Results will be announced on April 23, 2013, at our DiversityInc Top 50 Announcement Event. Click here to attend.

Video Minutes

0:00:00 Don’t Wait Until the Last Minute
0:04:15 Movement on the List
0:07:19 Four Areas of Measurement
0:08:35 Tip: Executive Diversity Councils
0:11:02 Tip: Cross-Cultural Mentoring
0:12:29 Tip: Resource Groups
0:15:16 Tip: Multicultural Philanthropy
0:17:04 2013 Survey Changes
0:18:09 Audience Q&A

Follow these links for more about the competition, a description of the survey methodology and FAQs.

Click here to see the DiversityInc Top 50 for every year since 2001.

The post Tips on How to Do Well on the DiversityInc Top 50 appeared first on DiversityInc.

Q: I’ve been giving our current diversity advisory council some thought, and it prompted a question that I’d like to get your perspective on. Have you seen companies utilize their resource-group leaders as diversity advisory-council members?

A: As resource groups have matured, they have literally earned a place at the table. That table, increasingly, is the executive diversity council. [Watch our diversity web seminar on resource groups for insights on the growing importance of these groups.]

We’ve heard from a number of companies that they are creating rotational spots on their executive diversity councils for one to three resource-group leaders. These spots usually last two years (although we’ve seen one- to four-year terms), and in some cases, the resource-group leaders are not voting members of the councils. When executive compensation is directly tied to company-wide diversity goals set by the council, the resource-group leaders usually are excluded from that. For more on resource-group leadership and selection, read DiversityInc’s exclusive resource-group research.

Their purpose on the council is twofold; they give the council insights into the middle layers of the organization and specific insights from their own affinity groups, which are incredibly valuable in determining business-related strategies to reach more employees, customers, investors and suppliers from these groups. The council experience is also a major talent-development initiative for the resource-group leaders and exposes them to interactions with the senior-most executive in the company. Kathryn Collins, former vice president of associate recruitment and inclusion & diversity, jcpenney, explains more about resource-group structures in the video below.

We started asking the question of what percentage of The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity has resource-group rotational positions on their executive diversity councils in the 2011 survey. The answer was 34 percent. We expect to see that percentage increase this year. The percentage of CEOs of DiversityInc Top 50 companies who meet regularly with resource-group leaders (defined as specific small-group meetings, not speaking engagements to large audiences sponsored by resource groups) is 88 percent, twice what it was five years ago.

So you see specifically where the trend is and why. You can get more information on this from our diversity web seminar on diversity councils, featuring IBM and jcpenney, and our recent roundtable on diversity councils, featuring KPMG, American Express and Aetna.

For more on the benefits of resource groups, read How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%. In the roundtable, Kraft’s Vice President of Diversity Jim Norman explains how resource groups not only helped the company increase its retention of Black, Latino, Asian and women employees (as shown in the video below) but also promote more women into its management ranks.

The post What Your Resource Groups Are NOT Telling You appeared first on DiversityInc.

If you can monetize the benefits of what diversity and inclusion brings to the organization, you’ll see that change.

For example, say your firm has 75,000 employees, 50 percent of whom are women and/or non-white people, and a 3 percent average turnover rate but a 3.6 percent turnover rate for women and/or non-white people. If it costs $10,000 to replace an employee, then closing that turnover gap will save $2,250,000.

What hasn’t been possible—until now—is to strongly connect the results of diversity management and inclusion to areas we can measure, such as turnover or failure for some groups to thrive equally in talent development.

I think the key is “engagement,” which is a measurement of a person’s feeling of inclusion in an organization and which drives the quality of overall human-capital output. Further, engagement can go beyond human-capital factors to business subjects on a range as wide as accidents on factory floors to quality of innovation.

We’ve invested in SAS software this year and now have the computing power to correlate our engagement survey to our benchmarking survey, which allows us to then make exacting, precise recommendations for best practices going forward. Our engagement survey carefully introduces questions about race, orientation, age and gender to avoid decreased performance, as described by Dr. Claude Steele as “stereotype threat.” This is especially important for majority inclusion and for companies that may not enjoy a great diversity reputation internally.

