Globally Sodexo is one of the largest companies in the world operating in 80 countries and employing nearly 420,000 employees. While the decentralized nature of our business model allows Sodexo to operate with agility and speed, it poses a challenge with regard to employee engagement.  As a service company, employee involvement and enthusiasm are essential components to delivering the optimal products and services Sodexo is known for.

Research has shown that companies who disregard diversity as a component of their business strategy have a higher percentage of disengaged workers. Organizations that effectively capitalize on the strengths of all employees and leverage their differences and unique values have the most engaged employees. In addition, employees with the highest level of engagement perform 20 percent better and are 87 percent less likely to leave the organization, according to a survey by TowersPerrin. A study by the Hay Group found engaged employees were as much as 43% more productive.

Over a decade ago Sodexo embarked on a journey to drive employee engagement through a sustained and comprehensive commitment to diversity and inclusion. Employee Business Resource Groups, Mentoring, Training & Development, Flexible Work Arrangements and Recognition all became instrumental in fostering a culture of inclusion and engagement. Sodexo held itself accountable for progress through various measures and metrics. The result has been systemic culture change that has differentiated Sodexo for our clients, customers and employees.

Measuring the impact diversity and inclusion has on engagement is key. Sodexo conducts an enterprise-wide Employee Engagement Survey as well as special surveys targeted at Employee Business Resource Group members and mentoring participants.  The results of these surveys clearly demonstrate improved engagement as a result of participation in diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Sodexo’s Employee Engagement Survey has reflected increases in the engagement of women and people of color since the survey was first conducted in 2006.  In fact, 2012 results show that diversity is one of the top two key engagement drivers for employees.

Despite several years of economic challenges, Sodexo’s total management population reached an engagement high of 69 percent, which represents an increase at a time when most companies experienced a decline in overall employee engagement.   According to Aon Hewitt, this is considered Best Employer Range.  In addition, 83 percent of employees believe “At Sodexo, employees who are diverse are valued for the differences they bring to the workplace.”  That is up 16 percentage points since 2006.

Engagement for women and people of color also experienced increases that are at or above Aon Hewitt’s Best Employer Range.  Qualitative research findings revealed that both groups feel good about being able to bring “all of themselves” to work.  One of the most interesting findings was with regard to white male managers who said that they were proud to be a part of a company that is committed to diversity and inclusion.

Employee Business Resource Group members were also recently surveyed about their level of engagement and 65% said that Resource Groups enhanced their engagement and connection to the business.  Results from this survey are incorporated into Employee Business Resource Group’s strategic plans. Participants indicated Networking, Engagement and Opportunities as the three top reasons for increased engagement.  Participants also noted their performance improved and they were more likely to stay with Sodexo due to their involvement with a Resource Group.

Sodexo has experienced firsthand the link between employee engagement and business results.  When employees feel valued and empowered to focus on their strengths and honor their differences, diversity becomes one of the organization’s strongest competitive advantages.

The post How Diversity and Inclusion Drive Employee Engagement appeared first on DiversityInc.

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“Our leaders are so moved by our people and they care so deeply about what they think that I knew if I brought their voices to our work, they would really hear me,” she says.

Twaronite launched a “listening tour” in October 2011, when she started her position. Beginning in Dallas, she traveled all over the Americas region—Atlanta, San Jose, Detroit, San Antonio, São Paulo, Brazil, Mexico City, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Secaucus, N.J., Memphis, New York City, Stamford and Hartford, Conn., Charlotte, Orlando, McLean, Va., and Washington, D.C.

In each location, she met with different types of employees—diverse in racial/ethnic/gender/age/orientation/disability demographics, diverse by position and job function, diverse by level of technical skills.

“I worked with our HR department to make sure they preselected people who had proven track records in their day jobs. I wanted the best perspective on what makes people high performers,” she says.

The HR representatives gave the employees topics in advance and lots of direction about being candid and open with Twaronite. Her main questions concerned whether people felt they could bring their whole selves to work, what made them feel included or excluded, and how their team leaders factored into their feelings of inclusion or exclusion. Sessions generally had between 10 and 35 participants, and her team met with a few thousand employees total.

Simultaneously, Twaronite reviewed numbers from an engagement survey and compared them with employee ratings and what she heard directly from the employees themselves.

“We are an accounting and consultancy firm—we really like the numbers. So if I see data with extreme positives, we can replicate it in other places,” she says.

Her key findings were that when people said they felt included, they better absorbed real feedback, like on-the-job coaching. Flexibility in their workplace and from their manager correlates to higher inclusion levels. And employees who had more interaction with clients and senior executives also felt more included.

