DiversityInc - Spring 2012

Should Resource-Group Leaders Be Part of the Executive Diversity Council? BY BARBARA FRANKEL

CHANGING ROLE OF DIVERSIT Y COUNCIL

Council Sets Diversity Goals

56%

42%

90% 5 Years Ago

Today

Have you seen companies utilize their ERG leaders as diversity advisory-council members?

As employee-resource groups have matured, they have literally earned a place at the table. That table, increasingly, is the executive diversity council.

We’ve heard from a number of companies that they are creating rotational spots on their executive diversity councils for one to three employee-resource-group leaders. These spots usually last two years (although we’ve seen one- to four-year terms), and in some cases, the ERG leaders are not voting members of the councils. When executive compensation is directly tied to company-wide diversity goals set by the council, the ERG leaders usually are excluded from that.

Their purpose on the council is twofold; they give the council insights into the middle layers of the organization and specific insights from their own affinity groups, which are incredibly valuable in determining business-related strategies to reach more employees, customers, investors and suppliers from these groups. The council experience is also a major talent-development initiative for the ERG leaders and exposes them to interactions with

What
Diversity
Questions
Should Be on
Employee
Sur veys?

BY SHANE NELSON

We’re looking to post employee polling questions on our diversity and inclusion website. Do you have tested questions that might be probing and relevant to our company?

CEO Chairs Diversity Council 32%

Source: DiversityInc

the senior-most executive in the company.

We started asking the ques-
tion of what percentage of The
DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for
Diversity have employee-resource-
group rotational positions on their
executive diversity councils in
the 2011 survey. The answer was
34 percent. We expect to see that
percentage increase this year. The
percentage of CEOs of DiversityInc
Top 50 companies who meet
regularly with
ERG lead-
ers (defined
as specific
small-group
meetings,
not speaking
engagements to
large audiences
sponsored by
ERGs) is 88
percent, twice
what it was five
years ago.
So you
see specifi-
cally where
the trend is and why. You can get
more information on this from our
recent webinar on diversity councils
(www.DiversityIncBestPractices.
com/diversitycouncil-webinar),
featuring IBM and JCPenney,
and our recent roundtable
on diversity councils (www.
DiversityIncBestPractices.com/
diversitycouncil-roundtable), fea-
turing KPMG, American Express
and Aetna.

Polling employees about diversity is a key way to gain critical feedback on the impact of your company’s diversity initiatives. All of the DiversityInc Top 50 companies include questions specific to diversity in their employee surveys. These questions also serve to increase knowledge of engagement and awareness.

The DiversityInc Top 50 companies also use these questions to drive specific diversity results, such as increasing participation in mentoring and employee-resource-group programs.

Take Sodexo. No. 2 in The 2011 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity. The company uses employee-engagement surveys to measure the effectiveness of its IMPACT cross-cultural mentoring program. Participants are polled twice throughout the one-year program—at the midway mark and at the end. Questions are designed around engagement, job satisfaction, performance and retention. Results showed that the top three intangible benefits of the IMPACT program for mentees and mentors were increased