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How to Run a DEI Survey

How to Run a DEI Survey: An 8-Step Guide for UK Organisations

15 June 2026 by Mark Holt

How to run a DEI survey: an eight-step guide for UK organisations

To run a DEI survey, decide what you want to learn, choose a tool built for diversity data rather than a generic form, base your questions on the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, guarantee anonymity, launch for around ten days, then analyse the results by demographic group — not headline averages — and act on what you find.

That is the short version. The rest of this guide walks through each step in detail, with the UK-specific pitfalls that catch organisations out and the decisions that quietly determine whether your survey produces honest, usable data or an inbox full of half-finished forms.

Divrsity Disclaimer
This article describes general good practice for running a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI, or EDI in UK terminology) survey, and references how the Divrsity platform approaches each step. Every organisation is different. The figures we quote for response rates and timings reflect our experience across hundreds of UK surveys; your own results will depend on your context, your communications and your culture.

Step 1: Decide what you actually want to learn

Before you build anything, decide what decision the data will inform. A DEI survey is not a box-ticking exercise — it should answer a specific question: where do different groups of people experience the same workplace differently? Surveys with vague goals produce vague results that nobody acts on. The clearest surveys pair questions about the individual with questions about the organisation, so every finding can be segmented.

This split is the single most important design decision, and it is where most home-grown surveys fall down. You need two kinds of question. Demographic questions capture who someone is — age, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and the other protected characteristics. Experience questions — what we call Lenses — capture how the organisation feels to work in: belonging, fairness, psychological safety, whether people feel able to be themselves. On their own, neither is very interesting. Cross-referenced, they tell you exactly which groups are having a worse experience than the headline average suggests, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Be honest about your motivation, too. If you are running a survey purely to produce a number for a board pack, employees will sense it and disengage. If you are running it because you intend to act on what you find, say so — and mean it. That single commitment, made credibly up front, does more for your response rate than any incentive.

Step 2: Choose a survey tool built for DEI — not a generic form builder

The tool you choose decides almost everything else: whether people trust it enough to answer honestly, whether your questions are right for the UK, and how long you spend wrestling with the results. A generic form builder can collect responses, but it cannot guarantee anonymity, does not understand the Equality Act, and leaves you to analyse the data yourself. A purpose-built DEI platform handles all three.

The two failures that sink DIY surveys are predictable. The first is anonymity. When HR emails a link to a generic form, people quite reasonably assume their answers can be traced back to them — and participation typically collapses to 20–30%. The second, and arguably the bigger hidden cost, is analysis. One organisation we work with used to spend the best part of a week every year cleaning, cross-tabulating and charting the output of a generic tool by hand. Because a dedicated platform already knows the structure of the data — demographics on one axis, Lenses on the other — it can analyse everything automatically and return results in minutes rather than days.

There is a longer checklist of what separates a real DEI platform from a repurposed form, which we cover in our guide to choosing a DEI survey platform in the UK and our overview of EDI survey tools. The short version: if a tool was not built specifically for diversity data, you will pay for it later in trust and in time.

Step 3: Build your questions around the Equality Act 2010

Your demographic questions should map to the nine protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010 — age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. For ethnicity, use the Office for National Statistics categories so your data is comparable with national and sector benchmarks rather than a bespoke list nobody can interpret.

Getting the wording right is harder than it looks, and it is where generic tools do the most damage. Response options should be listed alphabetically rather than ranked by perceived importance, phrased in plain English, and offered with a genuine "prefer not to say" on every single question so nobody feels cornered. Our full set of model questions, with the reasoning behind each, is set out in our DEI survey questions guide; a typical UK survey lands at 20–30 questions and takes under five minutes to complete.

The most important difference between a purpose-built question set and a generic one is that the language of DEI does not stand still. Terminology around gender, ethnicity, neurodiversity and disability shifts, and new communities ask to be recognised. A form you wrote three years ago is quietly out of date and risks causing offence. Divrsity tracks this evolving language and updates its templates continuously, which is why our questions read as current rather than dated — something a static spreadsheet can never offer.

