By Barbara Frankel

Are flexible workplaces going the way of VHS tapes and the Palm Pilot? I’ve heard grumblings from several people, mostly women with children, since Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer decided to ban telecommuting and Best Buy told its corporate employees they have to start working in the office.

I was never a big fan of workplace flexibility because I was one of those women who tried to do it all, including going back to work at a demanding job when I had a 4-year-old and a 6-week-old baby. But I had a supportive husband (with a job that eventually paid well), parents who could back us up financially and, therefore, the ability to hire good help. In recent years, working with Millennials who blur the line between office and home, I’ve come to deeply appreciate the ability to work when I am at my most effective (early in the day) and where I need or want to be.

The concepts of work/life and telecommuting are alive and well—but only for companies that use them correctly. Like any other “benefit,” flexible workplaces only help the business if they are put in place with best practices, goals and valid metrics to assess success, and with constant review.

Flexible Workplaces: What Works—and What Doesn’t

I remember the days when there was no flextime. Everyone had to go to work at the prescribed time and you never left before your boss did. I recall being a young newspaper editor with babies at home. I was always a fast worker, and I’d finish all my tasks for the day by 5 p.m. Yet I’d sit at my desk doing busywork until 6:30, because that’s when my (male) boss left. I desperately wanted to go home—and I wasn’t very effective in that last hour and a half—but the culture made leaving earlier career suicide.

There have been many studies on how Millennials (those born between 1982 and 1993) don’t buy the 9-to-5 workplace, and how many of them prefer flexibility over higher pay. We all know that with today’s technology, those of us who are compulsive email checkers (I am definitely in this group) are wired to our jobs 24/7 and can do our work from anywhere.

Today’s question isn’t about whether you CAN work from home but whether it is beneficial to your employer. The answer is yes—and no.

Academic studies show telecommuters work more hours and often have increased productivity. Anecdotally, most of us would agree with this. When we’re in the office, we get caught up in side conversations and constant interruptions. When we’re home, most of us can lock ourselves in quiet rooms and focus, focus, focus.

Three Downsides to Flexible Workplaces

1. Those same studies that tout increased productivity also cite less innovation from teleworkers. This makes sense since the greatest innovation occurs through collaborative efforts of diverse teams, and that requires human interaction—the old bouncing ideas off of each other. The Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki spoke at one of DiversityInc’s Innovation Fests! He highlighted the human tendency to interact with people from similar backgrounds and how diversity initiatives enable different ways of thinking in organizations, leading to innovative solutions. If everyone sits at home in those quiet rooms, this interaction doesn’t happen.

2. Some people cheat the system. This is what Mayer says has occurred at Yahoo! With a general loose policy on people working wherever and whenever they want, the company has had a whole lot of people taking advantage, collecting paychecks and really not doing much of anything. Some even started their own side businesses. (Mayer’s ban reportedly mainly targeted 200 employees who worked at home full time.) At Best Buy, the policy had been “results oriented.” So if you made your numbers, nobody cared where you were. Best Buy has been in financial trouble, but new CEO Hubert Joly’s focus on improving efficiency, including the telecommuting cutback, is making Wall Street analysts more optimistic.

3. Flexibility without flexibility fails. The companies that really “get” this understand that they can’t just have a blanket policy that you can work from home X hours a week if you do this or that job. Look at Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization initiative, which creates a variety of models to climb the corporate path.

How to Succeed With Flexible Workplaces 

The companies that are making this work well—Accenture, ADP, Aetna and PricewaterhouseCoopers, to name just a few—have some things in common.

1. They clearly communicate their expectations to managers and workers.

2. They use metrics to assess the engagement, retention, promotion and productivity of teleworkers, and they evaluate gaps

3. They engage their resource groups to promote more virtual interaction. A growing trend in DiversityInc Top 50 companies is groups for teleworkers; these groups enhance the collaborative relationships of employees and allow them to find solutions to the hindrances to effective performance.

4. They continue to innovate and never rest on their laurels. Several companies that have been considered early pioneers in workplace flexibility are looking at ways now to change the model, such as having top salespeople not spend so much time on the road, especially globally.

