- [Kathy] This is a recording of Workplace Gender Auditing training delivered by consulting partnership GenderWorks Australia in April and May, 2021 with funding from the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Service. This file is the final recording in a series of five focused on step five of your workplace audit process, bringing your data together for meaningful consultation. You can access the other four recordings in the series by the website of the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector. My name is Kathy Oliver. I think I'll be co-facilitating these sessions along with Jen Branscombe. We are Principle Partners at GenderWorks Australia. We've now delivered these sessions to more than 200 entities across the Victorian Public Sector and this recording is a summary of the materials delivered. Materials delivered in these sessions have been tailored to the mixed competence and capacity levels of entity representatives. In order to develop your Gender Equality Action Plan, you are required to undertake meaningful consultation and engagement, to develop strategies and measures to address the gender inequalities you identify through your audit. As with gender auditing and gender impact assessments. The Gender Equality Commission has produced a guide on how to develop your Gender Equality Action Plan. The data collected from the gender audit and the analysis is the foundation to your Gender Equality Action Plan or your GEAP. You can see the case steps here for completing a GEAP in the middle column is recommended to start the process as early as possible. Building the case for change, for example, could take your organisation time to do, especially if you're new to working on gender equality. Other aspects that are important for you to consider now is your baseline audit analysis, how you will go about this, how you will resource it, what additional skills and support might you require. Secondly, meaningful consultation and engagement, which is what we'll be talking about in this section. Thirdly, a case for change, which will articulate your organization's vision for gender equality and how you have incorporated the principles into the ways of working, strategies and measures that you develop to demonstrate progress against your baseline measures, leadership and resourcing, and how you would go about measuring your progress. You're also required to undertake meaningful consultation. Two rounds of consultation are recommended. The first of which will be when you share the results of the audit with your organisation, this will include the workforce data collection plus also the results from the employee experience survey. The second round of consultation that's recommended is to consultants, strategies and measures for your GEAP. This will enable everyone from across your organisation to have a say on how your organisation can go about making progress. We recommend that at this point, you can sit at developing a project plan for your GEAP from start to finish. This will include all phases of the work, including the workforce data collection, your employee experience survey, your consultations, the development of your measures and strategies, and the submission of your Gender Equality Action Plan to the commission and in the publication of that on your website. Underpinning all of this will of course be a communications work that will take place across your organisation and also ways of working with your executive and getting them on board. Meaningful consultation must include the groups that are identified on the slide. That includes your governing bodies and not just getting them to sign off at the end of the process, but considering how you engage them to ensure that they can have their views and opinions heard about the way in which you can prove against your baseline measures. You're in place from all across the organisation, ensuring that not only do you capture the views and vision of leadership, but also other people from across the organisation in different parts, your employee representatives. So for most of you, this will be the unions and you are required to liaise and negotiate with key groups as per existing arrangements. So if you have a workforce or workplace employee consultative committee, you would be engaging again through this mechanism. It is also recommended that you engage with people from across the organisation in terms of ensuring that you hear the views of people from different cohorts and different identity groups, you may want to liaise with your peak bodies or gender equality organisations, and another one where you could get some really interesting information and data is from unsuccessful applicants. So when you think about your consultation process and against the indicators, you'll be talking to people potentially around why workforces are gender segregated, what are some of the barriers and enablers and what are some of the measures and strategies moving forward? But the people that you're not actually hearing from in that process is the people who were unsuccessful when they applied for roles within your organisation. So by talking to those people, you'll be able to gain additional information. It's up to you, how you undertake this consultation and engagement process. You may look at a purely in-person model where you have focus groups of particular cohorts or people from particular gender groups. You might have drop-in sessions or workshops. You might use it as an opportunity to discuss the issues more broadly as well. You may also use online methodologies and mechanisms. So for example, additional online polls and surveys that you will develop based on the results of the data that you've collected through the workforce data collection and the employee experience survey. Many of you will be thinking ahead to how you will bring all the information that you gather through each phase to develop your GEAP. And so at the moment we'll work through an example of what this might look like. So for example, in terms of your data capabilities, this is the information that you're gathering prior to undertaking the data audit. So it'll be understanding what your systems are currently capable of reporting on, and what the gaps are, for example. So you might have information around your gender segregation in your workforce, mapped your as codes mapped against gender, but you may not have information on gender diverse people within that cohort you might have a data gap there, and you might have additional data gaps around some of the intersectional information. That will be what comes out on your indicative reporting template, which is workforce status in number two. And the third one, there is your employee experience survey, and those questions you will see when you have a good look at a map to indicate as 4, 5, 6, and seven, but it might not tell you all the information that you need. So for example, if you're looking at workforce gendered segregation, your employee survey has 12 questions mapped to that particular indicator. And that looks at things like bullying and harassment, but it might not tell you the information about why a particular pocket within your organisation is heavily segregated because you'll be getting that information most likely at the organisational level. So this is where consultation becomes absolutely critical. So you might look at that workforce style that you've got there on your indicative reporting template and say that one of your workforces is 95% women, or it's 95% men, and you may want to go and do some direct consultation with that particular cohort that was your workforce. So you might take the time to talk to people within gender groups within that workforce to understand what some of those barriers or enablers to becoming more diverse in their employment. It's important to remember to plan well, how you will collect information through your consultation process around intersectionality. So making sure that you understand the experiences of people of different identities from across your organisation, understanding that a lot of people do have fatigue, particularly if they identify with a particular group and considering the respect of how it would feel to only be consulted because of aspects of your identity. So being really respectful and thinking of where else you can obtain information about people's experiences in the workplace, there are a lot of papers and well-written evidenced research information around that you can draw on. And then also being really considerate and respectful when you do ask for people's opinions around intersectionality and the way in which people experience the organisation and ensuring that you use the information that you get to make workplace improvements, and where it becomes really important is how you report that back to people. So if they've taken the time to share their experiences and make recommendations, you might not be able to take all of them on board, but how you communicate back which ones you did take on board and progressing forward becomes really important. And that's really important for the consultation phase. Overall, you might want to do a comms piece at the end of your consultation process, explaining how that improved the measures and strategies that you developed under the GEAP. This is an opportunity for you to just pause and take a moment to chat to some of your colleagues about the consultation process. So you won't necessarily want to consult with every person on every indicator in the same way, you may choose to consult in terms of the strategic vision for each indicator with your leadership group or leadership groups from across the organisation who work in specific areas where there may be challenges, you may want to talk to people about their experiences in particular pockets of the organisation, to understand the barriers and enablers that they're experiencing. So now's a really good time for you to think about who to consult with on what, and map that and map what that purpose is. So being strategic, you can't necessarily consult with everybody on everything. So it's really important if you can choose what you do here. And that concludes all five sections of the Gender Auditing Workshop that were delivered across over 200 entities in April and May, 2021. GenderWorks was thrilled to be involved in this process and we have loved talking to all the different entities and getting to know you all. We wish you very, very well on the development of your Gender Equality Action Plan, and if you would like to stay in touch with us, you can find us on LinkedIn at GenderWorks, or GenderWorks Australia, or you can find us on our website which is genderworks.com.au and you can email us at auditing@genderworks.com.au. And we do recommend that if you've got outstanding questions and need support for your entity, that you do contact the commission directly, they can be emailed on inquiries@genderequalitycommission.vic.gov.au. Thank you very much.
Updated