Moreover, using our shortened 50-field benchmarking survey, we can benchmark several divisions within your company and give each an individual assessment on their relationships with people, as well as individual suggested next steps for diversity-management implementation. This can tie back to accountability for results to the local leader and give that person the exact tools they need to close gaps and move everyone forward in their engagement and feeling of inclusion.

DiversityInc is unique in its ability to do this; we have data on diversity management and outcome from hundreds of companies, and with our computing abilities, we can make specific suggestions tied to actual performance as correlated to other companies. We can project your potential return and we can help you put an actual dollar value on what success will look like.

Take these scenarios, for example:

• Your women employees are disengaged to the point of filing a lawsuit, which can mean a loss of real money and damage to the company’s reputation. Our engagement survey will identify that problem and the benchmarking survey will provide correlations to the best-practice solutions other companies have used.
• After investing heavily in recruiting and training Black, Latino and Asian execs, the percentage of retention among these groups remains low. Our engagement survey will uncover the cause and degree of their disengagement, and the benchmarking survey will show you what proven best practices and goals will stop that regrettable loss.

When the benefits of diversity management can specifically be tied back to bottom-line benefits, in the absence of emotion and in the sunlight of comparisons with other companies’ accomplishments, the benefits of a strong diversity-and-inclusion program become quite clear—and it can be monetized. I’ve staffed up on our consulting practice, and we are ready to put a detailed analysis together for you. Please contact me directly for more information.

–Luke Visconti

The post Monetizing Diversity Efforts: How Inclusion Can Be Quantified appeared first on DiversityInc.

Diversity-management case studies provide companies with insights into their competitors’ strategies. There is always volatility on The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list as the competitive set increases and improves in diversity management—and, simultaneously, as other companies lessen their commitment. When there is a major swing of more than 10 spots, it is usually attributable to a significant change in circumstances (e.g., a merger or a new CEO) or to a dramatic improvement or reduction in tracking or implementation of initiatives.

Consider these facts:

• 20 companies moved up this year; 24 declined
• 3 companies moved on to the list from DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies list
• 2 companies made the list for the first time; 1 was participating for the first time

With competition increasing (participation, including the number of companies that completed the entire survey, is up 11 percent), our questions evolve each year to reflect cutting-edge diversity-management techniques and metrics to evaluate them. For example, this year we put more emphasis on resource-group and mentoring participation and the concurrent results demonstrated by the demographics of the top three levels of the organization. Watch our diversity web seminar on resource groups and our diversity web seminar on mentoring for best practices in these areas.

Here are case studies of four companies in two industries: consumer-packaged goods and financial services. In each industry, we look at one company that went up significantly and one that declined.

Case Study No. 1: Consumer-Packaged-Goods Company That Rose

Contributing factors:

• Visible CEO support; accountability for results
• Dramatically improved metrics/tracking
• Increased utilization of resource groups

Company A is a large, decentralized global consumer-packaged-goods business, with a wide variety of products and customers. The company has been on the DiversityInc Top 50 list multiple times but has had trouble moving into the upper echelon.

This year, the company made significant strides for three reasons: It reassessed the manner in which it tracked key diversity-management metrics of mentoring and resource-group participation, multicultural philanthropy and first promotions into management; it better assessed and communicated the CEO’s deep commitment to diversity; and the racial/gender diversity at the top three levels of the company improved.

IT STARTS AT THE TOP

The CEO has been a vocal proponent of diversity for years, but much of what he said and did wasn’t captured or directly connected to diversity management. In the past two years, the company’s leaders have become much more cognizant of the need to link their leader’s support more visibly, both internally and externally. He talks frequently about the nexus of diversity and global innovation, and this of late has become a hallmark of the company’s messaging. This essential point is also now included in the company’s simple and direct mission statement.

