DiversityInc - May 2011

EMPLOYEE- RESOURCE GROUPS

specifically identified by one demographic. “We get a quarterly report and we measure their age diversity,” she notes.

For the majority of companies, however, creating an age-specific ERG is proving valuable. Here are the critical factors they cite:

A. Talent Development Jennifer “Jae” Requiro, internal diversity and inclusion process manager at Toyota Financial Services, remembers starting her career at Toyota 12 years ago, when she was a single mother in her 20s. “I did a lot of research figuring out how to communicate,” she says, noting that generational ERGs help future leaders determine how best to understand the corporate culture.

“Toyota is one of those companies where people don’t leave. So if you’re a Gen Y’er, you need to feel connected to the company,” she says.

At Aetna’s EnRGy employee-resource group, which officially started in 2009 and now has more than 600 members, the genesis was to create a safe environment for networking and talent development. Giorelly Prado, EnRGY national chair, 28, notes that the group is often used to help with recruitment and to introduce young professionals to others who can help them grow.

Dell’s Hyacinth puts it succinctly: “They really wanted professional development, to understand how they get to the next level.”

B. Retention/Engagement

WellPoint’s younger-employees group, HYPE (Healthcare Young Professionals Exchange), has been helpful in finding out ways to enable millennials to stick around longer, notes Linda Jimenez, chief diversity officer and staff vice president, diversity and inclusion. “It is about asking very particularly what it is they want, individually … If you recognize that they are not here for 10 years, what opportunities exist within our organization?” she asks.

She notes that for millennials, having an impact on the community is a key factor in engagement and retention.

“What really attracts this age group? That commitment to making a difference. That social responsibility, that volunteerism, is a really attractive component for them,” Jimenez says.

Flexibility also has been cited by several companies as key to retaining younger—and older—workers.

At AT&T, Brinkley says, there was a young man the company very much wanted to hire for its flagship leadership-development program, in which young MBAs are put in rotational assignments in various parts of the business. The young

GENERATIONS
AT DELL
Gideon Hyacinth (left)
and Michael Tatelman

man they sought had a child with an illness and he really needed to work at home and be close to medical facilities. “Because we were willing to do that, he chose to work at AT&T,” she says.

C. Innovation/
Customer Outreach
Donna Johnson, chief diver- sity officer at MasterCard,
tells us that her company’s Young
Professionals ERG, known as
YoPros, started in October 2010. Its
target group is employees with less
than 10 years’ experience.

“The focus is on innovation from a global perspective. We want to get insights into how they interact with technology and new product ideas,” she says.

Brinkley gives an example: “We’ve developed an online collaborative platform. We call it TIP, or the Innovation Pipeline. We have over 75,000 employees who are registered for it. We had 10,000 ideas generated in 2010 alone. What is surprising about this is that all generations are using it … It was a Gen X’er who had the idea [to] combine your work and your personal cell phones into one device.”

“It’s really important that companies have a value proposition
to attract, to retain, to develop your employees.
And this proposition needs to be across all generations.”