What made employees feel excluded? “When people acknowledged that someone was different but didn’t want to learn more about them,” Twaronite says, noting as an example a young Muslim woman who is a star performer but felt excluded because no one on her team asked about her religion. “She wanted to share who she is and her coworkers felt they needed to be respectful and cautious,” Twaronite says.

Although Twaronite’s schedule is understandably extremely busy, she plans to continue her traveling listening tour indefinitely. “It’s really relevant to be sensitive and close to your customers [in this case, the employees] so you can see consistencies and inconsistencies,” she says.

Related Video: “How Ernst &Young Gets Its Diversity Message to 50,000 Employees Every Day”

The post How Ernst & Young Improved Engagement, Innovation for 167,000 Employees appeared first on DiversityInc.

Video Minutes

0:00:00 Why Diversity Matters at Brown-Forman

0:01:35 Why a Non-Drinkers Resource Group?

0:09:17 Mission: Acceptance for Non-Drinkers

0:12:47 Benefits to Employees

0:14:06 Changing Corporate Culture

0:17:52 Full Support of Management

0:20:53 Benefits to Company

The post Can a Resource Group for Non-Drinkers Benefit This Liquor Company? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Lechleiter accepted Lilly’s award as DiversityInc’s Top Company for Working Families at our October event in New York City. Go to www.DiversityInc.com/2012specialawards for the full video. Also view our digital edition to read this article and other CEO Interviews.

Luke Visconti: You’ve publicly stated the importance of diversity to Lilly’s mission and to its business goals. How did you come to this realization and why has it become an increasing focus of your tenure as CEO?

John Lechleiter: I’ve been CEO just over four years. The importance of diversity as an underpinning of our business success today and for the future has become more clear to me and more evident. There are a number of reasons why diversity has sprung to life as an important business issue and been magnified in my mind during this time. One is the opportunity I’ve had to travel even more around the world to meet so many willing people and so many of our customers who reflect different backgrounds and different cultures.

Secondly, it’s the increased diversity of our scientific workforce. As we recruit the very best scientists and physicians from universities and medical schools around the world, we see an increasingly diverse population among the group of individuals who really form the core of our company, based as we are on innovation. And the way that our business is shifting in terms of serving different populations and different segments of different populations than we have in the past, both here in the U.S. and in emerging markets, has brought me, and the whole company, a greater awareness of how different we are with respect to the way in which medicine is practiced, the way in which treatment is sought, the way in which people understand disease and approach therapy.

Visconti: You’re coming off of patent on a couple of things. How are you seeing this subject applied to innovation at your company, considering how important it is for you to develop new products?

Lechleiter: We’re in a very interesting place right now in this industry where the promise of the science and all of this knowledge we’ve accumulated about the human genome and about disease pathways is sitting there in front of us, sort of tempting us, waiting to be exploited. Yet so many of our companies are finding it difficult to really innovate in a way that is affordable, that is timely, that ultimately hits the target.

We believe that among the best approaches is to really enhance the innovations, to make sure that we’re able to effectively integrate the ideas, the energies, the passions of Lilly people around the world—Lilly people who come from all sorts of different backgrounds, who bring their diversity with them to work, who are proud of that, who really make their different perspectives and their different backgrounds work for us in terms of literally making that whole greater than the sum of the parts. We can harness that, really harness that; it gives us a real competitive advantage.

Visconti: Is there a personal reason that diversity is a subject that’s important to you?

Lechleiter: I’ve been here almost 33 years now. I joined Lilly as a scientist, and you could say I came from a nontraditional background in terms of going from that entry-level position as a chemist to becoming CEO. There have certainly been times along the way when diversity and the implications of diversity for the company have been really brought home to me.

About 20 years ago, when I was in my first executive management job, I had lunch with a group of gay and lesbian employees who happened to work in the area that I was responsible for. Leaving that lunch, I felt like I really had stepped into someone else’s shoes and recognized just how subtle and how almost imperceptible some of these issues are that magnify themselves and become really big deals for people who are not like most of the people they happen to be working with. I have never forgotten that. It really opened my eyes, and opened my ears as well, to listen better, to try to figuratively, if not literally, put myself in people’s shoes to try to understand their stories and their journey more completely, and then to try to deal with some of the things that represented obstacles for them, that kept them from realizing their potential, that made them feel maybe just a little less significant in the scheme of things because of the ways they might be treated or things that were said, opportunities that didn’t open up for them.

Visconti: You’ve put Shaun Hawkins, a line executive, in the role of chief diversity officer. What led you to this decision and how is it paying off for your business?

Lechleiter: That reflects our view that diversity needs to be owned and led and driven by our people in the line. This is not HR’s job, it’s not strictly the CEO’s role. The message here is that we picked one of our best and brightest to serve as the catalyst. While I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made—we were tremendously proud to join DiversityInc’s Top 50—there’s never been a time when we don’t see the opportunity for more progress to be made. We’re never going to be satisfied.

