DiversityInc - September/October 2009

Editor’s Letter

The Most Critical

Diversity Initiative

Ten years ago, at all but a handful of companies, they were small, unfocused initiatives founded by people with good intentions who couldn’t make a direct link to the business. I’m not talking about diver- sity initiatives in general here, although I certainly could be. I’m talking specifically about employee-resource groups, which in those days were more commonly called employee networks or affinity groups.

Their rapid growth and increasingly important correlation to measurable business results has been the cornerstone on which successful diversity programs have been built. Employee-resource groups now touch every crucial area of a company’s future—recruitment, retention, talent development, innovation, productivity, customer relations, marketing and suppliers.

Their benefits are tangible and
measurable.

As we benchmark companies, we see a clear delineation between companies that are elevating their game and those that are either at the early stages of their diversity initiatives or are stalled.

With early-stage companies, there usually are no employee-resource groups, or just a women’s group. There is often fear on the part of management that starting additional groups will create a forum to spread unrest or a social network that will get in the way of “real work.”

Those fears are allayed by putting the right processes in place: a charter tying the group’s work directly to business goals and ensuring the group is inclusive of anyone who wants to join, the presence of a senior executive as a member of the group to keep it focused,

and business metrics to measure the group’s contribution to the company.

Recently, the head of diversity at a benchmarking client at the early stages of forming groups came to us with a question. Her company has a women’s group and is ready for one more. Her senior executives want to create a group for “all minority employees.”

Our advice, which we support with data showing the breakdown of groups at DiversityInc Top 50 companies, is that it is important to create distinct employee-resource groups for each traditionally underrepresented group, as their histories and cultural issues are different.

For more advanced companies, the ability to use these groups to differentiate themselves from the competition and to innovate escalates all the time. In the last year, we’ve seen an explosion of generational employee groups and an increasing proliferation of global employee groups, all tied directly to business results.

We’re also seeing increased accountability. This year, 84 percent of DiversityInc CEOs meet regularly with employee-resource groups, up dramatically from 44 percent five years ago. When we meet with CEOs during the benchmarking

process, they invariably cite these meetings as crucial to their understanding of critical issues facing their customers and clients.

We currently are featuring our latest research on employee-resource groups on www. DiversityIncBestPractices.com, and our recent webinar, featuring Merck & Co. and Aetna, documents best practices at two companies that use their groups for dramatic and sustainable business results. Go to www.DiversityIncBestPractices.com to see webinar highlights.

We’ll be increasing the weighting and the number of employee-resource-group questions in

The 2010 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® survey, which goes out in October. If your company is interested in applying, please contact top50@DiversityInc. com. Results will be announced at our March 9 event in Washington, D.C., which will focus on cutting-edge issues in global diversity as well as key trends in federal-government diversity initiatives. For event information, please contact events@DiversityInc.com.