Hi and welcome to Fair HQ! We're so excited to have you on board. 🥳
We know you really care about making this launch successful and we suspect you're super busy so this article will guide you. You can find lots of other articles in this help centre and our team is happy to answer questions with the little chat bubble to the right.
This is a how to guide, if you want a quick overview for yourself or others try the Fair HQ Cycle.
Jump to:
Add teammates (who are allowed to see employee information)
1. Where to begin
Book your Launch call with our team and together we'll set some goals for your company to get the most from Fair HQ.
Most companies should complete the Audit as soon as possible. Completing within 30 calendar days of joining keeps the momentum. 🛼
It'll give you a baseline measure of ED&I at your company and let us develop your personal strategy sooner. Not gonna work for you? See the special circumstances FAQs.
2. Make sure you'll always get our emails 💌
Some companies have strict spam filters which restrict emails from us, and sometimes we're just unlucky! To ensure we can guide you along this process and that emailed survey invitations will work for employees, please whitelist our email addresses.
3. Add your team members 👥
You can invite your team mates to collaborate by clicking the icon/image top right and choosing Team from the menu. Add their email and invite them.
Anyone with a login to Fair HQ will see employee information, assessment questions, reports, etc. We don't offer any stricter roles yet so please be mindful of this when deciding who to invite.
More on adding a team member and how they join the team.
4. Complete your first Audit 🕵️
The Fair HQ Audit comprises the employee survey and the company assessment. Completing either one of them unlocks some Reports, and combined they'll give the full picture.
4a. Upload the employee list and send the survey
Estimate: 1 hour + 6-10 for each employee to answer it
It usually takes 2-3 weeks for enough employee responses to come in (and to give people on leave a chance) so get the survey out there as soon as possible.
Uploading the list of employee emails is pretty quick. You can update things like department and level later by re-uploading (just keep the emails the same).
Internal communication needs and practices vary so we'll have talked about your approach in the Launch call. As a guide, we recommend announcing at the end of an all hands meeting, and asking people to go fill it in immediately.
75% completion unlocks the diversity and inclusion reports but most customers push for (and get!) 85%+.
So to recap, you're going to:
Upload the employees in Audit > Employees
Communicate to employees that you're using Fair HQ, why and what will happen (some resources to help)
Send the survey in Audit > Survey
Then look at how you're handling departments and job level
Remind stragglers to complete it (we will too)
Get to 85% and unlock Reports!
4b. Answer the company assessment questions and upload your documents
Estimate: 4-10 hours
Getting the company assessment to 100% unlocks most of the equality Reports.
Answer as many questions as you can, skip the ones you can't.
Upload any documents you have or share links. Make sure you anonymise any identifiable information.
Let us know when they're all there so we can score them (we only do this once a year so they need to all be there!).
5. Unlock your Reports 📊
Once the combo of survey and assessment is complete, your Reports tab will be packed with charts.
Book some time to look through this with your fellow Fair HQ users internally and compile any questions you have.
Then we'll have an Strategy call together to see what we've learned, what you want to communicate about it, and what you'll focus on in your Strategy.
Get more info on the DEI Reporting in Fair HQ.
6. Commit and take action 🎯
Your Strategy tab will generate the recommended priorities from our behavioural science team. You can adjust which areas to focus on, and get science-backed interventions to address your chosen challenges.
We'll be here to support you in setting goals and taking action over the next few months until it's time to start a new Audit session and see what has changed.
Wow, that was a lot! 😅
Take it step by step and we're over there on the chat bubble if you need us. And if you want even more (🚀) find out how Campaigns can raise DEI awareness through Slack messaging.
Appendix: Useful resources for internal comms 📟
Some bits and bobs to help you announce your Fair HQ survey and get that completion rate off to a great start. You're welcome to put your own stamp on any of these resources.
The Fair HQ product is evolving all the time so sometimes these resources get out of date. Please message us (💬👉) if you notice anything that needs a refresh, or there's something else you need.
✉️ Email template to follow up on an announcement (or tweak it as a fresh introduction).
ℹ️ Employee FAQs about Fair HQ: what it's for, how it will benefit them, data privacy and anonymity, etc.
🎥 4 minute video from Kate, Founder & CEO of Fair HQ, introducing the survey.
💬 Chat message template for the final push on deadline day
How to get the best survey completion rates
Use different channels and styles of nudge to create the feeling that everyone should have their say.
Explain why high survey completion is key: the results (and resulting action) will be much more powerful if they are indicative of all parts of your organisation. Set the clear expectation that everyone should participate.
Encourage everyone to block out a specific time in their diaries - or do that for them: Send company-wide 10-minute calendar invite to all employees to complete the survey at the same time.
Ask managers to mention it in their 1-on-1s. Give them the key points written down to help (it's anonymised, science-backed, and it benefits everyone). Encourage them to pass queries back to you so you can compile a custom FAQs for the whole team.
Publicise your completion rate if it's good. If over 50% of employees have already completed the survey, shout about that in team meetings or chat tools. Ask the others to go and do it now.
Put it on agendas for your employee groups and committees, not just the D&I related ones, and have execs and leaders mention it in team meetings. This makes it clear that it's an important topic for everyone, not a select few.
Ask executives and leaders to message in a company channel once they've completed it. Role model that it's worth taking the time.
Host an 'open office' where people can drop in with questions and/or an anonymous queries form.
Reach out to us if you need anything, we want this survey to be successful too!
Appendix: Starting in special circumstances
We're happy to support you during your Launch call with figuring out the best option. Here's a couple of things that worked for other customers who may have been in similar situations as you:
People need to see us making changes asap, what can we do immediately?
Actions speak louder than words so if you need to demonstrate your commitment quickly, start with the Critical Foundations on your Dashboard (or in Strategy). Your first strategy (before we design a personal one with you) is an evidence-based action plan to lay the critical foundations of equity. These are the best first steps for any company to make immediate change.
We only just surveyed our team, what can we do instead?
We've gotta say this bit first: no one has a survey like ours when it comes to exploring diversity and inclusion in your workplace. It averages 7 minutes to complete and our customers regularly see engagement rates higher than any other survey they run.
If you really can't run it right now, we suggest you prep for launching it in 1 month's time.
In the meantime, you can complete the company assessment to partially unlock the Equality reports, and start completing actions in Strategy to lay the critical foundations of ED&I.
We've got a bunch of people ready to work on this, what should they do?
🤩 That's fantastic! Focus them on getting the Audit done. The company assessment is divided into sections like Hiring, and Pay and Bonus, share the responsibility for completing them and put others on crafting great internal comms for launching your employee survey.
Prioritise getting that Audit done super fast, but when there's no more work to share your team can start using Strategy. Work through this evidence-based action plan to lay the critical foundations of equity even before your Reports are in.
Read more about Scientific Approach.
You can find more articles about the company assessment and the rest of the Audit in its section of our help centre.