Visconti: What place do metrics have in diversity management?

Lechleiter: My view is we can’t zero in on any one metric and say that achieving that represents the epitome; it has to be looked at as a composite. I pay particular attention to retention rates. We have proven time and again that Lilly is able to hire many of the best and brightest from schools and companies all over the world.

But that’s just the first step. We want to retain these talented employees that we hire. We want, through that metric, to see a clear indication that this is a place people like to work, where they want to build a career, where they want to raise their families, where they feel valued and where they feel like they can make a contribution. Even at a challenging time for Lilly, those things that we can control, we’re making the kinds of progress that we expect and are pleased to see.

Visconti: You personally are chair of the diversity council. Why take such an active role, and how do you hold your senior executives and council members accountable for results?

Lechleiter: This year, for the first time, I sent very explicit guidance to the 13 people who comprise the executive committee along with me about what I expected them to do in terms of their own leadership for diversity as we enter into this challenging period at Lilly we call Years YZ, where we’re going to lose these patents and we’re going to have some ups and downs in our business. At this time, any of us might be tempted to say, “Let’s not worry too much about diversity; we’ve got these clear business objectives we need to hit, we need to reduce our cost, we need to move our pipeline forward.” And I think that would be exactly the wrong approach to take. This is the time we need to engage people like never before; this is the time when we need to take full advantage of the power, of the intellects we have here and the people we have who are committed to this company, who want to see us move forward.

Our resource groups are absolutely a critical part of the overall fabric of diversity and are responsible for a lot of the progress that we’re making. I try to ensure that the individual executives who have been given executive-leadership or executive-liaison responsibilities with these groups really are engaged with them. I sit down with some regularity with people who comprise those resource groups and I ask about that, and I try to also understand at a first-person level what the Lilly experience is for them, how we can improve, what suggestions or recommendations they would have for me or for any of our executives in terms of how we can be more effective leading diversity.

When I meet with our resource groups—this is typically an hour-long lunch that is almost never over at the one-hour point—I learn an enormous amount. We have a resource group for veterans, a group for people with physical handicaps, a group for our gay and lesbian employees. Every time I sit down with any of these groups I learn a lot, my eyes are opened up. And these are not gripe sessions. These are, ‘Hey, John, did you know this, this is happening over here, we are driving this initiative there, things are getting better,” or, “John, progress is just too slow.”

I met with a group of our Indian employees a few years ago and they said, “When you walk in our lobby you have ‘Welcome to Lilly’ in eight languages, but our language isn’t there.’” Well, gosh, how hard is it to add “Welcome to Lilly” in another language? It was a small thing, but every time these folks walked into work, they were reminded they didn’t see their language up there.

Visconti: What do you see as the greatest value diversity and inclusion bring to Lilly’s ability to create and market pharmaceuticals?

Lechleiter: Our vision is improving outcomes for individual patients. We know that while medicines are necessary, they are seldom sufficient. If you have diabetes and you’re prescribed Lilly insulin, that’s not the end of the story. There’s a whole lot of other things that need to comprise your care for you to meet current treatment standards, in addition to using that insulin. So if we want improved outcomes for individual patients, and our medicines figure prominently in that, we really have to understand the patient journey. We have to understand how Hispanic patients are different from African-American patients, are different from a Caucasian woman who lives in New York City.

Sometimes we can do this at the genetic level—in other words, differentiate a disease based on a genetic factor. Cancer is a good example. Today we’re able to say you don’t just have this type of cancer, you have a subtype of this type of cancer, and we know how to treat that more effectively than we did 10 years ago because we can target therapy. That’s really exciting; that’s the ultimate improved outcomes for individual patients. But in between there’s a whole lot of knowledge we can bring to bear about how communities of people think and live and approach medical care. We’re getting better at that. We have a couple of programs we are running for diabetes, in particular one with African Americans here in the U.S. And we have growing knowledge of how certain disease states are approached and thought about within the Hispanic communities in the U.S.

Imagine what might be possible for us from a business perspective if we can become more relevant to the prescribing physician based on a more detailed understanding of the differences among people who seek care and use our products.

Visconti: What is your vision for Lilly for the immediate future and then longer term?

Lechleiter: Lilly the company needs to be representative of the people we aim to serve. There are still many things that remain to be done to get even closer to our vision of having the company comprised of diverse individuals who as a group are innovative and who ultimately can deliver on this promise of improving outcomes for individual patients.

