How do you ensure that your DEI strategy prioritizes equity across your organization?

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Equity is partially about access to employment. We recently brought our recruiting talent acquisition process all in-house. We did hourly sourcing in-house for many years, but we recently brought all of our salaried recruiting in-house as well. With that, we’re taking a look at what are the requirements, for instance, in job descriptions, educational requirements and other kinds of requirements that are excluding people who may not have had opportunities but have experience and ability. Equity also has to do with fair pay for the jobs that people are doing. Our compensation team does an exceptional job at ensuring that we have equity across the organization on pay.

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We approach DE&I in two parallel paths from a strategic standpoint; (1) it’s impact on culture, learning and organizational development (2) ensuring that we have established processes for appropriate governance which includes analysis and action planning.

From a culture, learning and organizational development perspective, our People Strategy coupled with our Global Cultural Tenets set our intentions to have an inclusive culture where colleagues can be their authentic selves. We recognize in order to live it, we need to nurture a growth mindset of lifelong learning. We are introducing Lumina Learning so all colleagues can learn about themselves utilizing a common self-assessment tool that provides them insights into how they show up in 3 different personas; at home, at work and under stress. We're launching this right now to support colleagues with a foundational understanding of “who are you?”. Knowing thyself ladders up to our leadership competencies of lead thyself, lead others and lead the enterprise. From there, once you know who you are, the next question is “do you have any unconscious bias?” We will then follow with unconscious bias training and begin the dialogue of how can we continue to advance the organization leveraging the diversity and experiences of all colleagues. I think without having the context of who you are and your unconscious biases, getting to a growth mindset when it comes to diversity might take longer or never be achieved.

From a governance perspective, we are enhancing our policies and processes to ensure that we are actively identifying actionable items to promote equity and equality for all colleagues on an annual basis along the entire employee experience journey.

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Some things that I've done in the past when we look at succession planning or identifying our top performers or who's getting promoted or who's leaving the company, we look at what is the diverse makeup of that group or the demographics of it, bringing it organically into the conversation.

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One of the ways we do it is through a program we call our career exploration program. We know that most of our diversity in the organization is in our entry level positions. We developed a program called the Career Exploration Program that's open to our early career employees who come from a diverse background. There's four different phases within the program. The first phase includes formal learning that focuses on specific professional development skills, such as developing a growth mindset, receiving feedback, emotional intelligence, and developing your personal brand. The second phase of the program introduces the different business lines in the organization. Because we are a business of businesses, an employee could start in our roadside assistance call center and then move into a career as a sales professional - all within the same organization. The third phase of the program is focused on career journey skills, such as interviewing as an internal applicant, resume writing, and networking. The final phase of the program is all about participants presenting back their reflection of learning and their career path.

Answer

The equity part of the equation, for me, is really exposing all the career opportunities we can to as many people as possible. When I think about equity, the one thing that I feel like we sometimes are up against is trying to ensure that people we want to engage with are also desiring to engage with us. Equity is like a two way street. We can provide the opportunity, but we also have to sometimes pull teeth to get people to come in and really be a part of the conversation, or a part of the solution. We need to ensure equality is being defined and is meaningful to the talent we are capturing. Becoming a really good listener is also important when it comes to equity.

How do you ensure that your DEI strategy prioritizes equity across your organization?

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