Who Feels Fairly Treated in Your Organisation?

I’ve been working on inclusive leadership with a large UK organisation recently. For me, fair treatment is perhaps the most important component of inclusive culture. There is a really strong, well documented link between fair treatment and employee engagement. When maintaining engagement is so difficult in these challenging times, treating people fairly seems a low cost though not simple route to pursue.

The company concerned has a regular employee engagement survey. I was really struck by one method of illustrating the “spread” of employee perceptions around fair treatment (see below).

The horizontal axis shows the % of employees responding favourably in terms of seeing their treatment as fair. The vertical axis is the number of units / departments receiving each score (in this case between about 20% and 90%).

There is real power in investigating the differences in leadership practices between the highest and lowest scoring groups. What helps the most?

A version of this distribution can also be used as a fair treatment or inclusion measure for a whole organisation. Rather than simply increasing the average score for fair treatment you might also choose to have goals for improvement of the lowest scores etc..

Assuming enough demographic data is available it would be terrific to look at this kind of profile for different identity groups. Any organisation using Six Sigma should be able to use this kind of technique particularly well.

Fair treatment is fundamental to employee engagement and the resilience of organisations. Are you doing enough to understand who feels fairly treated and who doesn't?