The DiversityInc
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can better lead, not just broadly in
the organization, but specifically,
those constituencies that have
often been underrepresented. This
reverse-mentoring program has
really been eye-opening for a lot
of our senior leaders, giving them
personal connections to junior-level
employees and the ability to see the
organization through different eyes.
provide the most effective ways
of understanding communities
and developing and delivering
products that resonate with them.
They are as crucial for B-to-B
companies as for consumer
companies. For our series on
employee-resource groups with
groundbreaking research, go to
www.DiversityIncBestPractices.
com/ERGs. For our webinar, go to
www.DiversityIncWebinars.com/
ERGs
we use our own talent to come
up with marketing strategies and
to help us understand the unique
needs of our customers.
Anand: We have a mentoring
program in which 80 percent of the
mentoring pairs are cross-cultural
and cross-gender and 90 percent are
across market segments, so the purposes are to break down the silos in
the market segments to allow for
flow of talent and also reverse-mentoring. It’s been a very powerful
experience, particularly for the
senior execs who have mentored
some of the folks more junior
in the organization—two levels
removed—and every single one
of our senior executive team
80%
members participates in the
mentoring program.
60%
Gadsden-Williams: We’ve utilized
our employee-resource groups as
internal focus groups. Most companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on focus groups;
Employee-Resource Groups
Jimenez: Our affinity groups are
becoming very strong in terms
of how they can help the talent/
acquisition department or the
marketing department. Here’s an
example: Our EEO statement listed
sexual orientation but it did not
list gender identity. The associate-resource group came back and said,
“Trust is one of our core values as
a company, so here’s why we think
there’s a gap.” Through their efforts,
we polarized all of our information,
got a lot of statistics, presented it to
the legal department as well as to
our CEO, and next week, we’ll be
signing off on gender identity.
100%
100%
96%
98%
79%
79%
71%
67%
6
Employee-
Resource
Groups
Employee-resource
groups are essential these
days to recruitment, retention
and talent development,
especially for traditionally
underrepresented groups. They
40%
20%
17%
0%
Has an
LGBT group
Has a
disabilities
group
Uses ERGs
for recruiting
Uses ERGs
for marketing
DiversityInc Top 50
Bottom Quarter
GOLD-STAR ANSWER
Bucherati: Employee-resource
groups are tremendously valuable,
and having watched the growth
just in the last few years is amazing. The groups started about 10
years ago. In the early days, they
were more focused on networking
and socialization. But a few years
ago, we went to the groups and
said to them, “We have to think
about how we operate as a business.” We started asking all of the
ERGs to put together an annual
business plan, in which we asked
No. 40 Linda Jimenez, Chief Diversity Officer and Staff Vice President, Workforce Diversity, WellPoint, No. 42 Susan Hamilton, Assistant Vice Presi-
