rned
GOLD-STAR ANSWER
Roy Weathers: Employee satisfaction is very important to us, so we
keep a very close eye on the demographics of our organization, in
terms of the 360s and some of the
impulse surveys we do. If everyone
under the same roof has the same
experience, you would expect the
perspective of the individuals to
be somewhat closely aligned, and
when they’re not, it’s a clue to us
that we need to get in the trenches
and focus. If we’re not retaining our best talent, that’s really a
drain on our business, and so we
monitor very closely, particularly
in a high-performing range, that
diverse talent.
We all do things at a national
level to drive retention, but retention is an individual thing. It’s about
what does that individual feel on
Monday morning when they get
the call from a recruiter that there
is a better offer somewhere. Some
people think in a tight economy
that they should sit back or step
back, the talent is going to stay here
because there are fewer places to go,
but from a diversity perspective, we
worry more.
Diversity & CSR:
Perfect Together?
By Barbara Frankel
Sherry Nolan: We’re holding our
organization accountable to an 85
percent index on whatever the turn-
over was initially before. We’ve gone
through that in every market that
we have. As we think about key tal-
ent that’s going to be running these
markets, if we don’t improve our
executive representation—minority
and female—then we’re not going
to get to that overall picture in our
communities that we want to be. I
was at a meeting with our diversity
advisory board with my chairman,
and we were talking about what
keeps him awake at night. He said it
was the notion of opening the doors
in 2014 and wondering, “Who’s
going to work here?” We ask how
we are going to keep some of these
people in the pipeline. And now
we’re seeing an expectation
of a millennial working
in one company for 1. 6
years or not needing to
come into the office at all
and being very indiffer-
ent to hierarchy … we’ve
had to step back and say,
“They have different life
experiences and perhaps
different biases, but we re-
About 10 percent of the heads
of diversity now have some
variation of the words “corporate
social responsibility” (CSR) in
their titles, according to a study
of the 352 companies participating in The 2008 DiversityInc Top
50 Companies for Diversity®
competition. Is this a natural evolution of progressive companies,
or is diversity management as a
strategic business factor in danger of being swallowed up under
a larger “social” umbrella?
We asked the 17 chief diversity
officers we gathered for four
roundtables for their opinions,
and they were split. Some felt the
intertwining of CSR and diversity
management was a benefit to diversity; others said the two could
co-exist with some overlap but
would never be combined; and
still others wanted to maintain a
strong separation. Here are some
of their responses:
“Is the stress worth staying on?”
Subha V. Barry, Merrill Lynch
THE PROS:
Magda Yrizarry of Verizon
Communications: Corporate
responsibility, diversity and ethics are really about the behaviors
and the values we want every day
in the workplace. It makes sense
for them to reside together, and
it has worked for us. Neither is
part of the soft part of the busi-
Programs, IBM, No. 9 Jimmie Paschall, Global Diversity Officer and Senior Vice President, External Affairs, Marriott International, No. 11 Rohini Anand, Senior
