DiversityInc has compiled a collection of best practices from religiously inclusive workplaces and data from the DiversityInc Top 50 to help your company navigate the cultural competence and legalities of religion in the workplace.

Ask DiversityInc: How Does Your Company Handle Religious Holidays?
When allowing employees to celebrate the holidays with tasteful decorations and celebrations, how do organizations make sure that those who don’t celebrate are not offended?

Best Practices on Religiously Inclusive Workplaces
Employers must provide “reasonable accommodations” for employees’ religious practices, per Title VII. But what exactly does that mean?

Religious Discrimination in the Workplace
A leading discrimination attorney provides advice on EEOC/Civil Rights laws and how to best mitigate religious discrimination at work.

Laws on Religion, Dress & the Workplace
What’s permissible and what’s not? We spell out the legal precedents for you.

Ask the White Guy: My Managers Are 95% White, Christian–Do I Have a Chance?
What can a person do if they’re in a company where the in-crowd goes to a certain church?

Ask DiversityInc: How Can Diversity Management Measure Religious Inclusion?
Can religion be represented/highlighted as a primary diversity metric in an overall assessment?

Ask the White Guy: What About Religious Expression?
How much religious expression in the workplace is acceptable? CEO Luke Visconti discusses the difference between proselytizing and religious expression.

Ask the White Guy: Are Traditional Christian Values Part of Diversity?
Does diversity management mean ignoring those who hold traditional Christian values?

The post Holidays at Work: Culturally Competent or Offensive? What You SHOULD Know appeared first on DiversityInc.

The sessions were led by chief diversity officers at companies especially chosen for their success in these specific areas, demonstrated by human-capital results. They are: Jennifer Christie, American Express (No. 14 in The 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity), on Resource Groups; Kathy Hannan, KPMG (No. 22), on Diversity Councils; Billie Williamson, Ernst & Young (No. 6) on CEO Commitment; and Ron Glover, IBM (No. 17), on Talent Development/Mentoring.

They shared their best practices in facilitated discussions on what other organizations are doing and what common concerns—and innovative solutions—are available.

Read the exclusive, four-part report, “Networking & Sharing on ERGs, Diversity Councils, CEO Commitment, Talent Development, Mentoring,” on DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

DiversityInc features highlights from their conversations in stories and video excerpts:

• Resource Groups: Why They Are Business-Resource Groups
  They bring in talent, help develop innovative people and connect with communities to drive sales 

• Diversity Councils: Why They Move the Needle
  Public support from the top and clearly defined goals link directly to business results 

• CEO Commitment: Why Visibility & Accountability Matter
  Senior executives are held responsible for results; middle managers buy in

• Talent Development/Mentoring: How to Find & Develop Hidden Gems
  Involve the entire organization in the process; use resource groups as key sources

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Data from The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity shows that those with the best retention rates keep a heavy focus on talent development and promotion. But how can you best leverage your current resources to attract, retain and promote the best talent from all groups?

Best Practices: Talent Development reveals the common top five strategies, which include the effective use of employee-resource groups, cross-cultural mentoring and compensation reviews.

Among the best practices, readers will learn:

• Why resource groups help employees “fit in” and why your CEO should actively be meeting with these groups
• Which employees need a formal on-boarding program
• How mentoring with a cross-cultural component can affect an individual’s success and performance
• How compensation factors into engagement and overall satisfaction
• Why you should measure your success with definitive metrics

For more best practices on talent development and retention, read Mentoring Roundtable: How Mentoring Improves Retention, Engagement & Promotions.

The post Top 5 Ways to Maximize Talent appeared first on DiversityInc.

Lou Miramontes, partner, KPMG (No. 22 in The 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity), Jim Norman, vice president, diversity, Kraft Foods (No. 7), and Nellie Borrero, managing director, global inclusion and diversity, Accenture (No. 12), discuss these issues in our diversity web seminar on metrics/accountability.

Moderated by DiversityInc’s Barbara Frankel, senior vice president and executive editor, these diversity leaders reveal the keys to their diversity-management success through their measurement of best practices such as resource-group membership, mentoring participation, philanthropy to multicultural organizations, and supplier diversity—and how they link executive compensation to the success of their diversity scorecards.

The 90-minute diversity web seminar, which is also available as a downloadable PDF, will offer readers comprehensive information in the form of case studies, including:

• Insight into key best practices in diversity management from our exclusive DiversityInc Top 50 data, such as mentoring, philanthropy and metrics measurements
• How KPMG determines its diversity goals and why it takes a layered approach to measurement
• What Kraft Foods’ diversity and inclusion initiatives are and how it uses a diversity-performance factor to hold leaders accountable for results in diversity management
• Why measurement helps Accenture fully utilize its diversity-management initiatives

Borrero says, “Building an inclusive and diverse workplace through a culture of sponsorship and measurement … is a journey.” Make sure your organization is prepared and is measuring the right metrics.

