Creating & Leveraging Collaborative Communities to Build Your Diversity & Inclusion Strategy

By Nereida (Neddy) Perez & Lucian Tarnowski

In this paper, we aim to share how organizations can build a stronger diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy to drive large scale transformation more quickly by leveraging the wisdom of the employee ecosystem.

Executive Summary

How can you build and increase support for a corporate diversity & inclusion strategy that aligns with your overarching business goals and leverages the collective knowledge of your employees?

The time has come to move away from traditional strategy development methods that companies have relied on for decades. We now must leverage the skills and knowledge of employees who are in the middle and senior management levels and on the frontlines of your organization. This approach will enable you to engage a greater number of employees and more quickly implement your strategy.

Some key take aways include:

· What is the business case for changing the development process of your strategy? Why is this a better approach?

· Sample case studies of companies that have leveraged the wisdom of crowds and their internal communities to drive change.

· A step-by-step process on how to leverage these internal communities and employees to create a strategy.

Business Case: A New Paradigm for Strategy Building

The concept of preparing “business strategies” was first formally introduced in the 1950s by people like Peter Drucker, Philip Selznick, Alfred Chandler, Igor Ansoff, and Bruce Henderson. Prior to the 50’s the term “strategy” was only used in reference to war and politics. In the Human Resources (HR) profession, it wasn’t until the early 70’s that the concept of workforce and HR strategy development took hold.

In the Diversity & Inclusion space it wasn’t until the late 80’s and early 90’s that the concept of strategy creation was applied to developing and executing programs to drive organizational change. Prior to that the focus was predominantly on developing training and addressing Affirmative Action initiatives.

The process for building a diversity and inclusion strategy is very similar to the building of a business strategy. The main difference is the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) is responsible for the design, development and execution of it with the support of a diversity council. While data and information from the company may be used, there is often little to no incorporation of input from employees. As a result, there may be missed opportunities for breakthrough thinking. Employees at every level have knowledge and experiences, which can be used to increase revenue, uncover new market niches, lead to the development of new products, increase productivity and/or improve business operations.

A linear strategy development process does not provide an inclusive approach. If anything, it undermines the creative process, contributes to disengagement, creates lack of trust in leadership, and results in slower adaption. How often have you heard in the workplace or seen written in the employee engagement survey, “No one asked what I thought” or “If they had asked me about X, I could have told them it wouldn’t work because…”. Providing the employee ecosystem with a channel for contributing insights gives individuals an opportunity to personally contribute and feel valued.

Our position is that in today’s marketplace the traditional linear approach to strategy development is no longer effective. Companies are spending millions of dollars on rewards and recognition programs to improve engagement, drive productivity and to create “inclusive corporate cultures” yet disengagement is higher than ever. Gallup’s annual Employee Engagement Survey conducted across 80,000 workers in the United States, shows that the majority (50.8%) of employees are “not engaged,” while another 17.2% are “actively disengaged”. What if, you could provide employees with an active way to help improve the company’s corporate culture and/or contribute in a meaningful way to uncover new market niches for your business would you want to try it?

The average replacement cost of an employee that leaves a company, per Wharton Business School’s Annual Salary study, is 150% to 200% of their annual salary. This kind of cost can quickly bring into question the effectiveness of initiatives designed to improve the corporate culture and funding requests to drive employee engagement.

While there are many best practices designed to create a more inclusive and engaged workplace, until now there has not been an approach that allows the collective knowledge of employees to be heard when building a D&I strategy. By leveraging technology and internal social communities you can help to engage employees, drive culture change and increase adaptability to new processes and systems as well as uncover new market niches.

When you think about companies that have driven large scale change and process improvement at a rapid rate, a common factor has been the incorporation of input from the frontlines and middle management. An example of this is the use of the Kaizen model [1]in manufacturing, where employees and management contribute to process improvement through regular active involvement. Toyota Corporation is an early adopter of Kaizen, where employees and managers work together to continuously improve the process used on their production lines to produce vehicles. By providing an opportunity for employees to be part of the solution process, companies can increase engagement scores and benefit by discovering new and innovative cost savings or revenue generating solutions that are practical.

Additionally, companies in today’s socially connected and data driven age are struggling to find ways to improve engagement scores and better connect with their employees. One way to create a more inclusive work environment is to provide a channel for employees, regardless of their job title, age, race, gender orientation, years of service, education level, etc., to contribute to the transformation of the corporate culture through their active involvement in the strategy process. To support this channel, map out the employee ecosystem and use a digital community and collaboration platform to facilitate discussions that feed into the D&I strategy process.

