How to evidence a menopause action plan
Government guidance on menopause action plans walks employers through six steps. The first is to understand the issues in your organisation, engaging employees and using workforce data, before selecting which actions to take.
Almost every supplier in this market sells the actions. This page covers the step that comes first: why it is harder than it looks, and how to do it so the answers hold up.
Why your internal survey underreports
The standard approach is an internal survey. It is free, it is fast, and it produces a number you can put in a board pack. It also systematically underreports, and the reason has nothing to do with survey design.
Disclosing a health issue to the organisation that decides your promotion is a career calculation. Most people decline to make it. That is a rational response to a real risk. Better question wording will not fix it, and neither will a stronger anonymity promise, because the promise is made by the party with the incentive to break it.
The effect is not evenly spread, which is what makes it dangerous. The people least likely to answer honestly are the ones closest to promotion, on probation, on short contracts, or in male-dominated teams where they are already conspicuous. Those are the people whose experience most needs to be in your plan, and they are the ones your internal survey will miss.
You already have provision. You do not know if it works.
Most large UK employers already fund support, and one survey of 200 UK HR leaders shows the gap in a single page: 79% of employers provide an employee assistance programme, only 27% of employees realise theirs exists, and nearly 85% of employers put its annual use at just 3 to 5%.
Source: HCML, corporate health and wellbeing report, June 2024
Read those figures together and the picture is not an awareness problem. It is a measurement problem. Nobody is asking the workforce whether any of it lands. The organisation asking is the organisation being assessed, and the supplier who could ask is the supplier being assessed.
What to collect
Seven things, one screen, under two minutes. Workplace-framed, never seen individually by the employer, and short enough that people finish it.
- What is affecting your work right now. Framed as work impact, never as symptom severity.
- Which part of the organisation you work in. Work area, not team, so nobody is identifiable.
- What would make the biggest difference to your working day.
- Whether you have asked for an adjustment, and what happened.
- If you did not ask, what stopped you.
- Which of the support your employer already provides you have actually used.
- How supported you feel at work, on a 1 to 5 scale. The only required answer, and the number the before-and-after comparison is built on.
The last two are the ones no employer can get any other way, and they are the two that change what you do next. The fifth tells you whether your problem is provision or process. If people are not asking because they did not know who to ask, that is a communications fix. If they are not asking because they were worried how it would be seen, no amount of provision will help until the culture question is dealt with.
Never score symptom severity
Rating how badly affected someone is collects special category health data about identifiable people under UK GDPR Article 9. It produces answers you cannot act on individually. And it moves the exercise from a workplace assessment towards a clinical one. Work area impact and existing controls only. That line is worth holding even when a well-meaning wellbeing lead asks you to cross it.
Why the collector has to be neutral
There are three parties who could run this, and two of them have a conflict.
| Who asks | What that does to the answers |
|---|---|
| The employer | Employees are answering the organisation that decides their promotion. Underreporting, unevenly distributed, worst among the people who matter most. |
| A menopause provider | They are being assessed by their own survey. A finding that their coaching, app or clinical service is not reaching anyone is a finding against themselves. |
| A neutral third party | No employment relationship, nothing to sell the respondent, and no commission from anyone being measured. A negative finding about existing provision costs them nothing. |
Neutrality here is not a marketing position, it is a data quality control. If the party collecting the answers benefits from a particular answer, the answers are worth less, and everyone reading your plan knows it.
What a good response rate looks like
Report the rate, not just the count. A finding from 233 people out of 412 invited is evidence. The same finding from 233 out of 4,000 is a signal about who self-selects. A reader who has to work that out for themselves will assume the worst.
| Response rate | What it means for the plan |
|---|---|
| Under 15% | Treat findings as directional only. Say so in the plan. A low rate is itself a finding, and usually says something about trust or about how the invitation was sent. |
| 15 to 35% | Usable for ranking what people asked for. Be careful about work area breakdowns, which will fall below the ten-person floor in smaller areas. |
| Over 35% | Strong for this subject. Work area breakdowns become meaningful and the baseline is worth remeasuring against. |
Three things move the rate more than question design. Whether the invitation comes from someone other than the employer. Whether it is genuinely short, which means under two minutes and no account to create. And whether it went to everybody, rather than to a group selected by age or sex. Targeting tells the people selected that somebody has already made an assumption about them.
Running it without an HR bottleneck
The usual failure is procedural rather than technical. The survey is drafted. Then it waits on a wellbeing committee, a works council, and a comms slot. By the time it goes out, the deadline has moved.
- Scope it to one site or business unit. A single area gives you a usable baseline in weeks and a template for the rest. An all-sites launch waits for the slowest stakeholder in the organisation.
- Send a link, not a platform. Anything requiring an account, an app or a single sign-on integration adds procurement and drops the response rate.
- Do not ask managers to collect it. A response handed to a line manager is not anonymous, whatever the covering note says.
- Set the close date before you launch, and publish it in the invitation. Open-ended surveys drift.
Anonymity also has to be architectural rather than promised. If a work area has four people in it, reporting that work area identifies all four regardless of what the privacy notice says. A floor of ten people per reported group is the minimum, and it has to be enforced by the system rather than remembered by whoever writes the report.
Set the baseline before the deadline
Publication is voluntary from 6 April 2026 and, subject to legislation, expected to become mandatory from spring 2027 for employers with 250 or more employees. That gap is the useful part. A baseline dated 2026 lets your first mandatory plan report a change rather than a starting position. A plan that shows movement reads completely differently from one that shows intent.
Source: GOV.UK, Creating an action plan: guidance for employers, step 5, updated 13 May 2026
- Run an anonymous pulse across one site or business unit, collected by a neutral third party.
- Complete a menopause risk assessment per work area, using work area impact and existing controls as the basis.
- Rank the actions by how many of your own people asked for each one.
- Keep the baseline figures and remeasure at 6 or 12 months.
That is what Summ Signal does, self-serve. An anonymous pulse your employees answer in under two minutes. Live results, with the 10-person floor enforced in the system. Every request ranked by demand, and the evidence paragraph written from your own numbers. We are not a menopause provider, we sell your employees nothing, and we take no commission from anyone we measure or signpost.