One of the things that is fundamental is ensuring that we continue to create opportunity for everyone to gain access to quality education. We put a lot of focus in terms of the way our foundation supports K–12 education, on encouraging women and minorities to pursue careers in math and science. We want to see more African-American graduates from schools of engineering; we want to see more women and Hispanics graduating from Ph.D. programs in chemistry and biology. Also, creating opportunities for people to expand their responsibilities within the company, to be promoted, to be able to be in positions of leadership as diverse individuals, is something we monitor, measure and strive for.

Visconti: Lilly is significantly more philanthropic than even the DiversityInc Top 50 companies. You are at about 2.3 percent of gross revenue going to philanthropy; the average for the DiversityInc Top 50 is 1.6 percent and my estimate for the Fortune 500 is 0.5 percent.

Lechleiter: We recognize that the Lilly family who started this company were in their own way visionaries way back when. They had a deep-seated belief that a successful firm should give back to the community and should engage with the community that it is a part of—for us that’s been Indianapolis for 136 years. Giving back is really in our DNA.

There’s been a trend in recent years to engage our employees more in that. A very successful program—we’re now in the second year—is called Connecting Hearts Abroad. We give about 200 employees an opportunity annually to spend two weeks in one of eight or nine locations all around the world, working on the ground in some sort of community-related activity. It could be supporting an orphanage, helping to build a new irrigation system. That’s really brought home to our employees the company’s commitment to social responsibility, but to also creating shared value among the people who ultimately, like any of us, could be patients someday.

The post Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter: ‘Engage People Like Never Before’ appeared first on DiversityInc.

Question on diversity management: 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?

Answer: Diversity-management questions on employee surveys are 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-management results, such as increasing participation in mentoring and resource-group programs.

Take Sodexo, No. 2 in The 2012 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 mentoring program for mentees and mentors were increased communications, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. More than three-quarters of each group attested that the program increased their desire to stay with the company. Sodexo also uses results from the surveys to constantly refine its mentoring programs. For more about Sodexo’s mentoring program and results from its employee-engagement surveys,  read Mentoring Roundtable: How Mentoring Improves Retention, Engagement & Promotions. Also watch our mentoring web seminar.

For one DiversityInc Top 50 company, diversity surveys increase awareness of and participation in its resource groups. This company surveyed employees in its resource groups and those not in its resource groups. On a year-to-year basis, employee engagement increased considerably more for those in resource groups.

Start by creating specific questions to gauge the effectiveness of your diversity-management programs, such as mentoring, resource groups and diversity training. Asking questions around the importance of those programs to one’s career development is critical. For mentoring, you want to focus on the relationship between mentor and mentee and if the programs are easily accessible. Finally, look to gain perspective from employees on whether the mentoring or resource-group programs are effective in recruiting, advancing and retaining talent at the company.

Ask DiversityInc is a forum for companies to pose diversity-management questions to our expert team of benchmarking analysts. Our analysts base their responses on 12 years of data collected for The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey. If you have a question, please email us at askDiversityInc@DiversityInc.com. 

The post What Diversity-Management Questions Should Be on Employee Surveys? appeared first on DiversityInc.

DiversityInc presents the story of two chief diversity officers: John Zamora at Deloitte and Shaun Hawkins at Eli Lilly and Company, Nos. 29 and 39, respectively, on The 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list.

Key themes discussed in the exclusive 2,137-word article, “Why Do P&L Guys Head Diversity at Deloitte, Eli Lilly,” include:

• How their backgrounds, access to the top of the company and emphasis on business goals are helping their efforts succeed more rapidly—and with more sustainable results
• Why becoming chief diversity officer puts P&L executives in an even more advantageous position

Deloitte’s John Zamora attests that his company wanted someone who understood how diversity management fit in with the business objectives. He reveals why he decided to take on the additional responsibilities and how his background gave him instant credibility, as well as why he focuses on mentoring and its impact on retention and engagement.

Eli Lilly’s Shaun Hawkins’ background was definitely not in HR, and he was surprised when Lilly’s top-level management approached him with the chief diversity officer’s job. He took the position, understanding that a big area of development for him would be the chance to learn to speak publicly to large crowds. With three primary areas of focus—the marketplace, the workplace and supplier diversity—Hawkins stresses the need for accountability to generate sustainable results.

Read ”Why Do P&L Guys Head Diversity at Deloitte, Eli Lilly” at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

The post Why Do P&L Guys Head Diversity at Deloitte, Lilly? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Additionally, the University of Texas at Austin and the Points of Light Foundation found that volunteer programs can contribute to employee skill development, improve leadership skills, foster teamwork and add to job satisfaction. Fifty-eight percent use their employee volunteer program for recruiting and retaining employees, and 97 percent of employee-volunteer managers thought employee volunteering provided a way to improve employee teamwork.

