Guide to consulting employees on gender equality

Meaningful consultation will help you bring your employees along on your gender equality journey and help to ensure your organisation develops and delivers policies, strategies and initiatives that reflect employees’ needs and priorities.

Through consultation, you can gather information about employees’ views on the workplace, what is working well and what could be improved—from junior staff through to executive management. It will also help demonstrate a genuine commitment to gender equality from leadership.

The value of employee consultation is recognised in WGEA’s Compliance Reporting program and is a requirement for the WGEA Employer of Choice for Gender Equality citation.

This Guide

This Guide is designed to provide organisations with guidance on how to conduct employee consultation on workplace gender equality issues. Explore the tiles below for detailed guidance on how to effectively consult employees through a range of mechanisms and methods.

The Guide does not include information on how to conduct one-on-one employee consultations, such as performance discussions or exit interviews. These are other valuable forms of consultation that should be used in conjunction with those described here.

Before you begin: the basics of effective employee consultation

How to develop and appoint your gender equality committee or council

How to effectively survey your staff 

How to make your focus groups a success

Tips for conducting and effective executive workshop

A case study of how to engage staff in gender equality: Clough

Acknowledgements and disclaimer

We would like to acknowledge and thank Diversity Council Australia for reviewing the Guide.

This Guide is shared openly with the intent of promoting progress towards workplace gender equality. Ownership of the intellectual property within the Guide rests with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. 

The ideas and recommendations contained within it should be tailored to individual circumstances and are used or adopted at the discretion and own risk of employers. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency cannot accept any responsibility or liability for outcomes resulting from the use of the Guide, either directly or indirectly.