Welcome everyone, my name is Bryony.
Today we're covering how to conduct an audit. Our session will guide you through step by step what is required, why it's important, and how you can truly make your workplace fairer for all employees. Everything that I'm covering is in the 2025 audit guidance, so for further instructions go check it out. By the end of this presentation I hope you feel confident and excited and ready to get started. Let's begin. I would first like to start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land that this meeting is being held, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I wish to acknowledge them as the Traditional Owners. I would like to pay my respects to Elders past present and emerging and to anyone who might be on the call today.
So we've got a lot of ground to cover in this session, we're going to look at an overview of the audit the workplace gender equality indicators, preparing for your audit, completing it, submitting it, and tips for common challenges.
But before we begin I'd like to hand over to our commissioner, Dr. Niki Vincent.
Thank you Bryony. Hello and welcome. The workplace gender audit is a crucial opportunity. It helps us see the reality of gender inequality in our workplaces by measuring the seven key indicators, and analysing the data you uncover, the gaps, the challenges and the areas needing change. This isn't just about collecting numbers, it's about using evidence to inform your action plans and track your progress. Over time, the audit is not easy but it brings clarity and direction to your efforts as we prepare for the next cycle. I encourage you to approach the audit with rigor and purpose accountability starts here. Thank you Niki.
An overview of the audit.
A workplace gender audit is more than just a compliance exercise. It's a chance to shine a light on the hidden barriers, like unseen pay gap, or missed promotion opportunities think of it as a health check for equality. It tells us where the gaps are, how big they are and who they effect. Because if we don't measure, we guess, so the audit turns opinions into fact so our gender equality action plans target the right issues.
Let's talk about timing. You're required to submit an audit every two years with the upcoming deadline set for the 1st of December 2025. For most duty holders, your audit will cover the data from the previous financial year. That means that for 2025 the reporting period is the 1st of July 2024 to the 30th of June 2025. Universities have a different reporting timeline. This aligns with their existing reporting obligations under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012. The reporting period for universities 2025 audit, is the 1st of April 2024 to the 31st of March 2025. Your next gender equality action plan is due on the 1st of May 2026, along with your progress report. And the reason why we've spaced them out like this is because your audit informs your gender equality action plan and your progress report.
Let's dive a little bit deeper into audits. Think of the audit as our evidence base. The data collected in audits will show where gender equality exists and persists in your organisation. There are two types of of data you need to collect for audits. Firstly, workforce data. This covers employment and demographic details. This can be gathered from internal data collection systems, for example human resources or payroll data. But these numbers only tell part of the story. So we need to gather employee experience data. This is where you might uncover issues with workplace culture or hidden harassment. If you're part of the People Matters survey run by the Victorian Public Sector Commission, fantastic. You do not need to complete and submit the employee experience data template. This is automatically filled and uploaded into our reporting platform. If not, a third-party service provider can conduct the survey. And also we recommend that you do not conduct the employee experience survey internally. If the data is mishandled it can cause serious harm. When you conduct the survey via a third party, or internally, you will need to complete and submit the employee experience data template into our reporting platform and that's it. In short these two sets of information, workforce data, and employee experience data form your audit. They can then be analysed to produce results that align to one or more of the gender equality indicators.
These seven indicators at are at the heart of the gender equality act. They provide a well-rounded view on whether women, men, or people of self-described gender feel equally valued, respected, and supported. Collectively they enable us to identify problems, so we can design and target strategies to improve these problems. Through the audits we gather data on these indicators. Through the gender equality action plan we develop strategies to address these, and through progress reports we report on how we're tracking against these. They really keep the work accountable and focused.
Before jumping into spreadsheets, having a solid plan is vital. Consider where you will store and manage the information that you are collecting. Consider the time commitment required for an audit, and this can really vary. Choose your audit process owner, they'll be your point person for gathering data, liasing with departments, and overseeing the process. You might also have a separate reporting process owner who authorizes submissions, and manages platform access. Think about which data is absolutely required. Are you only collecting the required data like gender, or employment basis, or are you going to go deeper with the recommended data like cultural identity or disability status. Also map out where all the data lives in your organisation from payroll software, to HR systems, or even spreadsheets. This planning phase is the foundation for a relatively smooth audit.