For example, Prudential, No. 9 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 and DiversityInc’s Top Company for Community Development in 2011, held a “Breaking the Gala Addiction” competition and asked nonprofits to submit business plans to create revenue-generating ventures that will raise money and reduce their reliance on expensive gala events, grants and donations. The Community Food Bank’s “Grains for Good” project won first place, which included a $75,000 grant from Prudential and three months of project-management assistance from a team of Prudential volunteers.

“They brought in their own marketing people from Prudential who worked with us redesigning the packaging, the bags that these bagel crisps are going to come in, and provided us with a brand new design and even a big poster on an easel we could display at a big event we had a few weeks ago,” says Richard J. Uniacke, director of market development at Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

Additional company success stories in the article are included from PricewaterhouseCoopers (No. 1) and Time Warner (No. 40).

However, before you start giving your employees time off to volunteer, you’ll want to set some guidelines to establish and support their efforts. In this 2,000-word Employee Volunteer Programs article, DiversityInc provides the eight best practices that companies need for a successful employee-volunteer program. Among the top three: firm commitment and communication; recognizing the activity as a valid use of time; and encouraging senior managers to lead by example and volunteer themselves.

Additional best practices detailed in the article include:

• Offering skilled volunteerism as an option for employees
• Helping employees find the right volunteer opportunity
• Providing training
• Giving recognition
• Tapping into experienced employees and retirees

Read the full Employee Volunteer Programs article at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

The post Volunteer Programs: 8 Must-Have Guidelines to Improve Employee Engagement appeared first on DiversityInc.

Several years ago, this company nearly lost several of its young, Latino managers. A cultural communications gap had left them feeling so uncomfortable that they considered leaving the company for better prospects—that is, until Accenture’s Latino employee-resource group took the initiative and met with corporate leaders to address the issue. 

In Employee-Resource Groups & Retention, DiversityInc reveals the details behind this retention best practice and provides five key lessons to understanding and solving cultural-competence through employee-resource groups. These best practices are must-learns for employee-resource groups to successfully improve retention among all employees, especially people from traditionally underrepresented groups who leave at faster rates than white men. 

The five lessons include: 

• How to ensure your employee-resource groups understand their mission­
• Why you must train employee-resource-group leadership
• The benefits of exposing members to senior leaders
• How to communicate employee-resource-group success throughout the organization
• Why you need to measure and document their impact on engagement and retention

Read Employee-Resource Groups & Retention at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

For more best practices on employee-resource groups, read Why Employee-Resource Groups Are Business Resource Groups and How Do We Get Hourly Workers in Employee-Resource Groups?

The post Retention: 5 Strategies to Maximize Employee Loyalty appeared first on DiversityInc.

Voss visibly and proactively has sought to build an inclusive environment where workers are encouraged to share their ideas openly. His efforts at holding executives accountable for diversity and inclusion results have sparked a cultural transformation that’s contributing to increased revenue and an improving stock price.

Voss shares with DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti his viewpoints on the importance of employee input, the need for accountable and proactive leadership to generate buy-in for diversity and inclusion, and why successful succession planning should go beyond if “someone gets hit by a bus.”

For more on CEO commitment and best practices in diversity management, read “CEO Commitment: Why Visibility & Accountability Matter” and “KPMG’s CEO Reveals How to Be a Strong Diversity Leader.”

Luke Visconti: Ameren’s website states: “We believe that the full utilization of all human-resources potential is critical to achieving the highest human potential and to best serve our countries and communities at large.” Why do you feel that way?

Tom Voss: Our most valuable asset is our people. We’re trying to do as every company is—the best job you can with the resources you have. You can’t afford to be dismissing people’s ideas. We found out as we invest in our diversity efforts that it’s been helping our company get better.

We had a long way to go. We had areas in our company that had absolutely no diversity. We had people who weren’t hearing or seeing people who were different than them.

Eight years ago, I recognized this and said this is important for our future success. We had to make that investment.

Visconti: Can you think of a day that you had an epiphany that led you to think more inclusively about people?

Voss: Back when those Clarence Thomas hearings were going on, the idea struck me that there could be people in the workforce feeling mistreated. I didn’t want that to happen to my department at that time.

I made sure that the people working for me feel like they’re treated fairly, that they can progress and openly express their feelings.

There was another event when I was in high school. I was going out to a restaurant after a prom. Some of our friends were African American. They couldn’t go in those restaurants. I thought that was just unbelievably unfair. I couldn’t conceive that there would be an issue like that.

Art & Economics

Visconti: You have in your bio one long paragraph on the different not-for-profits that you have been leader of. One that stood out was Dance St. Louis.

