Overview

Monitoring and review are the processes you use;

• To collect and analyse data about people’s background
• To assess whether your policies and practices are fair and non-discriminatory
• To find out your employees’ views about the organisation
• To set targets and timetables for change and report on progress

Together, they will help you to check whether your policies, operations and organisational culture are discriminating against any group and the progress you are making toward achieving your equality and diversity objectives.

Monitoring

Although monitoring is not obligatory for private sector organisations it is important because equality legislation places the responsibility for providing equality of opportunity for job applicants and employees primarily with employers. Your recording systems should be extended to include data on gender, marital status, disability, age and ethnicity for your workforce and workplace practices as well as recruitment and selection processes. Monitoring for religion or belief and sexual orientation should be done once your organisation’s culture and ethos supports this. Also, since most public sector bodies are required to monitor for disability, ethnicity and gender, they also want to ensure that their suppliers are doing the same.

Policy assessment

Assessing the actual or potential impact of your policies, practices, functions and activities is a useful way to check that they are not having an adverse impact on any of the equality groups and to avoid unlawful discrimination. DWfL’s impact assessment guide gives you a framework for carrying out your assessments.

Measuring and reporting on progress

Two ways to track and measure progress on equality and diversity are by setting targets and timetables for change and conducting employee surveys. The private sector is used to target setting across a range of business areas and functions and equality and diversity targets, indicators and outcomes should be added to this. Otherwise, you will find it very difficult to assess how you are doing in achieving your equality and diversity objectives. Asking employees for their views on how you are doing will also assist greatly in determining what needs to be done and a confidential annual employee survey is an effective way of doing this.