The CEO of this company is on the board of three multicultural nonprofits, and almost a third of the executives in the top two levels of the organization also sit on boards of multicultural nonprofits. In addition, this CEO meets with resource-group members at least quarterly. This CEO chairs the diversity council and holds senior executives directly responsible for results, with a significant portion of their bonus linked to diversity metrics. The council also sets company-wide goals, which are also linked to executive compensation.

In addition, this company has a very diverse board of directors, with good female representation as well as representation from Blacks, Latinos and Asians. As it seeks to understand the complex U.S. and global marketplaces, these strategic leaders from diverse backgrounds are even more crucial.

The representation in the top three levels of the organization has increased in both gender and racial/ethnic diversity in the past two years, showing that the talent-development and engagement efforts are paying off.

DOESN’T COUNT IF IT ISN’T TRACKED

This company demonstrates one of the clearest cases we’ve ever seen of an organization doing great work that no one was properly tracking in a consistent manner. The resource groups, which are used for recruitment, talent development and leadership training, have been instrumental in driving new business ideas for products directly relevant to underrepresented groups. However, until our discussions with the company this year, it did not institute a means of assessing how many employees were actually members of each group. Without the metrics to understand its participation and the result on engagement, retention and promotions, the company was not fully able to make the case to senior management for increased support for these groups. Watch our diversity web seminar on diversity metrics for best practices in tracking diversity goals.

Secondly, the company until this year was unable to measure its level of management participation in formal, cross-cultural mentoring. Many companies, especially larger ones, tell us they can’t track mentoring because they have so many kinds and so much “informal mentoring.” We ask them to measure participation of formal mentoring because that can be directly linked to business results.

Thirdly, the company had never been able to track the percentage of its philanthropic donations allocated to multicultural charities, which actually exceed the industry average by more than 15 percent. With new tracking tools in place, Company A was able to connect the dots both in our survey and publicly, telling communities exactly how much it supports them and raising loyalty of current and future employees, as well as consumers.

Recommendations for this company:

• Use resource groups to improve promotions into first management jobs. The company has improved its tracking of this key metric but still has some gaps for which resource groups can help identify reasons why people from underrepresented groups don’t seek to move into management.
• Use resource groups more formally for market research. This company surveys employees often about consumer trends/products but has never taken advantage of the formal groups to seek innovative marketplace solutions. Now that group membership is being tracked, the groups can contribute more directly to field work.
• Link mentee promotions to mentor compensation. Now that the company has a handle on who is in mentoring relationships, the next step is to tie mentee success to the mentor’s performance evaluation.

Case Study No. 2: Consumer-Packaged-Goods Company That Fell

Contributing factors:

• Top level all-white
• Lower percentage of resource-group participation
• Lower percentage of mentoring participation
• CEO doesn’t chair diversity council

Company B has been a mainstay in the DiversityInc Top 50 but has not dedicated the resources its competitors have to internal development and community outreach. The consumer-packaged-goods industry is one of the two most competitive industries we see for talent from underrepresented groups and, correspondingly, for multicultural customers. (The other industry is consulting.)

This company fell off the list because of several factors we put increased emphasis on that directly correlate to measurable results: resource-group participation, mentoring participation and demographics of senior executives.

NO REPRESENTATION, NO PROGRESS

This company is all white in the top level (CEOs and direct reports). The next two levels of management have some racial/ethnic diversity but considerably less than the other CPGs on the list. Five years ago, all of Company B’s competitors had pretty much the same white top demographics, but the top CPGs have instituted formal, cross-cultural mentoring, resource-group leader training and mandating diversity in their succession planning, resulting in increased diversity at the top levels.

Our research has shown that increased management participation in mentoring is the most significant factor in driving diversity to the top of the organization. We have been told repeatedly by people from underrepresented groups (and organizational research supports this) that the personal relationship, especially with senior executives, provides invaluable guidance to the corporate culture and individual plans for success. The data directly shows that when the percentage of managers in mentoring rises, racial/ethnic/gender representation in the top levels goes up. Company B does have a formal mentoring program, but the percentage of managers involved dropped significantly this year.