Voss: I have two daughters. They competitively danced. People came and said, “We’re looking for a board member for this group called Dance St. Louis.” This was 15 years ago, long before I was a CEO. It always has something, some nationality thing—either Spanish or Brazilian or something—tied to it besides the traditional things that you would normally see. It’s been truly a community thing, something for everybody.

Visconti: You have been involved with the local St. Louis economic-developmental agency with this perspective of diversity. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Voss: About a year ago, I came on as the chairman of the Regional Chamber & Growth Association. Right after I came on, the executive director announced that he was going to retire.

This year’s been about looking for someone suitable to replace him, a national search. The search committee made sure that we had a first set of candidates to choose from.

The first set of candidates wasn’t diverse. It was just all white males. They interviewed, got down to five and said, “We like this group, but we want to see some non-traditional candidates—some female and minority candidates.”

We regrouped and got about a group of 10, and then they interviewed back down again. It’s been a process that’s ensured we get a diverse candidate pool.

Proactive Innovation

Visconti: Ameren’s mission is a secure energy future. How do you see diversity and inclusion fitting in with that?

Voss: “Secure” has a lot of different ways you can look at it. We think our job is not to just react to things but be proactive—like getting ahead of electric cars and getting ahead of energy conservation.

To figure out those things that require an innovative workforce, you need a diverse workforce that is operating at a very high level. Diversity plays such a key role in that. We really can’t afford to have people holding back good ideas or for good ideas to be dismissed.

Visconti: Can you give me some examples of where you’ve seen that in action within the company?

Voss: At amerensolar.com, you’ll see a very sophisticated analysis of various solar technologies. I didn’t come up with that idea. That was our people who figured out how to make that very attractive, easy to learn.

We just signed a contract with the local supplier, Peabody, with ultra-low sulfur coal that did not require us to install very sophisticated environmental controls for at least five years. It saves our customers 30 percent rate increases in the future.

Visconti: What do you see coming up in the future?

Voss: We have been a very traditional organization and done things the way they’ve always been done. With the challenging environment—rules, deregulation and everything that’s going on in the market now—we just can’t be our father’s utility company anymore. We have to be better.

We went through this exercise with our senior managers, asking how much time they were being proactive/reactive. They were spending about 80 percent of their time being reactive. I said, “Where do you think that should be?” They said “80 percent should be proactive.” We have to consciously set aside time to be thinking about how to make this business better.

A New Culture of Accountability

Visconti: You have a very robust diversity-management structure. You have a diversity council, resource groups, mentoring. Do you see that as being integral to this general movement of being more proactive, innovative?

Voss: We didn’t push our employees into doing things they didn’t want to do. We gave general diversity training and gradually introduced forums. They were pushing their management: “Get on board with this.”

I was surprised at how well our employees embraced this concept of diversity through the organization. We just had to feed it. Every year incrementally we keep making it a little better—keep ratcheting it up.

Our managers have done a good job of putting accountability in performance appraisals and putting in pools of applicants and hiring standards. I think we’re really getting it.

Visconti: We were talking about accountability for achieving representative results with your recruiting. I pointed to the vice president of human resources and said, “You can’t expect him to solve everything. You have to be responsible.” The heads of your divisions nodded together as if it had been rehearsed. How did you build that understanding?

Voss: Just a few years ago, we didn’t have enough minorities in our entry-level jobs and we were blaming our HR department. We said, “Why don’t we take accountability and get it fixed?”

What you’re seeing now is an organization that’s been really transformed from a cultural initiative. That’s really what’s held us back from being a truly great company. We’re fixing that now.

In 2006, we had a bunch of storms that came through: We had a deregulation in Illinois and near-bankruptcy issues there; we had the governor and attorney general fighting for one thing or another.

We were sitting back saying that none of this was our fault. We were in that situation until our culture was at rock bottom and we really didn’t know how to get out of it.

We got on to this idea to bring in this training to look at our culture of accountability, and it changed the way we do business. It fundamentally changed our company.

The diversity stuff started a few years before that. There were a few of us who were proponents for this. When we started working on our culture, there were a few of us who saw how this fit in and that if we embraced this, it would make us even better. The two just meshed together and got us in a good spot.

Once we accomplished it, we saw all these other things. Safety and diversity were so important that we embraced them, and we could do something about those.

We measure how we interact with our customers and have gotten dramatic improvement in those scores, both in the phone center and one-on-one contact in the field. We’ve been trying to tie this all together, not only improving the company’s bottom line but the way we serve our community.

There was hesitation and there were things like “Is this political correctness?” When they saw it starting to take off, we started seeing that the community was noticing what we were doing nationally and thought, “This is working. If I don’t get on board, I’m going to be left behind.” They started embracing it more and more.