Step 4: Communicate clearly — and guarantee anonymity — before you send

People answer honestly only when they believe two things: that their responses are genuinely anonymous, and that the survey will lead to action. Say both clearly, in advance, ideally from a senior leader rather than from an inbox nobody reads. Then make the anonymity promise technically true, not just a line in an email — because employees can tell the difference.

Real anonymity is an engineering property, not a reassurance. On the Divrsity platform there are no cookies, no IP logging and no link between an answer and an email address: each response is tied only to a random 128-bit identifier, the participant's email is purged the moment they finish, and all non-summarised data is irrecoverably deleted within ten days of the survey closing. Not even Divrsity staff can see how an individual answered, and a GDPR Subject Access Request would reveal nothing. We are slightly obsessive about this, and we have written about exactly how we protect participant anonymity at length — because it is the foundation everything else rests on.

The communications themselves matter as much as the technology. There is a large body of behavioural science on what actually moves people to respond — urgency, social proof, reciprocity, the right send time — which we draw on heavily and have summarised in our piece on using psychology to maximise survey participation.

Step 5: Launch on a Thursday and keep it open for about ten days

Launch your survey on a Thursday morning and keep it open for roughly ten days. This surprises people, but shorter windows produce higher response rates, not lower ones: a tight, visible deadline creates urgency, whereas an open-ended survey is the easiest thing in the world to put off and then forget. Resist the temptation to "leave it open a bit longer" — that habit trains people to ignore it.

Once you launch, the chasing should be automatic. Divrsity sends the initial invitation, a reminder partway through the window, and a final reminder 24 hours before the survey closes — so your HR team does nothing during the survey period. What works brilliantly, though, is using the live interim figures to create a little friendly competition. You can see, in real time, that Oxford is sitting at 78% completion while London trails at 68% — and a quick, light-touch nudge to the office that is behind reliably closes the gap. That visibility is something a generic form simply cannot give you.

Step 6: Make sure you reach the threshold for meaningful data

A DEI survey only tells you something useful if enough people respond — and the threshold matters at two levels. As a rule of thumb, there is little value in running a formal survey below about 20 people. Above that, the figure that really counts is the size of each demographic group: a breakdown is only meaningful, and only safely anonymous, where the group contains at least 10 respondents.

This is why response rate is not a vanity metric. If only a third of your organisation responds, your smaller demographic groups will fall below the threshold at which you can say anything about them — and those are frequently the very groups you most need to hear from. Aim high: short, well-communicated, genuinely anonymous surveys routinely achieve 70–80% participation, and a good platform will automatically suppress any group too small to report on, so you never risk identifying an individual. If you want to compare your results against other UK organisations of similar size and sector, that is where regional and industry benchmarking earns its place.

Step 7: Analyse by demographic group — not just headline averages

Headline averages hide the very problems a DEI survey exists to find. The insight lives in the differences between groups: the question where the overall score looks fine, but one community's experience is dramatically worse than another's. This is precisely why pairing demographic questions with experience Lenses matters — and why automated analysis that cross-references the two is worth so much more than a tidy chart of company-wide percentages.

Our most uncomfortable finding illustrates the point exactly. In one organisation we asked employees whether they agreed that racial slurs were tolerated at the company. Looked at as a single average, the result was unremarkable. Split by ethnicity, it was anything but: the white community strongly disagreed that slurs were tolerated, while the non-white community strongly agreed that they were. The two groups were describing the same workplace and experiencing two completely different realities. No headline number would ever have surfaced that — only the combination of Lenses, demographics and automated analysis did.

In practice this analysis should not be your job. On the Divrsity platform an interactive results dashboard is generated within about 10 minutes of the survey closing — filterable by team, location and demographic, with intersectional breakdowns and open-text themes already pulled out — followed by a prioritised, AI-generated action plan within 24 hours. Crucially, that analysis runs on UK-based servers and UK-built AI; your raw data is never sent to a third-party model overseas.

Step 8: Close the loop — share the findings and commit to action

The fastest way to guarantee a poor response rate next time is to run a survey and then say nothing. Once you have your results, share what you found — including the uncomfortable parts — and commit publicly to a small number of specific actions. People forgive imperfect results; they do not forgive silence. Closing the loop is what turns a one-off survey into a credible, repeatable programme.