This company also lacks the accountability for results that we see in several of its industry competitors, especially in recent years. Almost all of the top CPG companies on the DiversityInc Top 50 list have their CEO chairing the executive diversity council, and they increasingly link executive compensation to company-wide goals that the council sets. Often, those goals are tied to increasing representational diversity, especially at the top levels. For more on top-level commitment and accountability, read CEO Commitment: Why Visibility & Accountability Matter.

At Company B, the diversity council is chaired by the head of diversity, who is only at the director level. The council does not link executive compensation to its goals.

INVESTING IN MARKETPLACE CONNECTIONS

For consumer-facing companies, understanding an increasingly multicultural marketplace is vital to sustainable business success, especially when it comes to product development and placement. While all of the other leading CPG companies have multicultural-marketing departments, this company does not.

Increasingly, top CPGs use their resource groups for market research and to take advantage of diverse views to create innovative solutions to reaching customers. Company B’s percentage of employees participating in its resource groups is one-third of what it was last year, while its competitors have dramatically increased their percentages. Our data shows direct correlations between resource-group participation and human-capital results, with companies with lower participation having less diversity in promotions into management, promotions within management, and demographics of the senior levels of management. For innovative diversity solutions, watch our diversity web seminar on innovation and watch the presentations from DiversityInc’s first Innovation Fest!.

In addition, the company has a very low percentage of supplier-diversity spend with businesses owned by Blacks, Latinos, Asians, American Indians, women, LGBT people and people with disabilities. Even in an industry not known for its high supplier diversity, this company’s supplier diversity is significantly lower, indicating it is not reaching vendors and community leaders of underrepresented groups.

When looking at this company’s philanthropy to multicultural organizations, it appears to be on par with the other top CPGs. However, this company has less than half the amount of top-tier executives (levels 1–3) sitting on boards of multicultural nonprofits as the average of the top CPGs. So the donations are the same, but the actual involvement, which builds relationships and community support, is much lower.

Recommendations for this company:

• Change diversity-council model to one chaired by CEO, with all direct reports involved. Have council set company-wide human-capital goals linked to senior executive compensation.
• Aggressively increase participation in and utilization of resource groups. Document benefits of taking on leadership roles (increased engagement, promotion). Offer groups recognition/rewards for customer-based solutions, including finding diverse suppliers.
• Connect participation in cross-cultural mentoring to compensation/performance reviews. Increase emphasis on networking, sponsorship and access to senior leaders for high potentials from underrepresented groups.

Case Study No. 3: Financial-Services Company That Rose

Contributing factors:

• Increased accountability (linking bonus to diversity goals)
• Ability to track, report mentoring
• Heightened emphasis on resource groups

Company C has an extremely committed CEO. He chairs the executive diversity council, which meets monthly. This CEO has increased philanthropic efforts to underrepresented communities and has been very visible in his public support of diversity management.

This company has been on the DiversityInc Top 50 list frequently but was not able to break out of the middle of the pack until this year. The difference is its increased ability to hold its executives accountable and to track and improve key best practices, especially mentoring. Read Ask DiversityInc: How Resource Groups, Mentoring and Accountability Drive Engagement for more on the benefits of mentoring.

DIRECT LINK TO COMPENSATION

Although the executive diversity council at this company is very active (and consists of the CEO and direct reports), the company has had difficulty in the past extrapolating how much of senior-executive compensation is actually linked to direct diversity-management results.

This year, the company put in place practices that enabled it to directly measure and reward the senior executives on the council based on individual factors, including sponsorship of a resource group, being a cross-cultural mentor and serving on the board of a multicultural nonprofit, as well as increased diversity in retention, engagement, promotion and procurement in the executive’s area of responsibility.

