What is AWEI?

The Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) is a document issued by ACON’s Pride in Diversity Scheme.

It is a set of instructions organisations complete each year and submit the results. ACON score the results and rank organisations based on their score. There are achievement levels awarded to high performers – platinum, gold, silver and bronze.

AWEI is a Loss Leader

AWEI is free, and doesn’t require membership or an association with ACON/Pride in Diversity. The AWEI is a way for ACON to start a relationship – a classic sales technique of offering something that seems valuable for free in order to generate business down the line. This is a loss leader. Businesses use loss leaders to establish a relationship with a potential customer.

Why is AWEI Free?

AWEI is free so that ACON can use it as a tool to engage with, and influence organisations. The AWEI tool is designed to encourage engagement and participation. The Pride in Diversity scheme is run by a large team of relationship managers who have experience influencing organisational culture.

Hidden Costs

Although there is no upfront cost, participation can be costly. Evidence shows several questions require financial contributions, and costly undertakings.

For example, the effort and cost to change IT systems so they accept “non-binary” salutations; assigning senior staff to implementing AWEI; cost of training and donations.

Gamification

Gamification is using gaming principles to drive engagement with non-game activities. Competition with others, rules of play and point scoring are used to make the AWEI submission process more engaging. AWEI translates the task of creating a diverse and inclusive workforce into a check-box exercise.

ACON offers training and consulting to help organisations improve their AWEI scores.

AWEI results are presented in terms of scorecards and graphs which encourage comparisons with other organisations. Extracts from ABC’s AWEI 2019 review show that the ABC engage with the AWEI as a competition, outlining their current position, achievement metrics, and achievement targets for 2020.

Extracts from ABC’s AWEI 2019 review (document 1.14)

Benchmarking

The AWEI Results Benchmark document sets out the AWEI results in a comparative leaderboard format. This is designed to encourage competition by focusing on the numerical score in comparison to other organisations.

What AWEI Claims

The Australian Workplace Equality Index originally drew from the rich experience, expertise and methodology of the Diversity Champions Workplace Equality Index published by Stonewall in the UK. The Australian Index was officially launched in November 2010 at Australian Federal Police Headquarters in Canberra

https://www.pid-awei.com.au

Pride in Diversity claim that the index:

  • “…now stands as the definitive national benchmark on LGBTQ workplace inclusion…”
  • is the “…largest and only national employee survey designed to gauge the overall impact of inclusion initiatives on organisational culture as well as identifying and non-identifying employees.”

Completing a Submission

ACON say the “AWEI sets out a range of expectations as it is and extremely comprehensive and evidence based. Therefore does take some time to complete”. The base template is 45 pages long, containing 67 questions to be answered.

In a typical benchmarking exercise, the applicant would be asked about usual practice, levels of performance and outcomes. The AWEI demands answers to “…a series of very specific questions in relation to areas that directly impact inclusion, or the perception thereof, and are required to provide evidence for all responses”.

Providing evidence is key. ACON are not benchmarking maturity, they are asking for evidence of active compliance with their agenda.

The only measure of success is number of points. Organisations compete against one another to achieve a platinum, gold, silver or bronze status. As each question is worth only a few points, a high level of activity is required in order to achieve an award status. This is known as gamification – application of typical features of games such as rules of play, competition and awards in order to encourage engagement.

The AWEI is reviewed each 3 years to “reflect shifts in practice and the research regarding this”. Levelling up is an element of gamification.

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Last updated on June 14, 2022