How Bias Creeps into Your DE&I Process—and What to Do About It
Published: 30 Jan 2025
Reading Time: 3 minutes
In today’s corporate landscape, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives have become essential to organizational strategy. However, even the most well-intentioned efforts can fall short due to biases embedded in the tools and methods used to measure success.
For example, engagement surveys, a popular method for assessing workplace culture, are often riddled with flaws that hinder progress and obscure critical insights. Here are three common survey design pitfalls that organizations must address to advance their DE&I efforts
meaningfully.
- Designing Questions with a Low Bar of Success
One prevalent issue is the use of questions that set a low bar for success, leading to self-congratulatory data rather than actionable insights. Surveys often include prompts like:
- “Is there someone at work who encourages your development?”
- “In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?”
While these questions may appear to assess employee engagement, they are too vague to provide meaningful data. Encouragement and praise can come from anyone, not necessarily a manager or supervisor, and the subjective nature of these terms makes them difficult to quantify. As a result, organizations may falsely interpret responses as indicators of a healthy and inclusive workplace culture.
Research highlights that clear, measurable feedback is essential for understanding employee experiences and driving performance outcomes (Gallup, 2022). Questions tied to specific behaviors or outcomes are more likely to yield actionable insights.
To avoid this trap, organizations should craft survey questions that are precise and aligned with DE&I objectives. For instance, instead of asking broadly about development encouragement, consider: “Does your direct manager provide regular, actionable feedback on your performance?”
- Avoiding Demographic Questions
Another critical error arises when organizations omit demographic questions from surveys, often out of a desire to maintain confidentiality or avoid discomfort, particularly in smaller organizations. While this may seem cautious, it can unintentionally obscure the experiences of marginalized groups.
When the majority group dominates the survey population, aggregated results may present an overly optimistic view of the workplace, masking disparities faced by minoritized employees. According to the Harvard Business Review (Thomas, 2023), failing to disaggregate data by demographic groups can perpetuate systemic inequities, as organizations remain blind to the unique challenges faced by underrepresented employees. To ensure accurate insights, organizations should thoughtfully incorporate demographic questions, accompanied by clear communication about confidentiality and data usage. This approach enables a nuanced understanding of DE&I challenges and helps pinpoint specific areas for improvement.
- Double-Barreled and Ambiguous Questions
Even surveys designed with good intentions can include double-barreled or ambiguous questions, which combine multiple ideas into one and force respondents to provide a single answer. For example:
- “How would you rate your work environment and pay?”
Such questions are problematic because they merge two distinct factors—work environment and pay—into a single response, making it impossible to determine which aspect influenced the respondent’s answer. This ambiguity hampers the organization’s ability to act on the data effectively.
A study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM, 2023) underscores that ambiguous survey questions can undermine trust in the survey process and result in incomplete or misleading data.
To eliminate this issue, organizations should separate these topics into individual questions, such as:
- “How would you rate your work environment?”
- “How satisfied are you with your pay?”
This ensures clarity and provides actionable insights that can drive meaningful change.
Further Reading: The Critical Need for DE&I Fluency in Healthcare Leadership
The Path Forward: Building a Bias-Free DE&I Process
To genuinely advance DE&I, organizations must design surveys that prioritize specificity, transparency, and inclusivity. This includes:
- Setting a High Standard for Questions: Ensure questions are precise, measurable, and aligned with DE&I goals.
- Incorporating Demographic Questions: Use thoughtful design to capture diverse perspectives without compromising confidentiality.
- Eliminating Ambiguity: Avoid double-barreled questions and focus on clarity to collect actionable data.
By addressing these pitfalls, organizations can move beyond surface-level metrics and create meaningful strategies for fostering equity and inclusion. As the adage goes, “What gets measured gets managed.” For DE&I to succeed, organizations must measure the right things—and measure them well.
This article draws on insights shared by Diana File, DE&I Data & Analytics Leader, and Founder of DF Analytics, and incorporates findings from research by Gallup, SHRM, and the Harvard Business Review.
Elevate Impact is committed to empowering organizations with the tools and strategies
necessary to achieve sustainable social and business impact.