Watch the diversity metrics web seminar on DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

The post Diversity Web Seminar on Diversity Metrics: Which Are Most Valuable to Diversity Management? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Combining an active career in revenue-generating positions and managing a family can be a challenge for women employees. An employer that enables them to achieve work and home success will garner loyalty and increased performance in return. 

In this 1,353-word article, Successful Career Paths for Women in Corporate Sales, seven companies from The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity provide insight into their key best practices to attract and retain women in corporate sales, as well as their significant results. 

These companies—PricewaterhouseCoopers, No. 3; AT&T, No. 4; Ernst & Young, No. 5; Kraft Foods, No. 9; Colgate-Palmolive, No. 10; American Express, No. 13; and Procter & Gamble, No. 25—understand that these positions are usually the way into the top level (CEO and direct reports) and want to make sure women are not excluded. 

Readers will take away: 

• The types of flexible work options women employees want and need
• Why a majority of these companies offer relocation and spousal support
• What research shows about the benefits of cross-cultural mentoring
• How to use employee-resource groups creatively to increase promotions of women
• Why a focus on training and education benefits all employees 

As Kraft Foods’ Valerie Oswalt, customer vice president of business development for Sales & Customer Logistics and the mother of two children, says: “A lot of women feel they can’t have everything—certainly not at the same time. Women don’t have to give up on their dreams. They may not get there as fast, but they will deliver the results.”

 Read Successful Career Paths for Women in Corporate Sales at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

The post How to Get More Women in Sales 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.

Regardless of company size or industry, resource groups are increasingly becoming critical to business success.

In this 1,531-word article, “How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%,” DiversityInc offers the highlights from our exclusive roundtable on resource groups. Four diversity leaders from Kraft, Dell, JCPenney and Toyota provide 12 case studies of how to utilize resource groups in innovative ways to achieve measurable results and improvements in diversity metrics.

Increasing the representation of women in sales leadership roles would have been a difficult task for Kraft Foods without the help of its Women Sales Council, whose efforts at understanding flexible work arrangements and other motivating factors resulted in a 39 percent gain in sales promotions for women.

Other case studies and success stories include:

• How Dell used its millennial generational group to field-test its tablet
• How Toyota’s Latino Business Partnering Group helped develop in-language navigation systems with local accents
• How jcpenney increased its talent pipeline by 150 qualified candidates via an employee-resource-group event
• Why Kraft will utilize its employee-resource groups to sustain an inclusive corporate culture when the company splits into two businesses this year

The article also presents four video clips from the roundtable, so DiversityIncBestPractices.com subscribers can see and hear these case studies firsthand. 

Read “How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%” at DiversityIncBestPractices.com

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“When you look at the business community, the landscape is changing. In order to compete, we have to be like our clients—even outpace the demographics of our clients,” says John Zamora, chief diversity officer for Deloitte.

Does your company face similar issues? Are you having difficulty retaining talent, especially from traditionally underrepresented groups?

In this 1,970-word article, “Best Practices on Improving Retention,” DiversityInc presents a collection of best retention practices from DiversityInc Top 50 companies, including Deloitte, American Express (No. 13), AT&T (No. 4) and WellPoint (No. 36). Company leaders who have had to address these gaps weigh in on what has worked to keep their managers engaged.

Strategies and takeaways include:

• How talent-development programs encourage people to stay
• Why diversity plays an essential role in fostering loyal employees and overall satisfaction
• The various types of talent-development programs and which one might work best for your company
• What resources can help identify and nurture talent?
• The purposes that coaching, mentoring and sponsorship serve
• How to best utilize your employee-resource groups for maximum ROI

Read “Best Practices on Improving Retention” at DiversityIncBestPracatices.com. Also read “The DiversityInc Top 10 Companies for Recruitment & Retention.”

The post Best Practices on Improving Retention appeared first on DiversityInc.

When I began my work at GLSEN 10 years ago, I had no idea that I would have a courtside seat for the emergence of one of the most important new forces in workplace diversity and corporate philanthropy: the resource group. In corporate workplaces, it is now expected that ERGs will be included in any diversity and inclusion strategy. Read Effective Uses of Employee Resource Groups and Why Resource Groups Are Business-Resource Groups for best practices.

During that same period, I have also witnessed the explosion of activism among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students, and the proliferation of student clubs known as gay-straight alliances (GSAs) in high schools and even some middle schools nationwide. GLSEN partners with amazing student leaders from all across the country, supports the formation of GSAs and maintains contact with a national network of thousands of these student clubs.

Over time, resource groups have demonstrated their value for increasing employee satisfaction and connection to their workplace, particularly when there is strong and visible C-suite support.  Affinity groups for LGBT employees and their allies are especially critical sources of support for those who face an entrenched—and sometimes violent—form of social prejudice. By supporting LGBT-specific ERGs, corporations and their most senior leaders convey a particularly powerful message about the importance of diversity to the entire organization. Read more on the best practices for the engagement of LGBT employees.

