The presenters—David Casey, Vice President of Workforce Strategies and Chief Diversity Officer, CVS Caremark; Susan Autera, Director, Business & Technical Leadership, and Shivani Kathuria, Business & Technical Leadership Partner, IBM; and Christine Talbot, Vice President, Human Resources, and Barry Myers, Director, National Leadership Development, Kaiser Permanente—discussed:

• How CVS Caremark Tracks Talent Development: the company’s nine-box talent matrix rates employees’ current performance and future potential. The goal is to have a diverse in-house slate for higher-level openings.
• Why IBM Promotes Learning From Leaders: Rather than a traditional mentoring program, female high-potentials interview women senior executives in an effort to understand and document their career journeys. The company then tries to replicate recurring themes to accelerate the careers of its future women leaders.
• How Kaiser Permanente Sets High Standards: To make sure that high-potentials have the right tools to take on leadership roles, Kaiser has four management-development programs, including a Diversity Leadership Program that pairs executives and mentees.

Takeaways include: How to on-board of new hires to improve retention, set requirements for diverse candidate slates, use your executive diversity council to set diversity goals, and get senior-level executives involved in cross-cultural mentoring.

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

The post Web Seminar: Ensuring Diversity in Succession Planning appeared first on DiversityInc.

Chief Diversity Officer Rohini Anand of Sodexo (No. 2 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50) led the discussion at a recent DiversityInc event and explored the challenges companies face in improving female representation at the executive levels. The audience of corporate and diversity leaders was able to ask questions, contribute their best practices for talent development and share firsthand their real-life success stories.

Companies participating included: PricewaterhouseCoopers (No. 1), Procter & Gamble (No. 5), American Express (No. 14), The Coca-Cola Company (No. 46), and BASF and Wyndham Worldwide (both are on DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies list). 

In What’s the Biggest Global Diversity Challenge? Female Talent Development, we share their best talent-development strategies and case-study examples that can help improve your pipeline of female talent globally. 

Talent-Development Best Practices for Women:

1. Provide a peer support system for women to help keep your top performers in the workforce
2. Promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace with respect for local laws
3. Gain cultural competence and understanding for local barriers to gender equality
4. Provide opportunities for global assignments to challenge and engage employees
5. Understand special issues facing women with strong family demands and devise culturally competent solutions
6. Adopt flexible workplace practices and educate managers about the value of flexibility
7. Use alumni/networking connections to encourage loyalty from female talent
8. Get senior-level managers on board with gender-intelligence training
9. Assign diversity champions in select countries to promote diversity-and-inclusion initiatives and help reduce gender bias

Read What’s the Biggest Global Diversity Challenge? Female Talent Development on DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

The post What’s the Biggest Global Diversity Challenge? Female Talent Development appeared first on DiversityInc.

Diversity management and awareness for increased cultural competence in the workplace have led Toyota Financial Services’ employees to be more sensitive in the community—and that has increased their business, says George Borst, president and CEO.

In this hard-hitting interview on diversity management with DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti, Borst discussed the strong emphasis on training, mentoring and succession planning – and the results they are having. He also emphasized TFS’ community involvement and efforts to implement equity in credit ratings. Toyota is No. 41 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50.

Borst explained how TFS employs a three-phase program rooted in diversity awareness. All 3,300 associates receive foundational training, and managers receive cultural fluency training, to help highlight individuals’ diversity blind spots and erase the underlying nuances of discrimination. It’s a 360-style approach to diversity management that’s allowed TFS to increase its representation and engagement of people from underrepresented groups.

For more on the importance of diversity training, read Do White Men Really Need Diversity Outreach? Watch our talent development web seminar for best practices from The Coca-Cola Company and CSX Corporation on increasing talent and employee engagement.

A Supplement for Business Success

Luke Visconti: Why is diversity so important to Toyota Financial Services?

George Borst: Our business, our work force has to mirror the people that we sell to and the people that we work with. I would love to take credit for it myself but I have a great expression: If you have two people in the room that think the same way, you now have one too many in there.

That is a very powerful thing. If everybody on the management committee thought the same way I did, it would be easy but as ineffective as it could be. This forces us to look at things in more creative, more innovative, ways.

Luke Visconti: Would you say that you are using race and gender as a proxy for diversity and thought?

George Borst: No. Diverse opinion does not rely on whether somebody is gay or Spanish or a woman. You get people that think differently.

We are a Southern California–based firm. People may look at us and say, “We are a blue state [TFS is in California] so we think differently and make these policies.” There are a lot of people that think differently.

I think race and gender get you different points of view quicker but there are also a lot of different points of view there. I wouldn’t say we use it quite as a proxy but as a supplement.

In the diversity and inclusion area over the last couple of years, we have launched a three-phase program where we had awareness training for all of our 3,300 associates. We had a second phase called “Small Acts of Inclusion” that talked about nuances of discrimination and how you make people feel more part of the group.

