According to the Annual Museum Survey 2021, only 39% of museums in the south east collect any equalities data about their own workforce.
Building a profile of your existing workforce (staff, volunteers, trustees, consultants) helps you identify gaps, agree priorities for diversifying your workforce, inform your museum’s Equality Action Plan, and set a benchmark to help you monitor progress. It is an important part in becoming a more inclusive organisation.
How to collect workforce equalities data
To help you collect equalities data about your workforce, we are sharing some templates and resources that we use at South East Museum Development.
You can download a Word version of our Workforce Equalities Survey below, which you can adapt for your own needs.
SEMD NPO Workforce Survey 20-21
Top Tips
- we collect the survey data via an online survey platform (e.g., SmartSurvey), which is password protected to ensure data safety and privacy
- we limit access to the survey results to one essential member of staff (i.e., HR lead, one senior manager/trustee), who collates the responses into one final report
- we keep the survey anonymous to respect privacy
- we provide an option, ‘prefer not to say’, to allow participants choice
- we provide ‘open text’ options to encourage participants to provide their preferred terminology
- we delete the individual surveys as soon as the final report is prepared
With this data insight, we can now monitor the effectiveness of our efforts to adopt more inclusive practice around recruitment, as well as informing future development strategies.
Other resources
You can also download a copy of Arts Council England’s NPO Survey template (Excel) and Guidance document (Word) to give you the context for the question structure that we adopted in our survey.
Any questions
If you have any questions regarding the resources above, please do get in touch with us at [email protected]