Build the evidence base
The first step in creating lasting change
Positive change towards workplace inclusivity can only be achieved through concerted, meaningful and intentional action.
To create lasting and impactful change, your inclusivity actions need to be guided by robust evidence.
Halsden works with you to collect, analyse, and interpret a range of data, including lived experience, to inform and strengthen your strategy to becoming an inclusive organisation.
Our data collection tools are tailored to encourage engagement, conversation, and participation, capturing lived experience and perception of inequalities through collaborative activities.
STEP 1 on your journey to inclusion
The starting point for your journey to inclusion is to access the knowledge you collectively hold and build the evidence base that defines your organisation’s current culture and inclusion climate.
What’s the point of evidence?
Using evidence to advance your inclusivity is fundamental to ensuring you create positive outcomes and do not unintentionally harm or exclude minoritised groups.
In the context of inclusion, an evidence-based approach can:
Build knowledge about your organisation’s current culture and inclusion climate
Understand the different needs of your staff and stakeholders
Understand the lived experience of staff and stakeholders and perceptions of inequalities within your organisation
Identify barriers and enablers towards inclusion and inclusive environments
Enable informed decision making
Guide effective action
Better equip organisations to deliver transformational change, meeting the needs of a culturally diverse society
Track your progress and demonstrate the impact of your inclusion efforts to staff and stakeholders, fostering greater accountability and continuous improvement.
What evidence can be used for workplace inclusivity?
The evidence we use to advance our inclusivity and gain insight of the impact that processes, practices and behaviours have on our workplace community is broad and multifaceted. Whilst diversity statistics may be used most commonly to ‘evidence’ inequalities (i.e. the quantitative data), it is the stories and experiences of those most deeply connected to EDI issues that provide the most powerful evidence (i.e. the qualitative data).
You can build an inclusion evidence base by drawing from a number of different data sources, including:
Stories, experiences and perceptions of those facing inequalities.
Inclusion-minded behaviours and practices.
Processes and systems that promote inclusion.
Demographics and diversity statistics.
Our data collection methods
We offer a bespoke range of data collection tools that are tailored to meet your needs to ensure that you are equipped to build a robust and meaningful evidence base.
Climate surveys
Climate surveys can be used to understand and evolve your approach to inclusion in the workplace. They are powerful analytical tools giving you critical information about employee perceptions and the signals your organisation is sending.
Pulse surveys
Pulse surveys are quick surveys used to gather real-time insights from employees, customers or other stakeholders. You can use pulse surveys to measure change in specific indicators (e.g. sense of belonging, perception of bullying and harassment, organisational inclusion).
Focus groups
Focus groups are a qualitative data collection method which involves a group of up to 10 people discussing a specific topic to gather a smaller, but more nuanced dataset.
Interviews
One-to-one interviews can be used to explore the lived experience of a specific individual. Interviews can be used to ensure everyone’s voice is heard equally or to discuss more sensitive topics.
Case studies
Producing case studies involves collecting data from multiple sources and producing case studies to provide you with in-depth and descriptive information about a specific issue.
Demographics and diversity statistics
Analyse workforce data by reviewing group demographic data, recruitment statistics, and promotion rates to identify trends and assess whether diverse groups are represented and supported.
Group concept mapping
Group concept mapping is a solutions-focused, mixed method data collection tool that allows stakeholders to conceptualise problems, produce solutions and rank those solutions.
Consensus Conferencing
Consensus conferencing is a structured approach to qualitative data collection that involves 10-20 stakeholders discussing a specific issue to generate data and find in-common, concrete solutions.
Creative Capture
Creative Capture is a data collection method that allows participants to capture in-the-moment data about a specific issue in multiple ways (e.g. blogs, journals, etc), which might not be shared in other contexts.
Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry involves collecting qualitative data about a specific, personalised aspect of participants’ lives through storytelling. It produces a rich and very nuanced dataset that is centred around lived experience.
Ethical considerations
We are committed to ensuring that our data-collecting activities, which involve human participants and personal data, are conducted in a way which:
respects the dignity, rights and welfare of all participants in research
minimises risk to participants, researchers and third parties
appropriately manages personal data
aims to maximise the public benefit of research
For all of our data-collecting activities, we obtain ethical review/approval from the Social Research Association.
For more information about our approach to ethical research, see our Research Ethics Policy.
