State Employee Survey Demographics

2020 Statewide Employee Engagement Survey Demographic Questions:

BUILD appreciates the presentation in our May meeting and the opportunity to take part in the 2020 Employee Engagement Demographic Questions survey. We look forward to turning science into action. Below is the response from OFM on the survey. Remember, we can’t improve what we don’t measure.

Thank you for your feedback on our proposed changes to the demographic questions on the 2020 Employee Engagement Survey! Many of you are balancing a lot more than just work right now, and we are grateful for your time. We are excited about our engagement survey no longer being colorblind, as we will now be able to connect employee experience with identity. However, our work is not done—our next steps are to ensure that this data is protected, and that it is used to benefit state employees and promote equity. More on this to come! 
 
What we decided for this year:

• We will move forward with the changes to the race and/or ethnicity question (Asian, Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern or North African).
• The disability status question will have the definition and examples, with some changes for clarity.

For a final draft of all the demographic questions, please see the attached document. [not attached to this post]
 
We also received a lot of great feedback that we will research and vet for next year (the 2021 survey). With the results (especially response counts) of the race and/or ethnicity categories for 2020, we are hoping to identify other options to disaggregate further. Since 2020 will be the first “census” for the new options, we don’t currently know if we’ll have enough responses in each category for analysis, let alone further breakouts. Additionally, we are exploring other survey platforms that will help with text analysis, allowing us in the future to have a text box for some options. That won’t be available in 2020, but we hope it will soon after!
 
In the meantime, be on the lookout for our data protection policies. We will publish our internal protocols for data this summer. We need to be more transparent if we are asking for more personal data from our respondents.