Company C now has measurable goals directly tied to diversity results at roughly the same average as the DiversityInc Top 50 of 12.2 percent. The bonus plan was approved by the board of directors, and the CEO is signing off on each executive’s diversity bonus. The CEO includes both the quantitative goals stated above as well as a qualitative assessment of the executive’s performance championing diversity throughout the organization.

The company is seeing specific results in its human-capital demographics. While its board and senior management have had relatively good representational diversity, diversity by race/ethnicity and gender in the two levels below the CEO and direct reports in first promotions into management has improved year to year. Relative to its industry, which has racial/ethnic gaps at the top on average, this company has significantly improved its competitive position.

WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE

Company C is a large financial-services company, with business units across the United States and globally. The company has a variety of mentoring programs in place, some formal and some informal. These include group mentoring, reverse mentoring, on-boarding mentoring for new hires, peer mentoring and external mentoring. Until the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 survey, this company had repeatedly said it was unable to measure the percentage of managers in its formal mentoring program and the percentage in cross-cultural relationships.

DiversityInc has increased the weighting of these percentages in the past two years because of the direct correlation to improved diversity in human-capital results, especially in management levels. Understanding that, and the importance of tracking these results as well as the long-term successes of mentoring in terms of engagement, retention and promotions, Company C determined a year ago that it should implement a better tracking system. The results? The company now reports that at least 30 percent of its managers are involved in the formal mentoring program, which compares with 39.7 percent of the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 average. Company C believes the actual average across the entire organization will be higher next year as it more effectively collates its mentoring efforts. Read Mentoring Roundtable: How Mentoring Improves Retention, Engagement & Promotions for best practices in mentoring.

The company has also followed best practices established in our benchmarking practice to ascertain how to count resource-group membership and has doubled the percentage of employees who participate in those groups. Like many ethical companies, it was being overly conservative in its initial findings, and without a benchmark, it did not know what the standard was. It has been leveraging the ability to properly assess participation to garner more resources for the groups from senior management.

Recommendations for this company:

• Do not give 100 percent of eligible executives the diversity bonus. A bonus that everyone gets in full (as they did this year) doesn’t have credibility. The bonus should be awarded on a curve.
• Increase metrics to assess resource-group success. Although the company has increased its metrics on resource groups, it still lacks a consistent method of measuring promotions of those in groups versus those not, as well as membership in more than one group.
• Use groups to provide training/on-boarding for new employees. Company C does not have specific training to acclimate new hires, especially from underrepresented communities. Resource groups are critical in improving retention/engagement of new hires, our data shows.

Case Study No. 4: Financial-Services Company That Fell

Contributing factors:

• Lack of diversity at top
• No longer links bonuses to diversity goals
• No cross-cultural mentoring emphasis

Also a long-time member of the DiversityInc Top 50, Company D is a financial-services company that has been directly impacted by the economic and reputational turmoil occurring in its industry since the housing-boom bust of 2008. The company has undergone several organizational shifts and layoffs, but the diversity leadership has remained constant. However, this year, we note a drop in several key indicators, including linking executive compensation to diversity and senior-leadership demographics.

LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY

For a company that has been in the public eye for its lack of accountability during the financial crisis, the decision to no longer link executive compensation to diversity results is surprising. Still, that’s what company D did between the 2011 survey and the 2012 survey.

Although the company continues to have an executive diversity council chaired by its CEO, it does not have the council set organization-wide diversity goals or hold the council executives responsible for reaching those goals—which 86 percent of the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 companies do. As this company has reorganized in general, its efforts to pay bonuses at all have been jeopardized. But companies with deep commitments to diversity see this as crucial. Sodexo, for example, which has been in the top two in the DiversityInc Top 50 for the past three years, has a fund set aside for diversity bonuses that is the only one that is paid regardless of the financial performance of the company. And Sodexo links 25 percent of executive compensation of its senior leaders to diversity goals.

