There is a moment, usually early in our work with an organisation, when we ask the leadership team a simple question.
“When did you last ask your employees what inclusion actually feels like here?”
The pause that follows is often more revealing than anything else in the room.
Most leaders are not indifferent to inclusion. They have strategies, commitments, perhaps a proud record of activity. But activity is not the same as insight. Initiatives are not the same as impact. And the distance between what leaders believe is true about their culture and what employees are quietly, carefully navigating every day can be significant.
The only way to close that distance is to ask better questions. And then, critically, to do something with the answers.
This is not about annual surveys that disappear into a spreadsheet. It is about creating the conditions for honest conversation, and building the organisational muscle to hear things that might be uncomfortable and respond with genuine intent.
Here are fifteen questions worth asking.
Why Questions Matter More Than Programmes
Before the list, a word on why this matters.
Many organisations invest heavily in diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and then measure their success by tracking how many people attended a training session, or whether their demographic data has shifted by a percentage point. Both things have their place. Neither tells you what it actually feels like to work there.
Insight questions work differently. They create space for employees to reflect and respond honestly. They signal that leadership is genuinely curious, not just collecting data to fulfil a reporting obligation. And they surface the lived experience that sits underneath the headline numbers: the micro-moments, the patterns, the everyday frictions that either build or erode a sense of belonging.
The questions below are designed to do three things: open up honest reflection, surface systemic patterns, and create the foundation for meaningful action.
The 15 Questions
Belonging and Psychological Safety
1. To what extent do you feel you can bring your whole self to work, and what, if anything, holds you back?
This is a foundational question. The concept of “bringing your whole self” is used widely. It means very little unless people can tell you where the edges are. What do they filter, perform and leave at the door?
2. Have you ever stayed quiet in a meeting, or chosen not to raise a concern, because you didn’t feel it would be heard or received well? What happened?
Psychological safety is measured by what they don’t say. This question goes directly to that silence.
3. Do you feel comfortable raising issues related to fairness, equity or inclusion with your manager or HR? What shapes your answer?
The “what shapes your answer” is the important part. It moves the question from a yes/no data point into something that tells you about trust, precedent and perceived consequence.
Day-to-Day Experience
4. Can you describe a moment in the past six months when you felt genuinely included, valued or seen at work?
Asking for a specific moment is deliberate. It grounds the question in experience rather than general sentiment, and it helps you understand what inclusion looks and feels like when it works.
5. Can you describe a moment when you felt excluded, overlooked or treated differently? You don’t need to name anyone. What was it about the situation that stayed with you?
The permission not to name anyone removes a common barrier to honesty. The second part of the question invites reflection on impact, not just incident.
6. Do you feel that the contributions you make at work are recognised and attributed to you fairly?
Credit, visibility and attribution are some of the most consistent fault lines in inclusion. Ideas repeated by others. Work that is acknowledged in the group but attributed to a specific person. This question opens that territory.
Fairness and Access
7. Do you feel you have equal access to the opportunities, projects and sponsorship that would support your career development? If not, what gets in the way?
Development opportunity is one of the places where structural inequity shows up most clearly. Not in policy, but in practice. Who gets invited into the room, who is given stretch assignments, who has a senior advocate who speaks for them when they are not present.
8. Looking at the people who get promoted in this organisation, do you feel the process is fair and transparent? What is your experience of it?
Promotion processes are among the most consequential and least examined systems in most organisations. This question invites people to share what they actually observe, not just what the policy says.
9. Do you feel that people in this organisation are held to the same standards of behaviour and accountability, regardless of seniority or identity? Where does that feel true, and where does it fall short?
Two-tier accountability, where senior people are visibly excused from the standards applied to everyone else, is one of the fastest ways to erode trust and inclusion. This question names that directly.
Leadership and Culture
10. When you observe how leaders and managers behave day to day, does it reinforce or contradict the values this organisation says it holds?
This is the values-behaviour gap question. It is not asking whether people like the values; it’s asking whether they see them lived out in practice.
11. Do you feel your manager understands and is actively interested in your experience as an individual, including the ways your identity or background might shape that experience?
Managers are the primary architects of the daily inclusion experience for most employees. This question asks directly whether people feel seen and understood, not just managed.
12. If you witnessed or experienced something that felt discriminatory, harassing or unfair, do you know what you would do? And do you believe that reporting it would be safe and would lead to a fair outcome?
Knowing the policy is not the same as trusting it. This question distinguishes between the two.
Belonging and the Long Term
13. Do you see people like you progressing and thriving in this organisation at all levels? What effect does that have on you?
Representation in leadership is not just a diversity metric. It is a signal about who this organisation is actually for. This question asks employees to reflect on what they see and what meaning they take from it.
14. In the next twelve months, do you see yourself still here? What would make you more confident about that?
Retention intention is one of the most important leading indicators an organisation has. And the “what would make you more confident” framing gives you something to act on.
15. If you could change one thing about the culture here to make it genuinely more inclusive, what would it be?
Leave space for this one. Some of the most important insight an organisation will ever receive comes from this question. You need to ask with sincerity, listen with humility, and follow through with action.
How to Ask Well
The quality of insight you receive will depend as much on how you ask as on what you ask.
A few principles that make the difference.
Create conditions for honesty. Anonymous surveys can help with this, but they are not the only route. Focus groups run by someone without a line management relationship. One-to-one conversations with a skilled facilitator. It matters that people believe their answers will not be used against them.
Signal that you are genuinely listening. Communicate why you are asking. Share back what you hear (in aggregate and with care for confidentiality). Tell people what you intend to do with what you learn. Even when it is worked through.
Ask everyone, not just the obvious groups. Inclusion insight is not only relevant to employees from underrepresented groups. Asking everyone signals that this is a whole-organisation conversation, not a niche one.
Follow up. Nothing erodes trust faster than asking meaningful questions and then going quiet. The act of asking raises expectations. When you don’t meet expectations with some form of response, the next survey will have lower participation and higher cynicism.
A Final Thought
These questions will not tell you everything. They will, however, tell you something real.
And that is the starting point for the most important work most organisations are still not doing: building inclusion not as a set of activities, but as the lived, daily experience of every person who works there.
The leaders we most admire are not the ones with the most polished strategies. They are the ones willing to ask uncomfortable questions and stay in the room when the answers arrive.
Culture is not what you intend. It is what people experience.
These fifteen questions are an invitation to find out what that experience actually is.
At Edge of Difference, we help organisations listen better, lead more inclusively, and build the cultures their people deserve. If you would like support designing a people insight process or acting on what you find, book a conversation with us today.
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