Your Employees Already Know Who They Are. They Don't Need You to Tell Them.

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

You are taking a survey, or you’re filling out a form or the like, and the first few questions are demographic questions. And the way they are constructed, they are predetermined choices. As you look at them, you realize -- the choices are wrong.

Maybe they don’t include one of the ways you personally identify. Maybe you don’t like the language choice. Maybe something that’s very important to you -- religion, for example, or being a parent -- isn’t reflected. Maybe it’s just annoying because you feel like they are living in another century.

Whatever it is, you’re five questions in, and you’re already upset or annoyed. And something that was intended to be an act of inclusion has turned into an act of exclusion. And that is not productive, and that is not fair. And it’s all because of these predetermined choices.

At Holistic, we’ve endeavored to solve this problem. Now, on all of our analyses, these questions are open-ended. The end user writes what they want, how they want, and we deal with it. Simple as that.

We operate from a base of three principles:

You don’t need anyone to tell you how you should identify -- you can do so yourself.
It’s our job to build a sophisticated enough translation and analysis tool that we can process this information and use it for positive purposes.
In doing so, we’ll get better responses from individuals and we’ll engender more participation, positivity and opportunity.

We’ve started by doing this with our open demographic survey, which allows any company, anywhere, to collect self-reported demographic information on individual employees. This is a really powerful concept -- it’s actually really hard for companies to safely collect and store demographic information on their employees, and many companies don’t even want to mess with this. So we give them an opportunity to do so, but by using our proprietary technology, so we are actually able to truly make this an act of inclusion, meet the employees where they are, and generate successful, clean, valuable data.

Give it a shot. Any company can use it to generate demographic information for their employees, which we’ll collect and steward for free. Or contact us if you have questions or more specific needs. We’ve even included an additional question -- how else do you identify -- that allows us to glean more and more information from participants.