Supporting Diversity at All Levels

Having now a remote based distributed team, it has enabled us to be so much more inclusive and diverse in our hiring and our retention. So now we can hop into talent. And so that’s one way of ensuring that we’re supporting diverse talent from a new employee standpoint.
The other thing is making certain that we’re looking within our organization at creating that pipeline, because one of the challenges that I think many organizations have is that if we’re looking at ensuring that we have leadership that’s diverse, that we have representation at the senior leadership levels, then that has to start by making certain that we’re investing in our individual contributors and our supervisors of color and making certain that we’re supporting their development so that we have more and more diversity at higher levels in the organization.
So, we had a program this last year that we called the Diverse Leadership Development Program. And we had four high profile women of color who participated in a very concentrated, intense program, and they were just fantastic, as far as the investment they made, it gave our leadership across the organization, more connectivity to talent we had. So the speakers who came in were speakers, some of our CFO’s or other executives, who maybe wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet some of these supervisors. And so that was the other, I think, benefit of doing something like this. And the great news is that we had promotions that came out of that, we had these women take on kind of next steps that I think will continue to help them realize their potential, and it’s a program we want to keep duplicating.