At Essex, people are at the centre of everything we do. We aspire to build a culture in which every member of the University feels valued and can flourish and we have a lot of initiatives in place to help work towards a more inclusive culture. These range from our participation in sector-wide equality charters, to task-and-finish groups looking at specific challenges and experiences.

We regularly report on outcomes by different characteristics to help us identify gaps in our current provisions, but one of the challenges we face in improving our work and provision around equality, diversity and inclusion is low disclosure of characteristics such as ethnicity and disability. This makes it harder for us to draw robust conclusions from the data and in turn impact our ability to develop programmes and actions that can make a positive impact on your experience as a member of staff.

This is where you come in: by taking a few moments to update your information on HR Organiser, you will be directly contributing to equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives at Essex, and our People Supporting Strategy.

How you can disclose

There are two places on HR Organiser that you should update your information. Once you log in, you can click on ‘my profile,’ and then go to the ‘sensitive information’ page where you can choose to disclose information related to protected characteristics. The second page is under ‘my profile,’ ‘employment,’ and then under ‘view or amend HESA details.’ This information is held internally and returned to HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, as part of our annual submission to them. 

There have been some changes to the categories on HR Organiser, so even if you have previously disclosed this data, we would encourage you to check that your details are up to date. 

Your data is safe

We would like to assure you that this information can only be accessed by a limited number of people and always held in line with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Data is only shared outside of that team on a limited basis for work such as reporting and equality charters. We take the highest care to ensure that anonymity is maintained. Disclosing information related to protected characteristics is a personal decision, and you can also select ‘prefer not to say’ for any question that you would not like to disclose information on. 

Please contact the Inclusion Team if you have any questions about disclosing your information on HR Organiser.