Sixty-three percent of U.S. companies now offer some degree of flexible workplaces—and ALL the DiversityInc Top 50 companies do. We aren’t going to return to the days of yore when you were chained to your desk whether you did good work or not. But it is valid for any company to assess what is working to engage employees so they can perform at maximum capacity.

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“Success requires more innovative problem solving, and more innovative problem solving demands diversity and inclusion,” Shi said. Watch clips from his presentation below. Or you can view the full presentation from Toyota and download the slides at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Stephen Howard, Corporate Manager of Debt and Derivatives, Toyota Financial Services, shared how Toyota’s Treasury Department uses the diverse backgrounds and thoughts of its team and its suppliers to generate  significant business results.

“Working together with MWBEs is a sustainable platform. It’s good for business. It improves our ever-changing national demographic for the better,” Howard said. Watch clips from his presentation below. Or you can view the full presentation from Toyota and download the slides at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Toyota Motor North America is No. 41 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50.

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LUKE VISCONTI: What led you to be a supporter of diversity and inclusion? How has it impacted the success of your business units?

DAVID EPSTEIN: There are two drivers for me. One is that I grew up in an atmosphere my parents created where people are people, regardless of whether they’re male, female, from any given country, religious background or sexual orientation. I’m interested in what a person can contribute, what their unique experiences are.

The second driver is that, back in 2000, Dr. Daniel Vasella [Chairman and former CEO of Novartis AG] gave me the opportunity to run Novartis Oncology, a global business unit. For the first time in my career I ran discovery, development and commercialization. We operated in more than 70 countries. I had the opportunity to build that team from scratch. I picked people based on their experiences and how I felt they treated other people. My philosophy is that you treat others in the way you expect to be treated.

I ended up with a team that came from all over the world. We had phenomenally productive discussions. At the beginning, it was very difficult because we had different cultural backgrounds and the norms within which we communicated were different, but after a while I saw the power of people with different backgrounds and what they could contribute to business ideas. Once we got that group working as a high-performing team, we were able to accomplish feats that nobody thought were possible.

The business more or less didn’t exist when I was asked to create Novartis Oncology in 2000. We pulled together what oncology products and pipeline we had within Novartis, which represented about $1.5 billion in sales. We had three products, two of which were not robust: one was going generic, and the other was a licensed product but the license was coming to an end. The business was about to disappear.

We built, over 10 years, a $10-billion business, the No. 2 oncology business in the industry. More importantly, people who work in that business say there is a unique focus on creating the environment and the atmosphere, which drives people to do what’s right for customers and patients. An environment that brings people together in a way that’s unique: People can be open, be themselves, and passion fuels what they do together.

Now, I’m trying to create that here in the bigger Pharma business. We’re making progress: You see a much more open, a much more inclusive atmosphere. You see that we’re increasingly hiring people of varied backgrounds. You’re seeing more women in management, more people from emerging markets sitting on the leadership team. It’s starting, but it’s a long road. It takes years and commitment.

Authentic Leadership

VISCONTI: When I interviewed Dr. Vasella, he said, “I love other cultures.” Do you think it was his influence, his leadership that was an inspiration? 

EPSTEIN: Daniel influenced me in a lot of ways; I found him to be a very authentic leader. I take great pride in my authenticity. When I speak, there is no hidden agenda. People around me know what I think. They know that I will listen, that I will debate. I might be the guy who makes the decision, but they’ll know where I’m coming from. It engenders a lot of trust.

If you have weaknesses as a leader, you should be willing to discuss those with your team. If you make a mistake, you should admit it, whether it was a business decision you made, the wrong person you hired, or how you treated someone.

The second thing I owe to Daniel is that he believed in me. He gave me some unique opportunities, such as running the Oncology business or being chosen as head of Pharma. If he hadn’t made that choice, I never would have had the opportunity to grow and become more worldly, more diverse, more inclusive.

VISCONTI: How do you translate the Novartis values across different cultures while respecting local traditions? 

EPSTEIN: It’s not about everybody being in the same place at the same time or having to do everything exactly the same everywhere. For me, it’s a journey. Everybody is moving along that journey to become more inclusive, to put together the best possible team, to get their teams to operate in a high-performing way. Yes, you may have to do it uniquely in China versus Japan versus somewhere else. I think that’s OK.