We are just launching what we call the third-phase, “Generational Workplace.” People in their 60s look at people working in their 20s and may view them differently. Everybody has different points of view on work/life balance, so we are trying to make people understand how they work together.

Building the Bench

George Borst: That leads us to the second phase—our talent-review system. We are a management committee group of 10 people and we meet a couple of times a year to talk about the work force. We have one seven-hour meeting on succession planning.

Prior to the meeting, everyone rates the national managers, corporate managers, non–management vice presidents, and management committee vice presidents by strengths, weaknesses, readiness, et cetera. We determine whether they have areas to work on, what else they need, what they do well, et cetera. [Hear Borst speak in detail about their leadership selection process by clicking the player below.]

We then post the top 35 jobs in the company that are the next layer under the management committee and we select the top three candidates in the succession plan.

We then look at each one from a diversity point of view. We say, “How do we look on diversity?” For example, if we find out that we have three white men that are 45 years old, we go through the whole thing and adjust for a diverse slate of candidates.

When we put somebody in there, we say, “To be successful in this job, what do they need to do?” We assign them a management committee mentor who is not in their direct line of command. We talk about extra training or cross-organizational projects that they can get on to get more exposure.

We have been doing this four or five years now. It has really led to a much more diverse population for us. There are 10 people on our management committee: 40 percent are women or people of color; the next level down today is now 36 percent women or people of color. Our field national managers now are 21 percent people of color or women and the level underneath them is 34 percent.

We really are trying to build the bench but not only build the bench. It’s one thing to show somebody’s name out there, but if you don’t give them the support to be successful—mentoring, the extra training, et cetera—it really goes away.

We have two internal programs: Advanced Leadership Development and Executive Leadership Development. We have these annually over the last three years. Sixty-eight percent of the people that have gone through the Advanced Leadership Development program are women or people of color; 60 percent of our women or people of color have gone to the Executive Leadership Development program.

We have a much more ready bench. That has helped the organization start to think differently about how we interact with our customers, our dealers and the people that may need help, both in buying a car and socially in the market.

The Danger of Homogeny

Luke Visconti: From the perspective of being a leader of a large organization, why do you think there ends up being a homogeneous selection? What’s the danger of that?

George Borst: I think it’s a legacy carryover. If you go back 20 years ago, the aha moments on what diversity and inclusion bring to an organization were not there. You are dealing with an experienced population who are now in key middle-management jobs that are disproportionately white males. [Click on the player below to hear Borst discuss the need for diversity in the workplace.]

In the last 10 years, people have gotten more enlightened and realized the diverse population they sell to. They have started to realize that you can make a lot of mistakes if you don’t have people thinking differently and, more importantly, creating the environment where they feel safe to challenge and attack things differently.

What you have to do is accelerate good, smart people that maybe haven’t had many opportunities but certainly have the EQ and the IQ to succeed if given the right support. You need to accelerate that to give a more level playing field that mirrors the population.

During Black History Month, I went to three of our African American Collective’s (AAC), a business partnering group, lunches and one of their evening events. I went to learn something.

We had a consultant at one of these meetings—he was an African-American. He was talking about the nuanced discrimination in the work force with women and he was talking about how a promotion opportunity comes up.

In his example, he said, “If there isn’t an immediate qualified candidate, the companyhas to take a risk. They may look at a white male candidate and say, “Let’s give him a chance.” In the same breath, they may say to a female candidate, “Why don’t we give her a project?”

It reinforces the nuanced discrimination. The sad part is that the person saying those things is being diverse in their thinking. They wanted to give this person a project to see what they can do, whereas they were going to give a white male a shot without having to prove himself on a project.

That got a reaction from the audience. That makes somebody like me take notice that we need to be careful. It also reinforces what we are trying to do in this talent-review session and give those people the right support, take the right risk.

Mentoring Improves Morale

We do our associate opinion survey and we added a couple of years ago two questions:

* Have you been formally or informally mentored in the last 12 months? It was about 42 percent. We segregated the people that said they were mentored: their morale was 20 points higher than the general population.

* The second question that we monitored against them was whether they had an opportunity to grow and develop—they were 22 percent higher than the population.

We formalized a mentoring program in the last year. It’s called RPTM (Realizing Potential Through Mentoring). We had a training program—trained mentors and mentees. Sixty-one percent of the 92 people selected were women or people of color. We could start to move the ball there—trying to build a groundswell, a nucleus of a work force that does think differently, feels comfortable—and it’s being appropriately recognized.

The most dangerous people are those that think they are open-minded and non-discriminatory. They have this nuanced discrimination that they are blind to.

That’s why we gave our executives cultural-fluency training: it puts you on a scale from zero to 140 how open-minded you are in acceptance of other groups, of other points of view. Nobody saw anybody else’s individual score. We had a coaching session and a training session, so hopefully they have alerted some people to their blind spots.

