Ernst & Young
Get on Board: Driving Action Through Gender Parity
NEW YORK CITY—Ernst & Young hosted “Get on Board: Driving Action Through Gender Parity,” a Forté Foundation event about woman representation in corporate boardrooms at which Forté released its list of Global Board-Ready Women. Nancy Altobello, Ernst & Young’s Americas Vice Chair, People, opened the program by discussing key data from a new E&Y report on the number of women on U.S. boards, and Karyn Twaronite, E&Y Partner and Chief Inclusiveness Officer, participated in a panel discussion. In attendance was DiversityInc Vice President, Consulting Debby Scheinholtz. Ernst & Young is No. 6 in the DiversityInc Top 50.

Forest City
Real Estate Associate Program (REAP)
BEACHWOOD, Ohio—DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti spoke at a session of the Real Estate Associate Program (REAP)—a 13-week series of courses that exposes professionals from underrepresented groups to the commercial real-estate business—at the headquarters of DDR. The session, titled “Career Workshop,” was facilitated by Andrew Passen, Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Forest City; Mark Floyd, Executive Vice President of Employment at DDR; and Daniel Gold, Vice President of Human Resources at Associated Estates. Forest City and DDR sponsored the program, which had only been held in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C.

TD Bank
Women in Leadership
MT. LAUREL, N.J.—TD Bank celebrated three years of its Women in Leadership program with a presentation on TD Bank’s diversity initiatives from President and CEO Bharat Masrani, a panel with a number of the company’s most senior women leaders, and a keynote address from Betsy Myers, Founding Director of the Center for Women & Business at Bentley University and former official in the Clinton Administration. The event was attended by DiversityInc General Counsel and Senior Vice President, Transformation Services Lora Fong; Director of Benchmarking Shane Nelson; and Web Editor Stacy Straczynski. TD Bank is one of DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies.

National Organization on Disability
NOD’s 30th Anniversary Celebration
NEW YORK CITY—The National Organization on Disability’s 30th anniversary celebration was held at the offices of McGraw-Hill. Kessler Foundation President and CEO Rodger DeRose spoke about the disability employment field and NOD’s place within it. NOD Chairman Tom Ridge and NOD President Carol Glazer presented awards to founder Alan Reich and founding board members. NOD also screened its 30th anniversary video, featuring board member and actor Robert David Hall (CSI), and highlighted its two signature programs: Bridges to Business and Wounded Warrior Career Demonstration. Members of NOD’s CEO Council, including from DiversityInc Top 50 companies Aetna (No. 24) and MetLife (No. 50), were recognized. DiversityInc Foundation Director Stuart Arnold attended the event.

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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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The panel featured several successful diversity-led relationships: Javara Perrilliat, Vice President, Global Supply Management for Owens & Minor, with William “Joe” Reubel, President/Chief Executive Officer, Kerma Medical Products, Inc.; and Keith Connolly, Vice President – Consumer Supply Chain, AT&T Services, Inc., with Jessica Firestone, President & CEO, Tempest Telecom Solutions LLC. Sam Johnson, Ernst & Young LLP’s Northeast Sub-Area Accounts & Business Development Managing Partner, also joined the panel to give his viewpoint on the global organization Ernst & Young’s relationship with Mitchell & Titus, LLP.

Twaronite kicked off the discussion saying, “I really have a front-row seat in seeing how critically important diversity is to our business, but also to our customers.” She shared supporting information from a DiversityInc benchmarking study, noting it found a direct link between high spend with underrepresented communities and higher recruitment, retention, engagement and customer loyalty.

Addressing the audience of entrepreneurs and c-suite executives, Twaronite asked for a show of hands to see how many of them had considered entering into a strategic partnership with a diversity-owned business – and many had. So, what was stopping some of them? Twaronite listed some common concerns about quality, capacity and margins. The panel discussion then started by debunking myths about these concerns by sharing the stories and specifics of several mutually beneficial strategic partnerships.

Diversity opens doors

Corporate initiatives to encourage diversity and inclusiveness have opened the door for many women- and minority-owned businesses, the panelists said, but are not the whole picture. “Diversity gets you into the door,” said Reubel, describing Kerma’s business partnership with Owens & Minor, a major supplier of health care products to hospitals. “But then you have to explain your value-added proposition, and get to know your customer,” he said. “Because if you’re not helping your customer gain additional revenue, then the relationship is not sustainable.” From Owens & Minor’s perspective, the relationship with Kerma enabled them to deepen their relationships with community and nonprofit hospitals.

AT&T’s partnership with Tempest was driven by the company’s mandate to source 21.5% of its equipment from diversity-owned suppliers. The partnership with Tempest blossomed when the woman-owned business helped AT&T build out a mobile network through Tempest’s experience as a supplier in Radio Access Networks.

The give and take of successful partnerships

“AT&T also gave us guidance on what they needed, so we went out and bought a company with experience in Distributed Antenna Systems,” Firestone said.

“The telecommunications industry has been a leader in the diversity space,” she said, “but you still have to provide quality services, be financially strong and prove you can support your customer over the long term. We’ve been very careful about how we’ve built our reputation with our customers.”

The membership of Mitchell & Titus LLP, the largest minority-owned accounting firm in the global Ernst & Young organization, has created similar opportunities on both sides, Johnson explained. “We were able to structure a relationship where they remain a minority firm, but they are also a member firm of Ernst & Young,” he said. “It allows us to first and most importantly help our clients achieve their objectives, it allows us to help M&T build capacity so they can take those services to market to other customers, and then finally it allows us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”

The overall message of the panel was clear – diversity and inclusiveness initiatives are vital for diverse-owned businesses to gain a toehold in the supply chain, yet delivering sustainable value is the key to continued success for those organizations.

Tips for supplier success

The panel closed with a lightning round of advice for current and future diverse suppliers. Some of their advice included:

• Be patient and persevere – you want to be a partner, not a vendor.
• Fine tune your value proposition. Understand the business and what its needs are so your value proposition will meet them.
• Think big. Keep in mind that most big companies are always looking for opportunities, so use this to differentiate yourself and create further opportunities in the future.
• You have to be willing to accept change and adapt. And learn about your customer – know what they don’t do well. Use that and find your niche.
• People do business with people. Build those relationships – invest in them.

Watch a video of the panel discussion, including all of the panelists’ tips and advice for current and future suppliers, here.

* This article features contributed content and has not been fact-checked or copy-edited by DiversityInc.

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Ernst & Young, No. 6 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50, is one of eight leading companies that presented at our Managing Relationships Between HR & Diversity Departments event held in New York City.

The full presentation slides are available at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

For closed captions, press the CC button in the YouTube player.

Video Minutes
0:01:29 Evolution of HR Departments
0:03:36 Importance of HR–D&I Collaboration
0:08:20 Metrics & Accountability
0:09:38 Working With Communications Staff
0:14:03 Use of Social Media
0:16:02 Senior-Executive Involvement

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