Implement an equality plan

A critical stage in delivering equality in the workplace is to monitor the effectiveness of your equality policy and plan to ensure they are both working in practice.

Monitoring demonstrates your commitment to promoting equality within your business. It can also help you to identify equality issues or problems that affect your employees and can help you to implement solutions such as alternative policies or practices.

What does equality monitoring involve?

Equality monitoring involves gathering individual information from potential and existing employees at certain times and then comparing and analysing this against other groups of employees in your business or the broader workforce.

You should only collect information that you are going to use.

Ask job applicants for monitoring data on a sheet that can be detached from their application form so that the information can be kept separate from the selection process. It should be made clear that this information will only be used for equality monitoring and not in the short-listing process.

Download a sample monitoring questionnaire for job applicants (DOC, 13K).

To obtain an accurate view of your business you will also need to monitor the existing workforce. Explain your reasons for equality monitoring and make it clear you are only trying to ensure that every employee has the same access to training, promotion, and other opportunities.

Take action

If you find some of your equality processes aren't working, you should find out why and take action.

For example, if you find your business is not attracting the number of jobseekers you might expect, you should look at your recruitment and selection procedures. Is one group benefiting at the expense of another?

If it is shown that this is the case, you should take affirmative or positive action, such as:

• encourage more people to apply for posts by considering job-sharing and part-time working
• advertise widely to attract a diverse workforce
• offer work experience opportunities or mentoring for students

For more information on the equality monitoring process, see the Equality Commission guidance on monitoring.