Diversity and Inclusion Survey Questions I Actually Use

I’ve run a lot of employee surveys over the years. Most of them were useless. The responses were vague, the data was hard to act on, and people didn’t trust the process. Then I started focusing specifically on diversity and inclusion survey questions, and the quality of feedback changed completely.

The difference was specificity. When you ask broad questions like ‘Do you feel included?’ you get broad answers. When you ask targeted questions about promotion processes, compensation, and daily interactions, people open up. They give you the kind of feedback you can do something with. Gallup’s research on employee engagement confirms that specific, actionable survey questions produce better organizational outcomes than general satisfaction measures. This post covers the questions I use, broken into two categories: diversity questions and inclusion questions. I also share ten tips I’ve learned for improving response quality and getting honest answers.

Diversity Survey Questions

These questions focus on representation, demographics, and systemic issues within your organization. The goal is to understand who is at the table and who is being left out. Ask these to get a baseline measurement of where your company stands on diversity.

How Diverse Do You Think the Executive Team Is?

This is one of the first questions I ask in any survey. If employees perceive a lack of diversity at the top, it signals a pipeline problem that no amount of entry-level hiring will fix. I pair this question with actual demographic data so the team can compare perception against reality. The gap between the two often tells you more than either number alone. If perception is worse than reality, you have a communication problem. If reality is worse than perception, you have a structural one.

What Percentage of Your Workforce Has Disabilities?

Most companies don’t know the answer to this question. That’s because many disabilities are invisible, and employees don’t disclose them unless they feel safe enough to do so. This question isn’t about getting exact numbers. It’s about signaling that your company recognizes and values disability as part of diversity. When you ask it, you open the door for employees who have been managing conditions in silence to feel seen. Track responses over time to see if disclosure rates increase, which is a sign of growing trust.

How Does Our Promotion Process Look in Terms of Diversity?

This question surfaces bias in how your organization handles advancement and career growth. If employees across demographic groups give different answers, you have a problem worth investigating. I’ve used this question to identify gaps between who gets mentored and who doesn’t, which directly affects who gets promoted. The responses also reveal whether employees believe the promotion criteria are transparent and applied consistently across the organization.

What Steps Do We Take to Ensure Everyone Feels Safe Here?

Safety is the baseline for inclusion. If people don’t feel safe, nothing else you do matters. This question helps you understand whether your psychological safety measures are working or just sitting in a policy document. I’ve found that answers to this question vary significantly by department, which tells managers exactly where to focus their attention. Pay close attention to differences between majority and minority group responses.

Does Our Compensation Reflect the Value of Our Work?

Pay equity is one of the clearest indicators of organizational fairness. This question tells you whether employees trust your compensation framework and believe they are paid fairly for what they contribute. If the answer trends negative, it’s time for a formal pay audit. I’ve done these at my companies, and the results are always worth the temporary discomfort. When people feel underpaid relative to peers, it erodes trust across every other D&I effort.

How Often Do We Recognize Contributions from People with Disabilities?

Recognition signals value. If employees with disabilities feel their contributions are overlooked, your recognition systems need adjustment. This question pushes teams to consider whether their definition of ‘high performance’ inadvertently excludes people with different work styles, needs, or accommodations. Recognition isn’t just about awards. It includes visibility in meetings, credit on projects, and access to high-profile assignments.

What Is Our Approach to Hiring Diverse Talent?

This question tests whether your hiring process walks the talk. I’ve learned that most companies believe they hire for diversity, but their actual practices tell a different story. Blind resume screening, structured interviews, and inclusive job descriptions all get surfaced through this question. It also reveals whether employees at all levels understand the company’s hiring goals or only hear about them during onboarding.

Inclusion Survey Questions

Inclusion questions focus on the day-to-day experience. Do people feel they belong? Are they heard? Do they have the same access to opportunities? These questions measure culture, not just demographics. They tell you whether your diversity numbers translate into an environment where people want to stay and grow.

I learned the hard way that strong diversity numbers can coexist with poor inclusion. At one of my companies, we had solid demographic representation but high turnover among underrepresented groups. The inclusion questions below helped us figure out why people were leaving even though we had successfully recruited them.

Does the Company Offer Flexible Work Arrangements?

Flexibility is an inclusion issue. Not everyone can work the same hours or commute to the same office. I’ve seen firsthand how flexible work policies open doors for parents, caregivers, and people with chronic health conditions. This question reveals whether flexibility is real or just on paper. If the policy exists but managers discourage using it, employees will tell you through the survey, especially if it’s anonymous.

Do You Have Equal Access to Career Development?

If some employees get mentorship, training budgets, and stretch assignments while others don’t, your inclusion efforts have a gap. This question highlights disparities in professional development access that may be invisible to leadership. I track the responses by demographic group to see if certain populations are consistently underserved. The patterns are often clear once you segment the data.

Do You Feel Comfortable Reporting Discrimination?