Managing data and privacy.
So as you know handling sensitive information like sexual harassment incidences or personal demographic comes with serious responsibilities. So you really need to make sure you follow privacy law and store data securely. Always remove personal identifiers before uploading data to the reporting platform. Your workforce needs to know their information is safe, and it will be used ethically. And really trust is crucial if we want honest feedback and accurate data.
So let's talk about who's driving the audit.
Data collection can get quite technical. Ensure that you have people who are comfortable with spreadsheets like Excel wizards who can wrangle big data sets. Payroll specialists are also key especially for tricky renumeration calculations. And it helps to have a leadership champion who can endorse the importance of the audit at the highest level. With the right skills on board you'll have a smoother more accurate process.
Completing your audit.
Here's a high level process for completing the audit. Download and fill in the audit Excel template. Stick to the exact codes. Validate with the in-built checker and fix any errors right there. Upload the template to the reporting platform. After it's uploaded you can generate certain reports like the data quality report. Correct any mistakes found in the data quality report and re-upload. You can repeat this until your report is clean then you can press submit. That's pretty much the full loop so it's clean data in and that means a clean audit out.
So for collecting your audit data, after the 30th of June 2025 work with the relevant people and teams to collect the data. The data you extract should be as at the last pay run immediately prior to the end of the reporting period. That is the 30th of June 2025, and for universities that's the 30th of March 2025. For each field of data you are collecting, refer to the definition for the data in part four of the audit handbook. Every field has a definition and instructions for how to calculate it, or what to include and what to exclude. Once your data has been collected you should look for the following things, are there any duplicates, are there any gaps in the data? Ss each data field in the acceptable values? Have you removed any potentially identifying information. Did you validate your data in the workforce template before you uploaded it to the reporting platform? Validation is run by clicking a button in Excel it can take a few minutes to complete. Any issues found will be listed and each issue will include a direct link to the data causing the issue.
Once your data is uploaded to the reporting platform head to the reports area.
First stop data quality report. Think of it as a smart friend marking your homework green ticks are fine, the red or amber rows listed at the top flag any issues like missing gender codes. If any issues pop up jump back to the Excel template fix them validate re-upload and return to the data quality report until the warnings disappear. Once you have clean data, open the indicators report. This pre-calculates every table and chart you'll need for reporting on the seven workplace gender equality indicators. So you can spot any gaps without wrangling spreadsheets. We also have a benchmark report which is not seen on the screen here. This lets you stack up this year's data against the previous years, or one demographic group against another all on the same screen. And what I'm giving you now is a very fast high-level overview, but we will be providing more detailed videos that take you through each of the reports in more detail.
Submitting your audit
When you're ready to finalize your submission do a final check in the data quality report to ensure there's no critical errors, then review what your data will look like in the public preview function on the reporting platform. Data cannot be edited once you press submit, so ensure it is correct. If everything is in order your CEO needs to attest to its accuracy and then you hit submit. The commissioner will review your audit and may provide feedback if anything's incomplete. So submitting a polished thorough order the first time saves everyone time. c
Common challenges
Here are some typical obstacles you might face one big one is scattered data. Your HR payroll and recruitment data might be stored separately making it hard to compile.
Overcome that by creating a simple data map and scheduling time with system owners to ensure you know exactly where everything lives. Another frequent challenge is limited Excel skills, so it's worth training someone internally or bringing in short-term help. Time is probably always one of those big ones, but if you start early and have a project timeline factoring in fixing submission errors you should be fine, And remember to validate your data early, so you have time to fix any of those errors. But most of all remain vigilant about privacy protections.
Next steps.
Now that you have your data what do you do with it? You don't have to wait to press submit to start analysing your data, you can actually still do it while it's in draft form. Your audit data informs your progress report and can help shape the strategies and measures in your gender equality action plan. This data driven approach is incredibly powerful, it tells us exactly where to act ensuring that your policies aren't just well intended but also effective in producing real and positive change. This brings us to the end now, we've talked about the why the how and the next steps for conducting an audit. If you would like to dive deeper into any of the other obligations we do have some short videos on our website on the gender equality action plan and also on the report.
Please keep in touch, and we will be releasing more support soon. So visit our website follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.
Thank you and have a fantastic day.
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