But Company D is not connecting compensation and diversity goals, and its top level of management (CEO and direct reports), which was all white last year but was almost half female, this year continues to be all white and is 10 percent less female. The next two levels of the organization also have little racial/ethnic diversity, a trend that seems to be getting more pronounced in the last three years. Read our Report on Executive Compensation.

MORE CULTURAL COMPETENCY: INTERNAL & EXTERNAL

Company D has been in the public eye for lending practices to lower-income consumers, many of whom are Black and Latino. Yet Company D does not have diversity prominently on its corporate homepage (unlike 82 percent of the DiversityInc Top 50 companies), and it has a lack of cultural-competency training for its mentors, mentees and executive diversity-council members. For best practices in training, read Diversity Training Goes Way Beyond Compliance.

The mentoring connection would be a crucial way for this company to increase its representation at the top. However, only 5 percent of its managers participate in mentoring, it does not have a cross-cultural component, and it has no formal evaluation or metrics associated with mentoring. By contrast, an average of 39.7 percent of DiversityInc Top 50 managers are in formal mentoring, 96 percent have a cross-cultural component and 84 percent have formal evaluations and metrics. All of those have increased significantly over the past six years.

The lack of formal cultural-competence awareness spills over into other areas directly impacting customer relationships. Company D has a very low multicultural-marketing budget—more than 20 percent lower than other companies in its industry, including Company C. A review of its recent public statements shows few mentions of diversity, while its closest competitor, another company in the DiversityInc Top 50, has increasingly tied its business results to diversity in its public messaging.

Company D’s decline on the DiversityInc Top 50 list is a direct result of its leaders’ decision to be less accountable for direct diversity results and to fail to emphasize the connection between diversity management and its increasingly multicultural consumer base.

• Reinstitute direct link between compensation and diversity goals. If no bonuses are paid, make the compensation part of executive evaluations and salaries.
• Include mandatory cultural-competence training for all mentors/mentees, executive-council members and anyone hiring or evaluating managers.
• Work with corporate communications and marketing to include diversity in business messages and to make the importance more prominent on homepage and in social media.

For information on the DiversityInc Top 50 companies, visit www.DiversityInc.com/top50.

–Barbara Frankel

The post Diversity-Management Case Studies Reveal Why Companies Rise & Fall in the DiversityInc Top 50 appeared first on DiversityInc.

Question on diversity management: We’re looking to post employee polling questions on our diversity and inclusion website. Do you have tested questions that might be probing and relevant to our company?

Answer: Diversity-management questions on employee surveys are a key way to gain critical feedback on the impact of your company’s diversity initiatives. All of the DiversityInc Top 50 companies include questions specific to diversity in their employee surveys. These questions also serve to increase knowledge of engagement and awareness.

The DiversityInc Top 50 companies also use these questions to drive specific diversity-management results, such as increasing participation in mentoring and resource-group programs.

Take Sodexo, No. 2 in The 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity. The company uses employee-engagement surveys to measure the effectiveness of its IMPACT cross-cultural mentoring program. Participants are polled twice throughout the one-year program—at the midway mark and at the end. Questions are designed around engagement, job satisfaction, performance and retention.

Results showed that the top three intangible benefits of the IMPACT mentoring program for mentees and mentors were increased communications, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. More than three-quarters of each group attested that the program increased their desire to stay with the company. Sodexo also uses results from the surveys to constantly refine its mentoring programs. For more about Sodexo’s mentoring program and results from its employee-engagement surveys,  read Mentoring Roundtable: How Mentoring Improves Retention, Engagement & Promotions. Also watch our mentoring web seminar.

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

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

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

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

DiversityInc Consulting helps clients to recognize their opportunities and implement recommendations. Consulting also includes analyzing all or aspects of a company’s diversity-management program against best practices, making recommendations, and then helping to implement the recommended changes.

For more information, download the diversity consulting PDF.

The post DiversityInc’s Diversity Consulting Service appeared first on DiversityInc.

By Shane Nelson

Q: What are the top drivers of employee engagement?