Sitting still is not acceptable. Having a team that all looks and sounds and thinks the same is not acceptable. How you do it will vary and, being a global company, we’re fairly adept at making those changes. Sometimes there’s friction and you have to have a discussion.

VISCONTI: I’ve heard it put that this work is fatiguing at times—a good fatigue—but that it’s also very invigorating.

EPSTEIN: For me, it’s not fatiguing. I get great satisfaction from developing people and seeing teams do great things that no one thought was possible.

You can have lots of people that look and sound like you and your organization will work fine, but you will never be great and you will never capture the upside. Or you can decide to go for a more diverse and inclusive atmosphere. If you don’t do the work, don’t have the right leadership skills and those people don’t work together, it may actually be worse than having a homogenous team. You just don’t get anything done.

On the other hand, when you lead a very diverse group of talented people and have created the right atmosphere, you’re unbeatable. So it’s worth it. As a leader, you have to have your sights on that far-off horizon.

For the person who comes into a job and thinks they’re only going to be there two or three years, it might not seem worth it. In every job I’ve taken, I have adopted the mind-set that I will be here forever. I want to leave a legacy of an extremely well-functioning organization that is delivering unique value to patients. That’s ultimately what drives me. I take personal pride in seeing people be successful.

VISCONTI: How has Novartis made efforts to address diversity in drug trials? Has this approach changed over time?

EPSTEIN: If you look back 10 years, we were a very U.S.– and Euro-centric company. That’s where the business was. That’s what we knew how to do.

Over time, we began to realize a couple of things. One is that one size does not fit all. A drug for every patient with a given disease doesn’t exist anymore. Medicine is more personalized, which forces you down the road of understanding differences in people—these differences can be genetic, dietary, about lifestyles, or many others.

Second, the world has shifted. Much of the growth opportunity in healthcare comes from emerging markets. Patients in these markets need to be included in trials to make sure we are developing the right medicine for them. About six years ago, for example, we started a project in Japan. We typically launched in the United States and Europe, and five to seven years later, we’d launch in Japan. We wanted to get to the point where that gap was down to one or two years. This year, we have a drug that was approved first in Japan, the U.S. and Europe a bit later.

In the U.S., we are trying to better adapt to the needs of various ethnic groups, and we’re increasingly doing clinical work that includes them. We need to see the data for an African-American patient or a Latino or a Japanese person living in America. We look at women versus men, we look at different age groups, so all these things are being incorporated into our business. Companies that do this work have an advantage in the marketplace. They can talk with the customer and make a different kind of connection.

VISCONTI: Do you see ultimately being able to give people pharmaceuticals customized to their genetic type?

EPSTEIN: If you look at what’s in our portfolio right now, I would say close to 90 percent of the medicines moving from discovery into the clinical-trial phase are targeted based upon a person’s genetic makeup.

Our new medicines will come along with an assay, which will become a diagnostic in the marketplace. If we have three patients in the room that have a given disease—whether it be breast cancer or rheumatoid arthritis—we will be able to tell in advance, thanks to a genetic test, which patient is likely to respond. Then all the clinical trials are done with those responding patients. You can imagine how it changes the health-economics benefit. There’s no more waste. There are no longer expensive, long trials with groups of patients who simply will not benefit from a certain drug.

In our company, we’re investing in R&D and we’re driving innovation and it becomes a competitive advantage. Some companies have chosen to be more focused on short-term commercial opportunity and have not continued to evolve their innovation capability. This creates a bigger gap between us and them.

VISCONTI: Can you connect the company’s focus on diversity and inclusion, cultural awareness and cultural competency with your philosophy on research and development?

EPSTEIN: There are a couple of connections. One is we can recruit people, the best people, from anywhere in the world, which is a major advantage. And when you start to recruit these people, they bring in even more people from those regions or those backgrounds.

