative a sample of employees as possible. And when you're thinking about representation, sometimes we tend to include people based on specific, maybe like biases towards certain things. So proximity. If you work in a specific office, you, you're probably just going to ask the people around you because you know them and they'll probably say yes to taking a survey or answering questions. If you are in a pretty strict hierarchy, you're probably going to overcount people's hierarchical role. As you think about representation, you just want to think about some of the characteristics. So things like as I mentioned, hierarchical role. You might be inclined to prioritize the perspectives of senior leaders because they are senior leaders and they seem really important.

But remember that they're only one part of the audience for a given program or activity. Think about department and a role type. So for example, if you're at an engineering company, are you only talking to technical staff? So you're only talking to engineers. Or are you also making sure to include the perspectives of support staff and some of those administrative roles? Think about tenure. You want to get both long tenured folks to get that historical perspective and good institutional knowledge, but can also be really valuable to get the perspectives of new folks both because they might be coming from a place that was doing something really cool or doing something that was really terrible. And also it's just sort of a fresh set of opinions and new ideas. And then you also want to make sure you're being representative as much as possible around demographics. So thinking things like race, gender and age.

And then finally think about work location. If you have multiple locations, make sure you're including everybody or as many people from different locations. So you're not getting just one specific geographic location's thoughts. So once you've determined who you should be getting feedback from, you want to move to the kinds of questions you should ask. And this is going to be sort of broad advice or tips. It's not really meant to be very hyper specific. But on that vein you want to ask both broad questions that allow team members to talk about what's important to them. So give them space to kind of just talk.

And you also want to ask hyper specific questions about specific programs or specific components of programs. So a really broad question you could ask is please share about your experience with our organization's employee resource groups. People are just going to say what they think. That's great. Just open ended. You might get a lot of cool insights and it might be stuff that you didn't even think to ask about, but it's what's top of mind for different folks. And a hyper specific question could be do you feel that leadership communicates effectively about DEI at our organization? Why or why not? What that indicates is that you have identified leadership communication about DEI as something to explore. And then you can get more insights about that specific thing.

But you're guiding what folks are thinking about as they're giving you a response. You also want to ask both what is going well and what employees found meaningful. And then also what could be improved. We tend to use feedback just to focus on negatives or critical feedback. We just want to know what we need to fix. But you actually want to know what went well too so that you can really rely on that and reinforce that as you're addressing those areas for improvement. You also want to mix it up and ask for both ratings. For this please use consistent scales across questions or consistent sort of rankings, either like 1 to 10 or 1 to 5 or strongly disagree disagree, neither agree nor agree agree, strongly agree.

So you want to ask for both those ratings and for open ended responses that allows people to both answer the things you're getting and get some quantitative data with those rankings. But it also with some open ended responses you can get some of those more sort of qualitative insights. So we at equity at work, we do recommend the strongly disagree to strongly agree scale. It's five point scale. And then we will Provide statements that employees can respond to, such as I look forward to coming to work or My manager supports diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. And one quick tip is at the end of any feedback session, whether it's a survey or it's an interview or it's a town hall or or a focus group, always include a final question and make space for it and time for it. Make it optional, but just say, is there anything else that you would like to share? It's just a great way. You won't get a super ton of responses.

But if there's something that has been eating at someone that they either want to say something has been going great and they really want to give someone a shout out, or there's something that's been really, really challenging that someone wants to mention and it's not been covered by the previous questions, that's the space to do it. So it's really important to just include that last question because it just means, hey, is there anything else? I know I don't know everything. I don't know all of the pain points or the positive points that people are feeling. Is there anything else that I should know? So the last thing is some just general best practices around operationalizing feedback. So this is actually about sort of developing a strategy for getting feedback in the first place. 1 the first thing is you want to make sure that feedback is a normal and expected part of any DEI strategy you have, any program you have, or any activity you have. The longer that you consistently ask for feedback, the more normal and expected it will feel and the more likely you'll get continued and grow and more responses. Additionally, the more you show that you are taking action based on those feedback, the better feedback you will get because employees will see that what they are sharing actually causes things to change.

As you're doing feedback, oftentimes you might think, oh, I need to sort of design the thing, implement the thing, and then I'll ask for feedback about how it went. You actually want to build in feedback sort of throughout the development and implementation process. So employee insights should drive the development of programs. You want to pressure test the ideas, what you're thinking even before the thing has launched. And you want to get regular feedback that can help you make adjustments as needed before launch. So at every stage of development, pressure test it with the folks that are going to be impacted by the program or are going to participate in the program. And then once the program is live, check in regularly. One week after it's live, one month after, six months after, to Understand how the program is operating and what, if any, adjustments need to be made.