A: Employee engagement can be a barometer of how well diversity efforts have been implemented. In the workplace, high employee engagement leads to increased retention rates and higher productivity, which helps to drive down costs of replacing employees and lost productivity. In the marketplace, high employee engagement leads to better customer satisfaction. So how can organizations retain their talent and empower them in the marketplace? Here are three ways our data demonstrates that diversity helps increase employee engagement.

Senior-Management Accountability

The CEO and his/her direct reports serve as ambassadors for employee engagement. Engagement of senior management is often contagious, reverberating throughout the entire workforce. Our research shows that when the CEO and his/her direct reports are held accountable for diversity-management results, it sends the message that diversity is a business imperative. The benefits of accountability are twofold. The company benefits from increased employee engagement across the board, resulting in positive results such as an increase in the diversity of recruits or diversity of those promoted, or even increased diversity of senior management.

Sodexo is proof of these goals working. In the DiversityInc article Linking Executive Compensation to Diversity Goals,  the company notes that it links 25 percent of senior-executive pay to diversity goals and 10 percent to 15 percent for all bonus-eligible managers. The 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 averages 12.2 percent, up from 11.5 percent in 2011. Encompassing the diversity goals are process metrics that impact behavior change and outcomes, such as being a mentor or executive sponsor of a resource group. There are representation goals, such as recruitment and promotions, that are based on the availability of women, Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and American Indians for the area and the position. Dr. Rohini Anand, senior vice president and global chief diversity officer, cites Sodexo’s employee-engagement scores, which have gone up dramatically and have been driven by increased scores mostly from women, Blacks, Latinos and Asians.

Resource Groups

For the DiversityInc Top 50, resource groups  serve as a key measurement of employee engagement. Participation in resource groups gives employees many advantages in navigating their careers. Participation in resource groups promotes career growth by exposing employees to the right people and the right projects. Ninety-six percent of the DiversityInc Top 50 companies have senior executives leading resource groups. Participants have the opportunity to showcase their talents to senior executives and in many cases are exposed to a senior executive they might otherwise not have come in contact with, and vice versa. This kind of exposure creates bidirectional engagement.

Senior executives find that new talent and participants are recognized for bigger projects. A resource-group study by Sodexo found that the top two reasons its employees joined resource groups were networking and to enhance professional and personal development. An Aetna employee-engagement study found that while overall engagement of employees increased from year to year, those in resource groups had significantly higher engagement scores than those not in the groups. Measures of manager effectiveness and customer focus also showed the biggest difference between those in resource groups and those not in the groups.

It also helps when a resource group is specifically tasked with increasing engagement and promotions of Blacks, Latinos, Asians or women, such as Kraft Foods. The company started a resource group for women in sales, the Women’s Sales Council, with the objectives of increasing the percentage of women in key sales positions and elevating them in the company. The group convened annually with more than 80 women leaders. Kraft Foods reported increases in promotions of women in sales by 39 percent.

Mentoring

Our data shows that mentoring is a vital component in driving employee engagement.  Companies that excel in diversity management use their formal mentoring programs to identify and nurture high-potential employees. The mentoring programs are formal and cross-cultural, meaning the mentor is of a different race, gender and/or sexual orientation than the mentee. Seven years ago, 10 percent of the DiversityInc Top 50 had mentoring programs with cross-cultural components. Today, 96 percent of the DiversityInc Top 50 companies include cross-cultural components in their mentoring programs. This ensures that the programs are reaching all races and genders and increases cultural awareness of all, including those at the senior-most levels.

Data from the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 survey shows a positive correlation between having a formal mentoring program and senior-management representation.

For IBM, it starts with identifying talent early. Every year, current executives and those who go through a screening process across the enterprise globally who are identified as having potential for executive leadership go through the company’s Business and Technical Leadership Process (BTL). Candidates are assessed against a set of competencies, including the ability to manage cross-culturally and globally. Leaders are asked to evaluate their own competencies as a part of that exercise, and where they come up needing development, specific efforts and opportunities around both mentor and mentee occur.

