DiversityInc - July/August 2009

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HOW Can Employee-Resource Groups Help? Our experts were selected based on companies that have effective generational employee groups. Forty percent of the DiversityInc Top 50 now have these groups, compared with 31 percent just a year ago, demonstrating how critical generational issues have become and how these groups are increasingly being used.

HANNAH When you all are doing this—when you’re getting your data from your Gen Y employees—where are issues like race and gender and orientation?

JACKSON One thing I’ve heard from our Gen Y group is “We get diversity. We got it from Barney and on up; we all need to play together.” This is the largest multicultural generation in our history and they are not letting this go.

FRANKEL Do you find a lot of younger people transcend several groups? And how useful are you finding these age groups?

DEJONGH They’re very useful. I was meeting with only a cross-section of the group and almost every single person was involved in more than one employee-resource group, and the reason for that was to celebrate being inclusive and seeking to understand and learn from others based on experiences. Secondly, that was just very natural for them based on what they were used to in their own environment. They want to bring it all and they want you to embrace it.

WILEY-LITTLE Our young-professional organization is up to 600–700 people right now. They’re probably our most active group. They’re a group of individuals and professionals who want to be heard and they’re very clear about offer-

ing up their time to participate in focus groups … We’re not necessarily building things for the work force today but the work force of the future. They want to be heard, and when it comes to things like mentoring, they absolutely have a clear voice, and we see them asserting themselves.

We’ve decided that we wanted to look at the company a different way. This last year, in our employee surveys, instead of just asking someone’s age, we asked them to begin to identify their generation group so that we could begin to dissect the information and the data about how the company was performing and how they perceived the company as well as all the diversity and work/life offerings so that we could tailor them to their needs.

SMITH We’ve begun to use some of our Generation Y or millennial advisory groups to advise some of our regional leaders. They very much want to be involved. This is also a group that you can never over-survey.

Six or seven years ago, when I started doing some of this, I said to our leaders, “You must go out and talk directly to people.” They said, “We’ll cascade it down the lines of command.” I said, “That does not work because these young people know who makes decisions and they already go over the head of their seniors and supervisors. They want to hear you, the CEO, and hear you, the chairman.” So our CEO and chairman began doing that.

LAMAE ALLEN

DEJONGH

U.S. Human Capital and Diversity Managing Director Accenture No. 23 on The 2009

DiversityInc Top 50

Companies for Diversity® list

CAL JACKSON

Senior Diversity

Practitioner

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida

No. 32 in the DiversityInc Top 50

STAN SMITH Principal Responsible for Cross-Generational Initiatives and Author of “Decoding Generational Differences” Deloitte No. 33 in the DiversityInc Top 50