Be realistic about scope: two or three concrete commitments you will actually deliver beat a twenty-point action plan that quietly dies. Then run the survey again on a regular cadence so you can measure whether the experience has genuinely improved, rather than guessing. Tracking the same Lenses over time is how you benchmark your own progress and demonstrate, with data, that DEI is more than a statement on the careers page. For a wider view of where this is all heading, our piece on DEI surveys in 2026 sets out why listening — and acting — has become a baseline expectation rather than a nice-to-have.

Why this matters in the UK right now

Running a DEI survey is no longer a fringe activity. A 2023 survey found that 57% of UK businesses now treat diversity and inclusion as a strategic priority, and the regulatory backdrop continues to tighten — from the public sector equality duty enforced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to the FCA and PRA's expectations on diversity data in financial services. The Equality Act 2010 gives you the framework; a well-run survey gives you the evidence. The organisations that do this well are not the ones with the biggest budgets — they are the ones that ask the right questions, make anonymity real, and act on what the data tells them.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a DEI survey take to complete?

A well-designed DEI survey should take an employee under five minutes to complete. A typical UK survey contains 20 to 30 questions split between demographic questions and experience-based questions. Longer surveys cause drop-off: short, focused surveys consistently achieve participation rates of 70 to 80 percent, while sprawling questionnaires struggle to break 30 percent.

How many people do I need for a DEI survey to be meaningful?

As a rule of thumb, there is little point running a formal DEI survey below about 20 people. Beyond the headline figure, results are only meaningful — and only safely anonymous — where a demographic group contains at least 10 respondents. Below that threshold a good platform will suppress the breakdown so no individual can be identified.

How long should a DEI survey stay open?

Around 10 days is the sweet spot, ideally launching on a Thursday. Counterintuitively, shorter windows produce higher response rates: a tight deadline creates urgency, whereas an open-ended survey is easy to ignore. Automated invitation, reminder and final-reminder emails do the chasing for you across the window.

Are DEI surveys anonymous?

They should be — but a generic form builder rarely is. True anonymity means no cookies, no IP logging and no link between an answer and an email address. On the Divrsity platform each response is tied only to a random 128-bit identifier, the email is purged on completion, and not even Divrsity staff can view an individual's answers. A Subject Access Request would reveal nothing.

What questions should a UK DEI survey include?

Base demographic questions on the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, using the Office for National Statistics ethnicity categories so your data is comparable to national benchmarks. Pair these with experience questions covering belonging, fairness and psychological safety. The language of DEI evolves constantly, so your question set should be reviewed and updated rather than written once and forgotten.

How quickly do I get results from a DEI survey?

On the Divrsity platform an interactive results dashboard is generated within about 10 minutes of the survey closing, with a prioritised, AI-generated action plan following within 24 hours. By contrast, organisations analysing data from a generic survey tool by hand routinely spend the best part of a week cleaning and cross-tabulating spreadsheets.

How much does it cost to run a DEI survey?

Divrsity charges a flat fee per survey based on the number of participants, starting from £499 plus VAT, with no subscriptions or hidden charges. Pricing is set in GBP and you pay only for the surveys you run, which suits organisations that survey once or twice a year rather than continuously.

Conclusion: from question to action in ten days

Running a DEI survey well is not complicated, but the details decide everything. Pair demographic questions with experience Lenses, make anonymity technically real, keep the survey short and the window tight, push for the response rate that makes your smaller groups reportable, and read the results by group rather than by average. Do those things and you will surface the truths that headline numbers hide — sometimes uncomfortable ones — and have a concrete basis for action rather than a hunch.

Divrsity was built to make every one of these steps the default. UK-built, obsessively anonymous, with an Equality Act-aligned question set that we keep current, and — the part HR leads and DEI leads tell us makes the biggest difference — automated results analysis that turns a closed survey into an interactive, segmented dashboard within minutes, not a week of spreadsheet wrangling. If you are weighing it up against a generic form, the honest answer is that the generic form will cost you in trust and in time.