A national utilities company in the northeast was struggling to generate home energy audits in the Asian community. The company, which received a financial incentive for each audit conducted, was located near the city’s Asian community. As part of the diversity efforts, the company realized that by engaging their employee resource groups they could increase the number of energy audits. Thanks to the Asian employee resource group that partnered with the marketing team, they increased the number of energy audits from 100 to 4,000 in one year’s time. Had the employee resource group been engaged in the creation of the diversity or marketing strategy of the company early on it would have been able to impact business results sooner.

In today’s workplace, with four generations sitting side-by-side, leveraging a social platform that provides people with an opportunity to express themselves and engage in a two-way communications process to create solutions, problem solve in real time and improve processes, goes a long way in creating an inclusive workplace and improving retention. In short, empowering communities for peer-to-peer engagement and best practice sharing.

Outline of the Standard Diversity Strategy Process

In most corporations developing a diversity strategy falls to the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) and the Diversity Council or select business leaders representing the business and Human resources. The majority of strategies are prepared for short-term (one to three years), mid-term (four to five years) and long term (seven or more years).

In this process, the only employee input gathered is static and comes from employee engagement surveys or workforce data. Employees are not asked for feedback on relevant issues and they rely on top down communications to hear about the company D&I strategy. Employee/Businesses Resource Groups (ERGs/BRGs) don’t get a chance to provide input even though these groups are critical in promoting awareness about the company’s D&I efforts and represent a cross section of the employee ecosystem

To increase engagement and adaptability of the D&I strategy, these ecosystems need to be provided with an opportunity to give advice and guidance. By hosting interactive discussions with key elements of the employee ecosystem, the CDO and company benefit by:

· Listening to and learning about what is working or not working with regards to the existing D&I strategy

· Discovering recommendations to modify the proposed plans

· Identifying new ideas that can result in faster adaptability or address a root issue

· Testing out ideas and recommendations that could enhance the corporate culture

· Obtain input on how the new strategy can be communicated broadly within the company

· Identify which projects will yield best results in recruiting diverse candidates or which community causes would have the greatest level of interest

· Problem solve a product design or support the marketing launch of a product

How Leveraging Collaborative Communities Can Increase Adaptability

The former leader of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), General Stan McChrystal, in his book Team of Teams shared his perspective of new business principles based on his battlefield experiences. Throughout history, armies have been organized in a command and control fashion. Information went up the ranks and orders came down. Knowledge was power. Armies operated on a ‘need to know’ basis. What General McChrystal realized, in fighting the insurgencies in Iraq between 2003 and 2008, is that the rules of combat have changed. No longer was the enemy organized in a hierarchical structure with clear leadership and a chain of command. The insurgency operated more like a virus — there was shared leadership and a completely different approach to roles. It was chaos, it was unpredictable. This led to tried and tested military tactics failing with the increased complexity. He realized a fundamentally different strategy was needed to succeed in the VUCA battlefield.

General McChrystal introduced the Team of Teams concept where knowledge and intelligence flowed freely across ranks, regiments and regions. He took the military from a culture of “knowledge is power” to a culture of “sharing knowledge is power” in a short time. When the military started tapping into the collective intelligence of the team, they had more success in defeating the insurgencies.

Most corporations have been organized to resemble the traditional military structure of ranks (hierarchies) and roles/business sectors (silos). Communications is based on a “command and control” model where “knowledge is power” and held by a few. Knowledge silos cost corporations more than $260 billion each year in operational inefficiencies. In this paper we advocate that for organizations to thrive in the Digital Age, they need to transition from “Command and Control” structures to a “Team of Teams” structures by leveraging the collective thinking of their employees and leadership.

One natural starting point is with the building or revamping of the company’s Diversity and Inclusion strategy, which provides an excellent opportunity to engage employees at every level of the organization.

By embracing this collective knowledge and collaborative methodology to empower the majority of the workforce, the company will not only generate new ideas to improve cross collaboration, or uncover new market niches; it will also increase the speed of the adoption and implementation of diversity efforts. We believe the diversity and inclusion strategy is a powerful starting point to drive organizational change and transform corporate culture.

How to Disrupt the Strategy Development Process

By building into your D&I strategy process a way to gather the collective knowledge of your ecosystem, you will be tapping into what is known as the “hive mind”[2] and your organization will be more inclusive. In today’s Digital Age the process to gather input from various internal employee communities or the “hives” is much easier than ever before. In fact, leveraging technology and the collective knowledge is a fundamental shift in the way organizations engage their talent, scale learning and identify potential opportunities. Leveraging the collective knowledge of the hive to build a collaborative community best resembles what we see in nature — for example, the beehive and the ants nest, which are integrated and interdependent ecosystems.