Working with diverse cultures and backgrounds, you’re also more likely to design your clinical trials in a way that looks for subgroups or different patient characteristics

It’s largely about talent. It’s about getting the very best people in the door and then making the investment to get them to work together in a high-performing team. That means training your leaders to be inclusive—and we do have inclusive leadership training. We just rolled out a program called Leaders as Coaches. It teaches people specific coaching skills as leaders—for example, how to have a conversation with your team members so challenges and options can be addressed openly and in a reflective manner. We also do high-performing team training where the leader and their direct team work together on a multitude of things.

When you first explain to people that we are going to do this, you get the classic reaction: “I have to take two or three days out of my schedule to do this? I have to think differently?” After they’ve been through it, something interesting happens: They say, “This has made me a better leader and it’s had an immediate impact on how we all work together and what we can achieve.

Our strategy is to win in primary care, specialty care and oncology. We want to become the best pharmaceutical company by 2016. There are four major pillars: growth, innovation, productivity and people. The people pillar is very clearly spelled out as becoming more diverse and inclusive, to invest heavily in high-performing team workshops and education so that we can bring out the best in people. We’re very explicit about it.

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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”

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“It was my first time working in a different country and I experienced what it was like to be an outsider,” he recalls. “I was young and I felt all the pressures to have all the answers to be Superman. I hit a wall and there was real culture shock.”

What he learned was that he had a team of experienced people on hand “and all I had to do was bring them in the room and we got much stronger decisions.”

That experience has served him well as he has moved to increasingly important HR positions, from Unilever to Bristol-Myers Squibb to Novartis, where he recently was appointed global head, Human Resources, Oncology after three years heading HR in the United States and Canada for Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, No. 13 in The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity.

The Value of Diversity

For Baert, diversity is critical to the business strategy of Novartis, and HR clearly plays a central role in recruiting, retaining and promoting diverse groups. “I have seen firsthand that a diversity of experience, cultures and individuals leads to innovation, engagement and stronger decision making,” he says.

Having worked globally, including heading the Emerging Growth Markets area, which includes China, Russia, India, Turkey, Thailand, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, he sees strong differences in U.S. and other approaches to diversity and inclusion.

“There are ways the United States is ahead and ways it is behind,” he says. “In general, the focused attention on diversity and inclusion in businesses in the United States is ahead of the world. It seems every major U.S. corporation has a dedicated function on diversity, with many senior leaders understanding the importance of diversity as part of their strategy. You will not find that easily in other parts of the world.”

However, he notes that on some issues, such as same-sex marriage, the United States is not as progressive as some other countries, and this can be a detriment to hiring. He says that he has had trouble recruiting gay/lesbian scientists to the United States because they cannot get visas for their spouses since the federal government does not recognize their marriages.

“As an employer who likes to bring in the best people, this is disappointing,” he says.

Tying Business to HR

Baert is a rare HR leader whose strategic emphasis is always focused on business goals. He started his professional life as a lawyer, which he chose because “life is not expressed in black and white and the law is a good training ground to manage ambiguity. … I am by nature very solution-oriented and I didn’t like all the fighting in law.”

He moved into HR, thinking he would work in that field for two years and switch to a business role, “but I got so passionate about HR” and its impact on the business. He was recruited by Novartis in a global role and in 2009 was asked to head up HR North America, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation. In that job, he had many opportunities to drive the human-capital agenda.

In his new role, he believes the intersection of HR, diversity and innovation is crucial to the company’s success. “Our business is all about innovation,” he says. “The discoveries we make to fight diseases become ever more complex. It would be naïve to think one person singlehandedly could come up with a solution. You need to bring in many diverse backgrounds, insights and experience to work in an inclusive way because that is what will lead to a breakthrough.”

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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.

McGraw-Hill also created a new social-networking platform for employees: an intranet called Buzz that encourages collaborative efforts through crowdsourcing, a problem-solving process.

The two-pronged effort has resulted in the company’s S&P live webcasts rising more than 300 percent, the CreditMatters TV downloads rising to 350 percent, and 95 percent of its education products being available in digital format. McGraw-Hill is one of DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies for 2012.

Watch video from the presentation below. Presenters include: Terri Austin, Chief Diversity Officer; Olga Kozak, Digital Innovation Manager, Diversity & Inclusion; and Edward Ford, Enterprise Community Manager. Presentation slides are available on DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Watch the other Innovation Fest! presentations from our event at www.diversityinc.com/innovationfest.