When we opened our employee-resource groups, all of our senior leaders took responsibility of being a sponsor for one of those groups, seeing that this is going to help us be better.

Visconti: Sharon Harvey Davis is your chief diversity officer. Why did you put a strong woman like her in that position?

Voss: Sharon now works for me directly and she doesn’t make it easy at times. She pushes the organization sometimes into uncomfortable areas for a very conservative company. That’s what we need. That’s one of the contributors to making us successful in this area.

We’re looking for those leaders who are pushing us to say good enough isn’t going to do it. We’ve got to get to excellence in our operations, excellence in our culture.

We’re just getting started. We got a long way to go. The ultimate is that maybe we won’t need a diversity manager someday, that it’s just so much into our culture that it’s our way of doing business.

Visconti: Do you see it being integral to your ability to innovate?

Voss: Absolutely. You want people to feel free to express themselves, that it’s safe to throw out ideas. We’ve pretty much hit a culture where you’ve got to be 100 percent sure this is going to work before you said anything about it. That just stifles creativity, innovation and growth.

Visconti: You grew up in that culture and you evolved it. What inspired you to do that?

Voss: I just didn’t see it working long term. The world changed. It’s gotten so much more about communications. You could not operate the way we were. We had to turn around a fundamental culture, and that takes a while.

If you looked at our past performance, some of it leveled off and could have started going into decline if we hadn’t turned it around.

Getting Ahead With Succession Planning

Visconti: When you see the future of your diversity and inclusion efforts applied to the footprint of your generational community customers, is there something that you intend to help lead the region?

Voss: I’d like to see us put some more emphasis on talent development—getting higher graduation rates out of high schools and colleges. That’ll bring in employment because people know we have a highly educated workforce that’s ready to go.

The whole idea of supplier diversity, innovative minority-owned businesses and nurturing them along, helping them out—I think that only makes the whole area prosper more.

I lived here. I want to make this a better place for everyone. Diversity efforts are going to be key.

Visconti: You have an interesting succession: You have who’s going to be the next CEO.

Voss: If you look at our company history, I don’t think we’ve done succession planning very well. We’ve done “If somebody gets hit by a bus, who’s going to fill that spot?” That’s not what you want to do. What you want is leadership development, a plan where you look at the leaders of your company, figure out who key people are and start investing in them through special or rotational assignments. We didn’t do that before. Each group kind of had its own leaders who kind of kept them to themselves.

Now we’re sharing them. We’re sitting down every year and looking at all of our talent and saying, “We can put them anywhere in this company. Let’s start doing it.”

We just did an organizational change where we put one of our leaders of corporate planning into a field-operations job. The idea is that it’ll help further his development. He’ll bring great strategic planning to that organization.

When we have an opportunity, we’re going to look for our best talent and then help them develop.

Visconti: You’re factoring diversity into succession planning. How are you assessing that?

Voss: When you get down to this pool of candidates that you think are your high fliers, one thing you want to make sure of is that it’s a diverse group. And if it isn’t, then we’ve got to do something more dramatic to make sure it is.

Part of our values now is diversity. It is so well embraced by our employees. If someone was in that position who hadn’t embraced the work we’re doing, or isn’t belonging to one of these ERG groups, or isn’t sponsoring one of them, or isn’t doing anything in the community in this area, I think that would take him off the list.

For more on succession planning strategies, read “Increasing Diversity in Talent Development.”

Creating Experiences, Making Changes

Visconti: Can you give an example of lives that have been changed because of these experiences?

Voss: As our leadership team has gotten involved in these ERG groups, I can tell you a number of them have come to me and told me they see things a lot differently. Last year, my wife and I hosted a gala for Doorways, which helps people with AIDS. At the gala, there’s a large number of same-sex couples. Our company’s culture hasn’t been used to dealing with that. I encouraged a bunch of my vice presidents to come—strong encouragement. When they came, they enjoyed it. In fact, they told me it was a very warm experience.

I thoroughly admit that the upper management has not been overly diverse, although we do now have a woman president who runs one of our segments. I do believe that those people truly believe in the concepts of diversity and know that we have to continue to work on those areas.

I think Sharon did a great job of laying it incrementally, nudging us a little further each day and each year. We had people at one point in time taking a personal commitment at one of our leadership meetings to the concept of diversity as we did to safety.

She’s been very straightforward—never went overboard, though. She pushed at a pace that people could accept and just incrementally kept doing things. In the beginning, awards, celebrations and non-threatening things, and then she gradually moved into performance appraisals, training and setting goals and measures for us in promotions and hiring.

Visconti: How did you manage this so that the push-back from middle management didn’t overwhelm the effort?

