(Bloomberg) -- In 2022, SAP SE made an unexpected discovery. It surveyed employees in Germany for the first time about their family plans and learned that 98% of respondents either had or wanted children. In response, the enterprise software company decided to reorient its benefits program around the needs of families, and in particular, fathers.
As surprising as SAP’s finding was the fact of the survey itself. Asking employees about their personal lives and preferences is something that would have been unimaginable to a German company even a decade ago.
While personnel and diversity questionnaires have been widely adopted in the US and many parts of Europe, Germany’s strict data protection laws and strong bias toward privacy have made such efforts a challenge. The recent rise of the far-right AfD party has also discouraged some people from wanting to share personal information for fear it could be exploited should the party take power.
Yet employers in Germany are also starting to recognize the importance of better understanding the makeup of their staffs. In addition to SAP, telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom AG and the city of Berlin, which employs over 100,000 people, are for the first time asking workers to volunteer information about their ethnicity, socioeconomic status and sexuality. All surveys must be anonymous and untraceable to any single individual.
Convincing workers to take part hasn’t been easy. Recent questionnaires conducted by SAP and the city of Berlin only saw 17% and 22% of employees responding, while the Telekom survey, which was sent out to a select group of people, received a 52% response.
“In Germany, people believe that if you ask these kinds of questions, then you create a risk of discrimination,” explained Katrin Terwiel, a diversity coach who, until March, was Deutsche Telekom’s vice president of human resources. That stands in contrast to English-speaking countries, she added, where “people more commonly believe that if we don’t ask, then we can’t detect discrimination at all and we cannot solve problems.”
Another issue is Germany’s approach to recognizing diversity. Rather than asking about race or ethnicity, it’s common in Germany to ask whether a person has a “migration background” – meaning that they have at least one parent born without German citizenship. Since the label can be applied to a person whose parents come from Sub-Saharan Africa and somebody whose parents are white and European, the approach has been criticized for ignoring differences between people who pass for German-born and those who don’t.
Some employers deal with this by drilling down into details, while others let workers decide what to share. In its survey, Telekom asked employees about their native language and whether they were born outside Germany. SAP, on the other hand, encouraged participants to base their answers on self-perception, and left space for them to elaborate in writing.
“If you grew up in Switzerland, you can decide for yourself if you feel addressed,” said Debora Murseli, who leads Diversity and Inclusion for SAP Germany.
While such open-endedness can frustrate efforts to fight discrimination, Terwiel points out that when crafting surveys it’s important not to simply transplant Anglo-Saxon categories and language. “In Germany, many people would be disturbed if the word ‘Black’ was available to select in the ethnicity category,” she said.
Corporate DEI efforts are currently facing a backlash in the US, but in Germany, efforts are just getting underway. SAP is preparing to introduce a new survey in 2025, the same year Telekom intends to roll out its questionnaire more widely. The city of Berlin is also planning a more detailed survey for employees who self-define as having a migration background.
To raise participation rates, both SAP and Telekom emphasized that workers need to be eased into the idea of sharing personal information, and that it helps to explain how employers plan to make use of the data. Telekom only sent out one emailed reminder and SAP none at all, emphasizing the importance of not harassing people into participating.
While SAP does not yet have an exact picture of what its workforce looks like, it still considers the survey results valuable. And now that employees are familiar with the process, it’s optimistic that the participation rate in the next survey will be significantly higher.
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