For more best practices on resource groups, view our Diversity Web Seminar on Resource Groups: Connect With Customers for Top Sales Results.

The post Resource Groups Improve Media Company’s Digital Business by 350% appeared first on DiversityInc.

Question: I hear a lot these days that diversity is not just about diversity in ethnicity and gender. It is also, to a great extent, about diversity of thoughts. I agree with that. My question is: How do we measure success in diversity of thoughts? A company can hire only white men below 40 and claim total diversity in thought.

My concern is that focus on diversity of thought may derail the need for increasing diversity in terms of ethnicity and gender. That, in my opinion, does greatly contribute to diversity of thought.

Do you consider diversity of thought in your ranking of the DiversityInc Top 50?

Answer: You’re right; these days, “diversity of thought” is a big topic in diversity management. I also think you’re right in that diversity of thought can be disconnected from diversity as defined by race, gender, orientation, disability and/or age.

In my observation, the dominant or “majority” culture is defined by superior access to the governmental process, access to education and access to capital. In our country, this has been sharply defined by white, Christian, heterosexual men with no disabilities. Despite the Voting Rights Act (access to the governmental process), Civil Rights Act (access to education), the Community Reinvestment Act (access to capital) and the Americans with Disabilities Act, we see a constant battle for the majority-culture-dominated state and federal legislatures to pass retrograde action. Examples are:

• Voter photo-ID laws (passed inGeorgiawhile simultaneously shutting down motor-vehicle offices in poor areas, preventing people from getting a photo ID)
• Societal acceptance of the absolute failure of the majority of public schools that serve the poor
• The subprime crisis, which created record gaps in household wealth between white households and Black and Latino households (a theft of wealth that is unprecedented, yet no major perpetrator is in prison)
• College-educated people with disabilities having the highest unemployment rate

In practically all American organizations, the dominant culture is readily apparent. When I am invited to speak at a corporation that is just starting out in diversity management, I often create a presentation slide that has photos of the people listed as senior executives and/or on the board—disproportionately white men. The visual makes an impression with the audience every time. I make the point that there are probably no overt bigots, sexists or homophobes, but their culture produced a certain outcome that valued conformity over quality.

Unless you can tell me how white men are so magical that they’re superior to everyone else (and genetic research shows that there is no scientific rationale for “race”), then it’s impossible to think that the most talented people are running corporate America, the federal, state and local governments, religion and charity. The most basic cut—college education—shows that an equal number of men and women in the workforce have bachelor’s degrees. Women outpaced men in four-year degree achievement in the late 1980s. There is now an eight-point difference between four-year degree attainment between women and men, yet women have far fewer corporate positions of power (by any measurement) and still earn 23 percent less than men.

In corporate America, there are differences in diversity we can absolutely measure—race, gender and age—because that data is required to be collected by the federal government. We cannot make absolute measurement-driven comparisons of differences that are voluntarily disclosed, such as orientation and disability—but they are just as important in my mind. In the differences we can measure, we can see that there are discrepancies in talent development across gender and race, with the DiversityInc Top 50 companies having made far more progress than the average Fortune 500 company.

I find it impossible to believe that an organization can have optimum diversity of thought while maintaining segregated talent development.

But there is an opportunity for any organization wishing to develop diversity of thought as they ramp up diversity of those factors we can measure. White men are diverse too. But the dominant culture, regardless of who it is or where it is, is driven to value conformity. The whitest management group in the country has white men who have differences in their perspective that derive from their personal history—growing up poor, wealthy, rural, city, large family, single parent—whatever the differences, they drive a different way to approach problems and opportunities. Being nimble in the marketplace demands opening the aperture for ideas. The primary factors of diversity management—mentoring, resource groups, diversity councils—can be adapted for utilization with any company, but often we see only non-white people and/or women being called “diverse,” and “inclusion” ends up being a segregated channel for everyone who isn’t a white man to discuss among themselves. Big mistake.