Ron Glover, vice president, diversity and workforce policy, human resources, notes, “We want to be conscious that the cross-cultural ones are the ones that tend to evolve into sponsorship types of relationships, particularly if they are at the more senior levels of the organization. But it has to build up the pipeline all the way up from the entry level of the organization, particularly if that’s the path [to] move into senior roles.” Glover spoke at a  DiversityInc roundtable on talent development. Watch the video below.

The post How Do Resource Groups, Mentoring and Accountability Drive Engagement? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Second, we are also in the beginning stages of forming a generational/new professional/young professional affinity group. We’d like some best practices/research on what other companies are calling similar groups. Would you be able to provide us with some information?

A: Forty-four percent of DiversityInc Top 50 companies have generational resource groups. This number is up from 40 percent in 2009. No companies had generational-resource groups in 2005.

The approaches to generational groups vary, depending on the specific needs of your company. When we say varied, we mean some companies have one “generational group” that is focused on generational communications, talent development and planning for Generation Y to step into leadership roles. Some companies have a specific need for on-boarding and retention and may focus their group specifically on Generation X or Y. Some companies might have an aging workforce or concerns around retirement transition, eldercare or succession planning and may focus the group on boomers and beyond. Some companies have both. The most successful groups communicate across generations and don’t restrict membership to one group. For example, a Gen X group would be open to older members who want to learn more about Gen X.

Seventy-six percent of DiversityInc Top 50 companies have a resource group for people with disabilities. This number is up from 70 percent in 2009 and 48 percent in 2005.

Important to the disabilities groups—we have seen—is to have it be inclusive of “friends.” This may increase membership as employees who may have invisible disabilities and/or feel isolated or uncomfortable sharing might be more inclined to join. It is also always important, for every group, to have outside advocates. Advocates help bridge communication gaps and, to an extent, provide additional exposure or credibility.

Also relevant here is a mention of some of the more innovative groups found in the DiversityInc Top 50, including groups for telecommuters, parents, military and caregivers. Caregivers groups and disabilities groups often have overlap and sharing of information. Veterans groups and disabilities groups also have overlap.

The post Ask DiversityInc: How Can We Start Resource Groups Based on Generations, Disabilities? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Q. We are trying to find ways to include our hourly and union workers in as much of the D&I work as possible. As you know, working with unions can be particularly difficult, and I want to have as much guidance as I can get. If there is anything written on this, that would be helpful.      

Barbara Frankel: We’ve recently completed an in-depth survey on employee-resource groups, going beyond the questions asked on The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey. We asked a number of questions on membership on this topic, and here are preliminary findings. The entire report will be available on DiversityIncBestPractices.com. I’d also recommend you read “Increasing Participation in Resource Groups,” also on DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Of the companies surveyed on criteria for membership:

100% count formally signing up for membership
67% count attending events
67% count attending a minimum number of employee-resource groups meetings (specified in advance)
22% count actively contributing to the group

The criteria on exclusion varies, but 50 percent exclude types of workers from participation—contractors, in most cases. Forty-five percent have different policies for hourly and salaried workers on participation. Most of those that allow hourly-worker participation often require supervisor permission if during work hours, will not pay overtime for time spent on employee-resource groups, or will only allow those who take on leadership positions at employee-resource groups to participate during work hours. Many of these companies also work to educate the managers of the hourly/union workers on the importance of allowing them the flexibility to participate.

A handful of companies have been tracking employee-resource-group participation and engagement and are publicizing the results internally and on DiversityIncBestPractices.com. This has an energizing effect on employees and enhances their involvement, especially in leadership roles.

Case studies and contact information for these companies are available to DiversityInc Benchmarking customers. For more information, contact benchmarking@DiversityInc.com.

The post Ask DiversityInc: How Do We Get Hourly Workers in Resource Groups? appeared first on DiversityInc.