The same is true for the interaction of school administrations with students who want to form GSAs to help make their schools more welcoming places for LGBT students. Take, for example, the experience of Richard Walsh, a former GLSEN Student Ambassador and current college student. Richard came out at an early age and faced relentless bullying. When he reached high school, Richard said, “I made the decision to stand up … I founded my school’s gay-straight alliance. It made my school community aware of the experiences that students like me endured on a regular basis. I soon noticed a difference in [my school’s] climate: more students and school staff intervened when incidents of bullying took place, a forum for discussion opened up and people no longer worried about their own sexual orientation or gender identity being called into question. They were more likely to speak out about harassment against their classmates.”

Richard and other club members began proactive efforts to change their school for the better. Members of the high-school administration had a simple but powerfully important response. They said yes.

Compare that to the experience of another openly gay student named Zach. This past October, Zach was brutally assaulted by a classmate simply because of his sexual orientation. Students watched the incident occur and did nothing to intervene. When GLSEN met with Zach and his family and offered support to students and administrators in the district, we learned that students at Zach’s school were denied the opportunity to start a GSA. Clearly, that decision by school administrators sent exactly the wrong message to the student body and deprived them of a critical source of support.

The benefits of GSAs are confirmed by more than anecdote. GLSEN’s 2009 National School Climate Survey, a biennial survey first launched in 1999 to document the school experiences of LGBT students nationally, found that LGBT students with a GSA were less likely to feel unsafe in school, experienced less victimization, were more able to identify supportive educators and felt more connected to the school community than students who did not have access to such a club. The study also found that the presence of GSAs and other forms of in-school support contributed to higher grade-point averages among students and a greater likelihood that students would plan to graduate and go on to college.

For LGBT students and their allies, GSAs provide invaluable peer support, promote safer school climates and encourage an overall feeling of inclusion within a school community. I am sure that those of you who have experienced the ERG revolution in the corporate workplace can identify many ways in which ERGs have had a similar impact on your individual experience.

But individual experience is not the only thing that has been transformed by GSAs and ERGs. These groups have also started to change the world by organizing individual energy for the greater good. For GSAs, this takes the form of outreach to peers with events like GLSEN’s Ally Week and Day of Silence, designed to promote positive change in schools, or work in coalition to bring the resources of the GSA to bear on the concerns of other student affinity groups.

Resource-group members—whatever characteristic brings them together—are similarly involved in a remarkable effort to transform workplace experience for themselves and others. They also prompt greater engagement by their employers in the issues and causes that they care about most. Indeed, corporate support—whether through resource-group volunteerism or resource-group-inspired corporate sponsorship—has contributed substantially to efforts to improve school climate for LGBT youth. Read about the Pride resource group at HP in The Business Benefits of Employee-Resource Groups.

One transformative movement supports another. One generation encourages another and is in turn inspired to do more itself. From where I sit, that definitely looks like a recipe for lasting change. 

Byard is the executive director of GLSEN. DiversityInc Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Barbara Frankel is a member of the GLSEN National Board of Directors.

The post Safe LGBT Spaces: What Schools Can Learn From Resource Groups appeared first on DiversityInc.

More than three-quarters of the companies DiversityInc benchmarks, including most of the DiversityInc Top 50, are concerned about getting more racial/ethnic and gender diversity in their senior-management ranks and in the lower levels as a sustainable long-term pipeline to the top.

While “talent development” is the phrase that everyone uses to emphasize maximum engagement and realization of full potential, it remains elusive in many cases as employees—especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups—leave or just bide their time without fully contributing.

In this 3,160-word article, DiversityInc offers best practices and insights from a panel of chief diversity officers from five DiversityInc Top 50 companies with the highest scores in talent-development initiatives and results. We also present our data findings and recommendations.

The roundtable participants include Debbie Storey, senior vice president, talent development, and chief diversity officer, AT&T (No. 4 in The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity); Beth Brooke, global vice chair of public policy, sustainability and stakeholder engagement, Ernst & Young (No. 6); Deborah Dagit, vice president and chief diversity officer, Merck & Co. (No. 16); Sylvester Mendoza, corporate director, workforce diversity & EEO, Northrop Grumman (No. 42); Pat Crawford, senior vice president and head of diversity and inclusion, Wells Fargo (No. 33); Luke Visconti, CEO, DiversityInc; and Barbara Frankel, senior vice president, executive editor, DiversityInc.

Readers will learn:

• The three key areas that most benefit efforts to improve engagement, retention and promotions of people from traditionally underrepresented groups
• How to use resource groups as a recruitment resource
• Why increased participation in these groups leads to increased engagement
• Why cross-cultural mentors are important to nurture talent, especially among women
• How to build mentoring relationship across business lines
• The impact that strong CEO commitment can have on diversity efforts

For more best practices, case studies and results, read the full 3,160-word Increasing Diversity in Talent Development article.

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