Voss: We trained all employees from the bottom and actually got them engaged, then kept them engaged through our forums. They were pushing their management too. The very visible support that I had always given to it helped people as well.

They kept the thing under control so people couldn’t push back very hard because they knew that that was unacceptable to the way I was moving this organization. They knew if they did not want to be a part of it, I often told people, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person; it just that you don’t belong here.

Visconti: You do have some areas and some generating plants that are not very homogenous-looking. How did it work there?

Voss: We have rural linemen who are out in areas where all you do is hunt and fish and put up wire. There is this diversity of thought even among a group of same people.

Little towns, they have some of the biggest prejudices. They might not be Black and white but they might be this side and that side of town. You have to get those people saying, “It doesn’t matter. When we come to work, we’re going to do the best we can do.” There are always those prejudices. If you break them down, you’ll be a higher-performing group.

It all comes down to performance. It’s not just the right thing to do—it’s also good business. It’s really about making the company better.

Visconti: Going back to the website, the words are essential. To describe diversity and inclusion on the homepage sends a very clear message.

Voss: We feel that way. I thoroughly believe that. Our performance has improved the last couple years. We’ve performed financially better; operationally, we’re performing extremely well. It’s starting to show on the stock market. I think it’s on its way up, and I’m committed to it.

It isn’t just about doing it for diversity’s sake. This is all about making our business better. I think employees feel better with this effort going on. I think they’re proud of the company.

Many times, people have come up and told me that they are glad the company has this kind of attitude about diversity that is accepting people’s differences. You can’t do a lot about things that happen off the job, but we can make this a better atmosphere here.

The post How Ameren CEO Tom Voss Improves Workplace Diversity appeared first on DiversityInc.

Maintaining Vigilance

[Diversity management] is not an exact science; we still have a lot of work to do. But the most important thing is probably [not] to give up or just let it go. Frankly, the day you give up, it’s over. It’s the JELL-O effect: You push and then you stop pushing and it goes back. If it’s not entrenched in people’s minds, it’s so comfortable to get back to where you were before. I think we’re still not at the critical mass in the world, so we have to push and be determined because, otherwise, I don’t think it will last. Human beings are human beings. And if you don’t push and continuously combat for human rights, then I think the risk of moving back to stupid things could happen—even if we say we’re in the 21st century and people are more evolved than they were. I think we have to be very vigilant.

Motivating Employees

I was in Colombia two months ago and met this employee of Sodexo. We were celebrating 10 years of Sodexo Colombia, and she was there in the beginning. She is a single mother, has four children and started as an employee and now is a manager. The four kids have very good jobs—one is a doctor, one is a lawyer. She called her last daughter Sodexene, and she tells me that Sodexo has made her life, allowed her and her family to become the family that she has. That’s why we’re at Sodexo. The rest is just not important.

Striving for Gender Equity

Set a goal: Today women are 18 percent of our top 300 managers, and we want it to be 25 percent in several years.

Now, you could ask me why not 50 percent because 50 percent of the population [is comprised of] women. But we have to build this and it takes time; we cannot change a company of our size in five minutes. So it’s setting the goal and doing women’s initiatives. We have mentoring, women’s groups, associations, outside groups, our SWIFt program and pushing to make sure we’re not changing the direction. I think this is something that we’ll move because more than 50 percent of college graduates are women and they are taking many more leading roles in society. We work very much on flexible time and making sure we organize solutions for daycare for the kids.

We also make it attractive for young men, because now the young generation of men wants to take care of their children. It’s not a career barrier if you have men staying at home and taking care of children. We make sure there’s equality for everybody.

Making this company attractive, changing the way we work and changing the status quo is very critical at Sodexo.

Fighting World Hunger

I started STOP Hunger Sodexo Foundation in the U.S. [because] I have always been shocked by the quantity of food that you get in a restaurant and the amount of waste. It is amazing and, frankly, it shocked me when I came to the U.S. back in the late ’80s [from France]. After Sodexo merged with Marriott [Management Services], we started … talking about these issues a lot. One day, we said maybe we should do more and make sure at least at Sodexo that we try to avoid this waste. From that came the idea: Get all the food we don’t use, give it back to communities and start this initiative. I think it fits with our culture, our objective and our mission and values.

After that, we extended it to other countries. Today, it is [active in 29 countries] and very powerful because it engages people. This is a business where if we want to be successful, we need to have all these people come in the morning and be happy to be here. It’s not easy if you have a difficult life and home. One way to motivate people is [to let them see] how important they are in life and what they can contribute. By doing this, it’s a good way for people to say, “I am important, what I do is important in life and I can really contribute.” So engaging the Sodexo people is why this initiative is working, and I am very grateful.

Click here to read Part I of this interview with video.

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