Luke Visconti: How long have you been doing that?

George Borst: We just started. It was the first one we did and we are really excited about it. It was a lot of fun and showed where the group scored and where you scored versus the group.

That’s one of the things everybody kept close to the chest—you were shocked that you could have been seen as a bigot. People probably had a lot of “aha” moments that I don’t think a lot of people shared.

Partnering Around Differences

George Borst: We talk about the importance of Toyota’s business partnering groups on campus and the support they get from the executives. I go to a lot of the business partnering groups. I enjoy going to those things because I meet a lot of different people and I always learn something from that.

But here is the thing that always startles me: I get a 150 percent recognition because the people there are so happy that somebody is there supporting their cause and they really appreciated when a member of senior management attends.

I have shared this over the last couple of years with my key direct reports and now a certain amount of their bonus is derived from diversity and inclusion activities and I will tell you the beauty of that—my direct reports started showing up and the people that work for them started realizing this is important. People now going down two and three and four levels are coming to these meetings and people thought they had to be from an underrepresented group to go.

Helping Consumers With Credit

Congresswoman Maxine Waters had come to our campus in California, and if she wins in November, she will be our district representative, our congresswoman from Torrance.

I pulled together some numbers: the focus was how we help people that are less fortunate than us. I started by telling her that Toyota Financial Services, when we approve somebody for credit, we are blind of whether they are African American, Hispanic or whatever.

What we are proud of in the financing of new autos is that TFS is number one in lending money to the African-American community and number one in lending to the Hispanic community.

The biggest issue facing the country over the last three to four years is the blowup in the housing market. There are a lot of very good people of all races that got hurt in the housing crisis and the depreciation of the housing market just put them upside down.

In evaluating somebody’s credit, if they have 120 days behind on the mortgage and they haven’t been foreclosed on, and the rest of their credit is good, we will approve them. Our view is that these people are not credit criminals; they are good people that ran into hard times. They have managed to pay their other bills. You know you should try to help people that have a good credit history except for foreclosure because you need a car to get to work.

We try to do that to help the community, and I think that has really improved things.  We have been doing this for a couple of years and are very satisfied with where it is.

Active Community Outreach

We are not good at being a “checkbook-charity” organization. We like to be very active in our involvement.

About six years ago, we decided we wanted to do charity work in a big way. We wanted to identify with an organization where our associates could be active and where it would not be self-serving. We picked the Boys and Girls Club of East Los Angeles. It’s in the middle of gang territory—a very tough part of town.

When you fast-forward five years, we have offered to just the Boys and Girls Club of East LA 200 partial scholarships to go to college. There is a national Boys and Girls Club week—it’s usually in April—and last year there was an event every day. We have 700 people here on campus; we had 140 people volunteer. Some of the events were on campus. We bused the kids in.

We since upgraded our involvement with Boys and Girls Club. In cities where our associates live and work, especially Baltimore, Cedar Rapids and Phoenix where we have customerservice centers with as many as 500 associates, we are deeply involved with the local clubs.

We now have a more formal program called Diplomas to Degrees with a national Boys and Girls Club that we just launched in the last year. About 41 percent of what we do in philanthropy goes to diverse organizations.

– Luke Visconti

The post Diversity Management: Training Exposes Execs’ Hidden Biases 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.

KPMG has demonstrated a strong commitment to building an inclusive future workforce, one that has racial and gender diversity. Specifically, the firm has been the co-creator and presenting sponsor of Major League Baseball’s Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, in which KPMG provides financial support for college-bound student athletes participating in an RBI league. Scholarships are awarded on the merits of financial need, academic achievement, leadership skills and community service. The KPMG Foundation also started The PhD Project in 1994, which has helped more than 1,000 Blacks, Latinos and American Indians become business-school professors.

The organization is now serving more than 400 doctoral students. Led by Bernie Milano, former head of recruiting at KPMG, The PhD Project is now a separate 501(c)3 that has more than tripled the number of Black, Latino and American Indian professors in business schools. In addition, KPMG is a leading supporter of other youth-based organizations, especially GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) and INROADS. KPMG has extremely strong employee-resource groups and was honored previously for its efforts to increase employee involvement in those groups. The company has done an excellent job of using them for recruitment, engagement, retention and talent development.

Award accepted by John Veihmeyer, chairman and CEO:

“As a special-services firm, all we have is our talent. If we don’t get it right from a talent and inclusion standpoint, we are not going to be very successful. Good intentions are good, but they don’t take you where you want to go. It takes a layering of accountability. This [award] is a tremendous encouragement to keep plugging in the direction we are going … We need the right diversity in our partnership. On some metrics, we are doing a good job, but we are woefully short of where we need to get. We have a number of things to make sure that we eventually right that.”

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