This is the fifth of your nine requirements under the Employment Equity Act. Implementing and monitoring your employment equity progress is an ongoing process.
This requirement comes down to a few basic actions that employers can build from:
What follows is a final set of tips and best practices to must ensure that your employment equity plan will bring about what is referred to as “reasonable progress” towards implementing employment equity in your workplace.
The minimum standards of reasonable progress are:
When it comes to demonstrating reasonable effort, minimum standards include:
As already mentioned, appropriate data collection plays an important role in creating strong employment equity practices and inclusive workplaces. This includes human rights data. It can help to monitor discrimination, to identify and remove systemic barriers, to prevent disadvantages, and to promote equality.
To collect human rights data, federally regulated organizations should also collect data relating to grievances or complaints about discrimination and/or harassment. Here are other possible measures and data sources you can consider using:
Several types of systems can be used to monitor employment equity progress. An organization’s approach will be determined by the size of the organization and its employment equity program, as well as its existing methods of performance measurement and goals. Examples of systems include:
Some organizations may choose to design an employment equity performance measurement framework. Based on the trends, the organization sets specific employment equity goals. In order to assess these goals, it establishes a structure to collect objective information. In this context, a performance measurement framework should include strategic outcomes, expected results, performance indicators and associated targets, data sources and data collection frequency, as well as the actual data collected for each indicator related to employment equity. Other organizations may choose to add employment equity outcomes to their overall performance measurement framework.
Other organizations may prefer to develop a dashboard or use an existing scorecard to monitor progress. Scorecards or dashboards are now widely used in organizations. Dashboards monitor and measure processes. The common understanding of a dashboard is that it gives a real-time update as employment equity progress happens. A scorecard, on the other hand, charts progress toward objectives. It displays periodic snapshots of performance associated with an organization's objectives and plans. It measures business activity at a summary level against predefined targets to see if performance is within acceptable ranges. No matter which approach your organization is using to capture its business performance, employment equity data, indicators or targets can easily be anchored to it.
In order to be successful, the monitoring system should be seen as a strategic process coming from senior leaders of the organization. It helps secure the resources (human and financial) to implement the monitoring system and gives credibility to the trends and best practices highlighted in the process.
Over the course of many years, the Commission has audited many employers and identified activities that although not required can be very effective at promoting equality in the workplace, including adequate representation of the members of the designated groups. Here are some examples:
One organization, who had been using a scorecard approach for monitoring its business performance, added one specific measure on its employment equity program. It added the overall employment equity results of all four designated groups from its workforce analysis to be able to compare them with availability. With this approach, each year, that organization can determine whether or not the organization made progress with respect to the representation of the designated group members in its workforce.
An organization is incorporating action items it has identified on its employment equity plan into its integrated human resources plan. The integrated plan is discussed with senior leadership and shared with all employees.
Several organizations have introduced competency profiles as a means to focus their learning approach on a strategic, operational and motivational level. The competency profiles define the knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors that employees use in performing their work and their role in the employment equity continuous improvement process.
Some organizations are using a self-analysis matrix to compare their results in terms of employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and society impact against pre-established key performance results.
Consider adding anti-discrimination and employment equity training to individual learning plans.
Many federally regulated organizations have created jobs with employment equity responsibilities included. These posters often include a diversity statement, as well as a statement about the organization’s willingness to accommodate. This helps to put applicants at ease and lends credibility to an organization’s diversity initiatives.
When collecting data, an organization informs employees, stakeholders and the broader public about why the data is being collected, and how it may potentially be used.