The Collaborative Community Model provides a step-by-step process for tapping into the hive (employee voices in your ecosystem). By leveraging technology, you can speed up your strategy process and create a more comprehensive and inclusive discussion.

The Collaborative Community Model:

Phase 1 — Community Planning

Defines the purpose of the network or the “hive” and the composition of the ecosystem. In this phase, content that will be shared with the group (s) and the type of input that will be sought is determined. It will be critical here to identify what community segments will be created and how you want to structure facilitate conversations. (i.e. High potentials, Employee Resource Groups, Senior Leaders, Operations, Sales. Etc.)

Phase 2: Community Development

Once the planning phase is completed then the focus turns to the technical aspect of how will input be sought. Participant guidelines are provided how they can participate in the discussions (i.e. what is acceptable and nonacceptable behavior). Content pages and questions are developed and invitations to members are designed in a personalized way.

Phase 3: Community Launch — Tapping the Collective Knowledge

Now you have your purpose, shared visions, goals and objectives, stakeholder segmentation, community design, content is primed and messaging developed — your community is ready to go. In Phase 3 you can begin to leverage the knowledge of the community. This will be accomplished by:

o Posting your questions & collecting responses

The construct of the questions posted to the community will be critical to generating responses and input to feed the development of your diversity strategy. The key will be posting critical questions or leveraging the community to help test out ideas and concepts proposed. For example: You plan to roll out a flex work plan but are not sure how that may work in your operations. You can use the middle management hive in operations to give you feedback.

o Track & Analyze Information

As your community grows and develops it will be important to collect content and analyze the information that will be used to feed the diversity strategy. You will want to track such things as content engagement, employee influence, outcomes reporting, emergent topics and others. Organizations can also track whether participation in this process increases the level of engagement of the employees.

Incorporating Insights from the Ecosystem into Your Strategy

Once you have gathered input from your ecosystem you can incorporate it into your D&I strategy. Examples of the feedback you can use includes:

· Vetting new training programs proposed

· Input on policy changes (i.e. Parental Leave Policies, Tuition Reimbursements)

· Feedback on the timing of new programs and policies, etc.

· Test new communications messages or diversity advertisements

· Get consensus on which programs to cut or keep, etc.

If you are faced with challenges when presenting recommendations to your leadership team, you can refer to the responses from the employee ecosystem. The ability to show the percentage of responses for or against an idea can be very powerful when soliciting executive leadership buy-in.

In addition, when you work with the corporate communications team, you can incorporate the feedback of the ecosystem into messaging theme tests as well as sample how they would like to receive information and on which platforms.

If you have created an ecosystem for middle and senior management, you can engage these individuals in discussions on program design and implementation to increase the rate of adaptability and roll out of initiatives. A good example of why engaging the ecosystem is important, was one multinational manufacturing company’s experience in rolling out a Flexible Workplace Program. The plan which was to be rolled out to all management employees came to a screeching stop when the plant operations leaders felt that the recommendations did not include their feedback. To address the issue, the Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of HR decided to hold off on the rolling out of the plans to quickly mobilized influential operations leaders and get their feedback. The roll out date was delayed by a couple of weeks and the feedback received was incorporated. When the program was rolled out the adaptability rate in the operations moved quickly. If the employee ecosystem had been engaged sooner for feedback to vet the plan There would have been no delays.

Conclusion

“Insanity is doing the same thing over-and-over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein

The recommendations of this paper are based on the premise that we need a new approach to developing D&I strategies to leverage the collective thinking of employees to drive culture change.

This approach can be applied to other types of organizational strategies and work, such as the creation of an employee value proposition, building a better talent pipeline process, ideation of new products, uncovering new markets, and/or building a business strategy, etc. In fact, we advocate that this approach can be used to reshape the future of how employees interact and how work gets done or how new products are developed. We can look at the business model of Quirky.com as a model, which leverages the ideas of its consumers to design, modify and create products that are then sold in consumer markets globally.

If your organization is seeking to create a comprehensive D&I strategy to transform your corporate culture, then leveraging the collective knowledge of internal ecosystem/hive will lead to breakthrough and transformative thinking. In the past, this may have seemed like an impossible task but with today’s technology and increased comfort level of social network platforms it is very doable.

