Assessing Internal Organizational Culture
Why It’s Important
As a starting point for DEI, many municipalities look internally within their organization and its culture. Service delivery from frontline staff can be more effective when those staff feel that the organization respects them, values them, and shares the values of DEI through their roles. All staff, from frontline workers that engage directly with the community to management that set the tone within their departments, benefit from these efforts.
Strategies
Assessing organizational culture can be challenging, especially because different departments within a municipality have their own unique cultures. It can be helpful to establish a baseline of how staff currently feel about and experience diversity, equity, and inclusion in the organization. Strategies include:
- Internal Staff Surveys: Internal staff surveys are a great way to ask for anonymous feedback from staff and create a baseline of data about how staff feel in the organization. These surveys can be administered in-house or by a third party and typically ask staff to reflect on the following questions or statements:
- How likely are you to recommend this as a good place to work?
- I feel comfortable asking my coworker for help
- If I saw something inappropriate, I would report it and I would know how to report it
- My manager / supervisor values diversity
- I feel like I belong in this organization
- Would you be interested in joining an employee resources group?
- I rarely think about looking for another jobs.
- Small group and individual meetings with staff and department heads: One-on-one or small group meetings with staff can help build trust and start to shift culture through open conversation. These meetings can help lay the groundwork for a future survey that would gain honest feedback. It can be helpful to have a third party such as a consultant facilitate these initial conversations.
- Data Collection: While more resource-intensive, data collection is a strong tool for tracking progress over time. IT and HR departments sometimes collect data on employee demographics, which can be used to look more closely at diversity in leadership staff over time, diversity in who gets promotions, and employee lifecycle and retention. Data can tell stories about the employee experience and mark changes over time.
Community Profile – City Of Aurora
The City of Aurora hired its inaugural Director Equity Diversity & Inclusion, Michele Williams Clark, in 2021. In her first year, Michele sought to better understand the culture of the organization and identify baseline metrics. Because Aurora was new to this work, the City decided to look internally and start with a survey to assess staff feelings towards diversity, equity, and inclusion. Aurora identified 26 metrics looking at employee demographics as well as the employee lifecycle over time to understand different stories about staff experiences within the City.
Overall, the survey found that the majority of survey respondents were proud to work for the City and very few people were looking for other employment. However, the survey also indicated that white males tended to think more positively about the organization than women and people of color. Some respondents expressed skepticism about the City’s hiring and promotion processes, including questions about how open positions are communicated and pathways to grow within the organization. However, others expressed reservations about DEI efforts and concerns that prioritizing DEI in hiring would result in hiring less qualified candidates. Overall, 49% of staff responded to the survey.
LEARN MORE — AURORA
Michele Williams Clark
Director, Equity Diversity & Inclusion
Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs
(630) 256-3592
The survey was a great exercise in establishing a baseline understanding the culture of the organization and identifying areas for growth and attention. Moving forward, the City hopes to prepare department heads and managers to present the results to their staff and identify areas to work on moving forward. To help managers, the Director created a leadership toolkit that will assist them in introducing survey results, talking openly about feedback from staff, and explain why the work is important. In the future, the City plans to budget for a third party entity to administer the survey to add more credibility to the process. The City additionally plans to empower managers to engage in departmental conversations around DEI topics and identify opportunities for improvement based on survey engagement and responses.
Lessons Learned
- It is helpful to get started even with limited resources. An internally administered staff survey still provides valuable information to build upon. A more thorough survey administered by a third party can be budgeted for in the future.
- It is important for department heads and managers to feel ownership over the survey results and address them directly with their staff.
- The organization may already have the data required to track key DEI performance indicators. However, it may be collected by different departments.
- Employees expressed gratitude that the City was conducting a survey. It can be valuable to formally ask staff how they feel about work, leadership, DEI, and the direction that the organization is headed.
Learn More
Michele Williams Clark
Director Equity Diversity & Inclusion
Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs
City of Aurora
ClarkMW@aurora.il.us
(630) 256-3592