I don’t think it’s possible to measure diversity of thought between disparate organizations. We can measure equitable talent development, supplier diversity, philanthropic spend, success of resource groups and mentoring, though—and that’s exactly what we do in the DiversityInc Top 50 process.

We can also have companies tell us about how they’ve harnessed diversity of thought—and that’s exactly what we’ve done with this issue of DiversityInc magazine. You can witness this live at our Innovation Fest! this September.

The post Ask the White Guy: Can You Measure Diversity of Thought and Innovation? appeared first on DiversityInc.

In our 90-minute diversity web seminar on innovation, Capital One Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion Donna Schaar and The McGraw-Hill Companies Chief Diversity Officer Terri Austin, Digital Innovation Manager Olga Kozak and Enterprise Community Manager Edward Ford present their companies’ diversity-management innovations—Barriers to Greatness and Digital Employee-Resource Groups, respectively—which have resulted in increased productivity and improved employee engagement.

You will learn:

• How Capital One removed 107 operational, cultural and organizational “roadblocks” in six months.
• The best ways to collect employee input and build a culture of openness with high employee engagement.
• How McGraw-Hill launched a digital resource group and how it benefits the company’s product portfolio.
• How to leverage social media and other digital advancements to improve collaboration throughout your organization and increase employee engagement.

“The innovation and success we’ve seen as a company is about the people we hire,” says Schaar. “Innovation links to talent development—that’s truly what we believe. Diverse thought equals innovation.”

Watch the innovation web seminar on DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Not a subscriber? Buy this web seminar now, or request subscriber information and pricing for DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

The post Diversity Web Seminar on Innovation: 107 Ways Diversity Management Improves Business Efficiency appeared first on DiversityInc.

Q: We are exploring creating a two-tier model of affinity groups—one tier that contains the traditional demographic-based groups (e.g., women’s group, Hispanic group) and another tier that is more based on a specific cause or interest (e.g., the environment group or the employees-with-pets group). Are you aware of any other DiversityInc Top 50 companies that have this multi-tier model for affinity groups? 

A: Several DiversityInc Top 50 companies have alternative or nontraditional resource groups. These groups are becoming increasingly prevalent as companies evolve, but these groups also form out of both interest and legitimate business need. Watch our web seminar on resource groups for innovative types of resource groups.

First evolution. All of the DiversityInc Top 50 companies have resource groups for Blacks, Latinos, Asians and women. This is up from 76 percent five years ago and 34 percent 10 years ago. These groups evolved from social networks, primarily for Blacks and women, to business-oriented groups inclusive of everyone. These groups are currently used for recruiting, on-boarding, identifying talent, talent development, mentoring and diversity-training initiatives as well as market research and building customer and client relationships.

The DiversityInc Top 50 companies also track and promote the successes of these groups. The most effective companies track retention, promotions and engagement levels of members of resource groups versus non-members. Read New Resource-Group Research: Hourly Workers, Finding Leaders, Counting Membership for our detailed research on these cutting-edge best practices.

Second evolution. Increasingly, companies are moving beyond “affinity” and are creating groups around common interest, topic or specific business need—such as Novartis Corporation’s use of cultural resource groups to conduct in-house market research (watch the video above). Here, you see groups forming around generations, religion or veteran status. Of increasing importance are global groups, which did not exist in 2005 but have grown to 60 percent of DiversityInc Top 50 companies today. This rapid growth is likely caused by the changing landscape of business, along with necessity, interest and technology making the world a smaller place. 

Finally, innovation. Most recently, companies have been really pushing the envelope and launching groups to reach either very specific employee populations—such as teleworkers, caregivers or parental groups—or very specific business needs. McGraw-Hill shared how it is driving employee engagement through its Digital Employee-Resource Group at DiversityInc’s first Innovation Fest! 

Clubs aimed at groups such as pet owners or ski teams, however, should not be resource groups because they do not fit the criteria: a targeted and underrepresented group that can be used to further internal and external business goals. 

Groups should have specific and clearly stated vision and/or mission statements, detailed objectives and prioritized action plans. And they must be open to everyone, whether or not that person fits the actual demographic.

The post Ask DiversityInc: Should You Use Multi-Tier Resource Groups? appeared first on DiversityInc.