When you're designing feedback processes, make them consistent across all situations. The process of giving feedback should feel similar. It should be consistent. Everyone should feel comfortable knowing sort of how they're going to engage with the feedback process. It shouldn't be like oh, what kind of feedback am I giving this time? It should always be kind of a consistent experience for the respondents. You also want to be able to use multiple methods to collect feedback. You want to create a broad set of opportunities. So this could be if you're doing a survey, also offer one on one interviews, offer focus groups, office offer town halls.

Different people ideate and reflect better in different situations. And giving people options can help them make sure that they are able to to give their thoughts in a way that works for them. Additionally, think about who is implementing the feedback process and then think about broadening that so that folks can talk to someone that they trust if they want to do an in person one. So maybe they have a really close relationship with their direct supervisor and they feel really comfortable giving them feedback. But sort of two levels up the hierarchy, they're going to shut down and not say anything. So really making sure that folks have the ability to talk to someone who they have a relationship with because you want to make sure that there's that trust so that they can really be candid. So when you're doing that, just think about things like power dynamics, hierarchical relationships, working history, including past interactions so you can determine who might be the best person to solicit feedback. Always set deadlines for feedback.

Don't leave it open forever. And then provide numerous reminders from a variety of sources. Think about all staff emails. Think about if you have the ability to text, send text reminders your intranet, have it be a banner on your intranet. There's a, there's a survey or there's some way to give feedback. Have managers remind direct reports, do call outs during staff meetings or town halls. Just at every moment. You can really reinforce that the feedback is is open.

The feedback process is open. Also if you're doing a survey, a potential way to drive responses is to work with managers to just set aside a specific time for folks to fill it out. That can be really tricky if there are things like utilization metrics or different things. But if you can just like set it aside, set aside time and then folks can just fill it out there. Another key tip is just keep all feedback processes as brief as possible. No one wants to do a 10 page 100 question survey on their experience, they will tune out, start clicking through just to click through, or they'll just quit and not respond. And if you're trying to do an interview or a focus group, keep it an hour or less or do follow ups, but just keep it brief. People will not want to participate if it's taking up too much of their time.

Another thing to think about is thinking about whether the feedback should be confidential or not. It is super helpful to collect a lot of identifying information about a person so how long they've been there, where they work, because then you can start to make different connections between the data and sort of what it says. But confidentiality makes people feel much safer. Sharing especially negative or critical feedback allows them to share their sort of real thoughts. That also speaks to just organizational culture in general. So if you make it more of a space where there's psychological safety and employees feel empowered to provide critical feedback, then that will improve sort of response rates and just responses. But be aware of just whether you want things to be confidential or not. People typically want confidentiality, but data is better if you have more information about who's responding.

And then the last thing is once you have feedback, analyze it quickly and then share the results as widely as possible. Share insights. Share the raw data if you can. Obviously take out any identifying information that would be inappropriate to share and share it as widely as possible. It promotes transparency and it also allows the organization and its employees to hold everyone accountable for what was shared. So we're not hiding anything. It's also a really great space where you can brag about really positive feedback or give shout outs to folks that you know got praise on a given survey or in in a conversation. If everyone's oh, I really love working with this person and numerous people say that they love working with that person, shout that person out and also follow up with that person to figure out what they're doing, what makes working with them so great.

But yes, share it widely, be transparent and hold yourself accountable to actually taking action. The worst thing you can do is ask people for feedback and then just put it on a shelf. So there you go. Getting feedback should be a critical component of any DEI strategy program activity. It is necessary to get insights, perspectives and opinions from the people who will be participating in a given program or activity to better understand their needs, what they're looking for, and what will lead to most meaningful impact. And then post did your intention of did your intended impact actually align with what happened? Once you've launched something, it is again, equally important to know how it went helps ensure alignment between what was intended and what actually took place. So ask for feedback regularly, often from a wide variety of stakeholders. Make the feedback process accessible and easy for respondents, and share what you learn widely to promote transparency and accountability.

Feedback is one of the most valuable things that anyone can provide to us. It allows us to make sure that we are making effective decisions and implementing impactful programs. If you are stuck on how to do feedback, or you feel like you're not getting good feedback, reach out to us. We're happy to help and just thank you so much for listening. Links to everything can be found in the episode Notes. This episode was edited and produced by Pactro with podcast art by me, Jamie Apk.