If you are interested in learning more about how to build Collaborative Communities and reinvent how you create your Diversity & Inclusion Strategies, contact the authors at:

· Neddy Perez, Principle Consultant, D&I Creative Solutions — neddyperez@dicreativesolutions.com

· Lucian Tarnowski, Founder & CEO BraveNew.com — Lucian@BraveNew.com

Resources to Explore

• General Stan McChrystal — Team of Teams — TED talk
• Gillian Tett — The Silo Effect
• HBR — Best leaders are constant learners
• Why Diversity Programs Fail — Harvard Business Review , July/August 2016, by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev; https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
• Gallup Engagement Survey Results 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/188144/employee-engagement-stagnant-2015.aspx
• The Secret Origins of Corporate Strategy, Sarah Green, Harvard Business Review online; https://hbr.org/2010/02/the-secret-origins-of-corporat-2
• Declining Employee Loyalty: A Casualty of the New Workplace” May 09, 2012 Knowledge@Wharton published by the Wharton School (http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/

Bios of Authors:

Nereida (Neddy) Perez, President D&I Creative Solutions

Neddy is an internationally known Human Resources and Diversity practitioner with more than 20 years of corporate experience working with Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies like UPS, Shell, Sodexo, KPMG, National Grid and Ingersoll Rand. She has developed and implemented business and diversity strategies designed to remove organizational and cultural barriers to spur talent and business growth. In 2016, she launched Diversity & Inclusion Creative Solutions a consulting company that helps small to large corporations build and execute diversity and talent management business strategies.

Neddy has been a speaker at a numerous national and international conferences on Talent Management, Diversity, Manufacturing Management, Global Leadership and STEM. ​She has served on the board of several national and international nonprofit organizations focusing on Human Rights, Manufacturing, Energy, Leadership Development, Diversity & Human Resources. Her programs have been recognized by the Association for Training Development, National Manufacturing Association, Center for Creative Leadership, International Association of Business Communicators, Mercer Consulting, Conference Board, and the Society of Human Resources Management.

In her spare time she is social entrepreneur credited with being a co-founder of STEMConnector.org, Latino Leaders in Diversity & Human Resources (LIDHR), the New York Supplier Diversity Energy Summit the North Carolina Employee Resource Group Summit and Mightychicks.org . Currently, she serves on the advisory boards of the University of Southern California’s Ellevate Program, the Asia Society’ talent Council, Ascend and the board of the Central Piedmont Community College.

Named as one of the most influential global diversity officers by Global Diversity Magazine and a “Woman Worth Watching” by Profiles in Diversity Journal, she has been recognized by dozens of publications and organizations including Diversity Inc., the National Association of Manufactures, United Way, Ascend, STEMConnector.org, etc.

Lucian Tarnowski, Founder & CEO BraveNew.com

Lucian is Founder and CEO of BraveNew.com, a Community Operating System. Lucian has a decade of experience in designing and powering online communities that connect diverse stakeholders around a shared purpose. Communities support virtual and distributed networks to scale and achieve their collaboration, knowledge sharing and problem solving goals. BraveNew enables Fortune 1000 clients, healthcare collaboratives, education reform collaboratives, sustainability initiatives and other multi-stakeholder Networked Improvement Communities.

Lucian is launching a platform cooperative called Civana with the mission to enable a community based sharing economy. With blockchain enabled Smart Contracts and the ‘Vana’ cryptocurrency, communities will be able to design economic and social incentives to remunerate members for their contributions. His goal is to disrupt counterproductive competition and unlock the power of cooperation.

Lucian lives with his wife and daughter in San Francisco. He has been honoured as a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. He has been an active attendee of Davos and other World Economic Forum meetings for a decade. He has served on the Steering Board for the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Talent Mobility and has been Topic Champion for Education, Employment and Skills. He continues to research and experiment around the social science behind communities, knowledge sharing and economic spaces. He passionately believes in the need for society to return to communities.

Since 2002, Lucian has run Take Heart, a 53-year-old no overheads charity started by his father that provides blind and handicapped people in rural India with the vocational employment skills to required to get lifelong employment. He is a Board member of Innovate Educate, a US Foundation that aims to bridge the skills gap with a demand driven approach to jobs. He has spoken at gatherings such as Davos, various World Economic Forum meetings, TEDx, The China Digital Summit, Impact Summit and for companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Coca-Cola, Oracle, Pearson, IBM and PWC. He speaks to audiences around the world about community design and the convergence of talent, knowledge and capital and the impact on the global workforce.

[1] Kaizen was originally introduced to the West by Masaaki Imai in his book Kaizen.

[2] Hive Mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_%28science_fiction%29