If people don’t feel safe reporting issues, your reporting system isn’t working regardless of how well-designed it looks on paper. This question is a direct check on your compliance infrastructure and your HR team’s credibility. I’ve found that the most common barrier isn’t policy. It’s trust. People need to believe that reporting won’t lead to retaliation or being labeled as difficult.

Does Our Company Communicate Inclusively?

Language matters more than most leaders realize. This question tells you whether employees notice exclusionary language in emails, job postings, meetings, or official documents. I once ran a survey where 30% of respondents said company communications didn’t feel like they were written for them. That’s a fixable problem, but you won’t know it exists unless you ask. Pay attention to the specific examples people give in open-ended follow-ups.

Do You Have Access to Mentoring and Sponsorship?

Mentoring and sponsorship are different, and both matter for inclusion. Mentors advise. Sponsors advocate. This question reveals whether the informal networks that drive career advancement are available to everyone or concentrated among a few groups. When I segmented responses to this question by demographic, the gaps were clear and gave us specific action items for building a formal program.

Do You Feel Your Identity Is Respected at Work?

This is one of the most direct inclusion questions you can ask. It gets at whether employees feel they can bring their full selves to work without minimizing aspects of their identity. Low scores here point to cultural issues that training alone won’t fix. You need visible leadership behavior changes and updated norms around how people interact in meetings, on Slack, and during social events.

10 Tips to Improve Your D&I Surveys

Running a survey is straightforward. Getting useful responses is not. These ten tips come from years of trial and error running employee surveys at my own companies. Each one addresses a specific failure point that I’ve encountered.

• Guarantee anonymity. If employees don’t trust that responses are anonymous, they’ll give safe answers instead of honest ones. Use a third-party tool if your team is small.
• Use plain language. Avoid HR jargon and academic phrasing. Write questions the way you’d ask them in a one-on-one conversation.
• Mix question types. Use a combination of multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions. Each type captures different kinds of information.
• Benchmark against previous surveys. Track progress over time rather than just taking point-in-time snapshots. Trends matter more than single data points.
• Share results transparently. If you ask people for feedback, show them what you found and what you plan to do about it. This builds trust for the next survey.
• Act on the data within 30 days. Nothing kills survey trust faster than inaction. Pick two or three findings and commit to addressing them publicly.
• Include every demographic group. Your survey should reach all employees, not just those in headquarters or corporate roles. Remote workers and hourly staff matter too.
• Keep it under 15 minutes. Long surveys get abandoned halfway through. If your survey takes longer, split it into two rounds.
• Pilot test with a small group first. This catches confusing questions and technical issues before they reach your entire workforce.
• Connect survey results to business goals. When leadership sees the link between inclusion data and performance metrics, they fund the next steps.

Tools for Conducting D&I Surveys

You don’t need expensive software to get started. Google Forms works for small teams and gives you enough functionality to run a solid survey. For larger organizations, platforms like Culture Amp, Lattice, or Qualtrics offer demographic filtering and benchmarking features that make D&I data actionable at scale. The tool matters less than what you do with the results.

Whichever tool you use, make sure it supports anonymous responses, allows you to segment data by demographic group, and exports to formats your leadership team will actually read. I’ve also found it helpful to include a free-text field at the end of every survey where employees can share something that wasn’t covered by the structured questions. Some of the most valuable feedback I’ve received came from those open fields.

Final Thoughts

D&I surveys are only effective if employees believe their feedback will drive change. Anonymity, transparency, and responsive action are critical. Start with the questions shared above, adapt them to fit your organization’s needs, and ensure you follow through on what you learn. The value of feedback lies in how you use it.

FAQs

Here I answer the most frequently asked questions about diversity and inclusion survey questions.

How many questions should a D&I survey have?

I keep mine between 15 and 25 questions. That’s enough to cover both diversity and inclusion without losing people halfway through. If you’re running your first survey, start with 10 questions and expand from there based on what you learn.

Should D&I surveys be anonymous?

Yes, always. If employees think responses can be traced back to them, they won’t answer honestly. Use a third-party tool if your team is small enough that anonymity is hard to guarantee internally.

How often should you run D&I surveys?

Twice a year is the sweet spot for most organizations. Once a year isn’t enough to track momentum, and quarterly feels like overkill unless you’re in the middle of a major initiative that needs frequent checkpoints.

What do you do with D&I survey results?

Share the top findings with the whole company. Then pick two or three actionable items and commit to addressing them within 60 days. If people see change after the survey, they’ll trust the next one.

Can D&I surveys backfire?

They can if you don’t act on the results. Running a survey and then ignoring the feedback is worse than not running one at all. It signals to employees that leadership doesn’t care about their input.

What is the best scale for D&I survey questions?

I use a 5-point Likert scale for most questions: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree. It’s simple enough for everyone to understand and gives you enough variation to spot meaningful trends.