Webinar Topic: Elevating Resource Groups as Business Drivers

00:00 Intro

 

Charlene [Opal Group]: Our moderator, Maneet Sarai, who is the co-founder of Teleskope and serves as the company's Chief Product Officer. Teleskope is a leading employee experience platform used by dozens of Fortune 500 employers. Teleskope's platform includes solutions for ERG management, Mentorship, Employee Communications and DEI awareness which we’ll be talking a lot about today. So, Maneet is going to lead the discussion today. We have some wonderful wonderful thought leaders and panelists representing Under Armour, Dollar General, Chevron and Accenture. So, I'll let them self-introduce. Maneet, I will hand the microphone over to you to kick off this panel.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Yep. Thanks a lot, Charlene, really appreciate it. I appreciate you teeing up this panel and getting organized. So, as Charlene mentioned my name is Maneet Sarai. I do serve as the VP of products for Teleskope. I'm in charge of all product roadmap, developing the product and working with our customers to take feedback and make sure our product continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of DEI professionals. I would like to go ahead and introduce our panel. So, Charlene just as a quick note if all of our panelists are on the on the panel, correct?

 

Charlene [Opal Group]: Yes, sorry, popping back in here. When the panelists are ready go ahead and unmute your mics when it's your turn to talk. I appreciate you guys muting to allow everyone to start talking. Everyone is here, thank you, Maneet.

 

0:46 Panelist Introductions

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Excellent. Perfect, thanks a lot, Charlene. Yeah, if we can go ahead and start introducing our panelists. Sheldon if you're on, we'd love to start with you and then I'll just go down my list here. If you can just give a quick introduction of your role at Accenture and maybe your tenure there. Then we'll just continue down the list.

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]: Sounds good. Hey Maneet! Hey everyone on the Team! So, Sheldon Maye here. I work at Accenture I've been at Accenture for 10 years I'm currently in our Human Resources team, leading Inclusion and Diversity. So, I am our North America lead for the ERG program. I also wear the hat of being our I&D lead for some of our business groups and when you think of our major groups such as Strategy Technology, Operations etc, so, yeah ,I would say I'm fairly new in the I&D space or DEI space. For the past couple of years and then before that I was in Human Capital consulting at Accenture, kind of doing the standard world warrior consulting model primarily for our domestic and international NGOs and then my life before that I worked in education focusing on education reform and college access for students across the country. Based in Charlotte, married with small kids and yeah, happy to be on the panel and work with all of you.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Excellent. Perfect. Thanks a lot, Sheldon. Johné if you're on, if you can just give a quick introduction of your role, your time at Dollar General that'd be great thank you.

 

Johné Battle [Dollar General]: Thank you, Maneet and welcome to all of my guest panelists. Happy to join you all to have an important conversation today. I’ve been at Dollar General for a year, I am the Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I’ve been doing inside out work for the last 25 years prior to Dollar General worked at Korn Ferry where my major was Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and my minor was Leadership Development. Three words I never want to hear associated with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are initiative, program and event because they all signify an endpoint.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Thank you. Appreciate it, Johné, really appreciate that Jessica, Jessica Rice, if you're on, if you can just give a quick introduction.

 

Jessica Rice [Under Armour]: Hi Maneet. Yes, I'm here and good afternoon everyone. So, I'm Jessica Rice. I'm the global head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Under Armour. I've been with Under Armour about seven years and double-hatted in this role for about five. I was also leading the Talent Development Center of Excellence and now full-time in this role and I'm located in Baltimore where it is storming pretty badly. So, hopefully my connection stays up and running.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Excellent. Perfect. We'll keep that in mind, Jessica. Appreciate that. And then finally Kristan from Chevron, if you could give a quick introduction on yourself.

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]: Hi, I'm Kristan Crapps, I work at Chevron. I've been at Chevron for about 10 years. I manage our Employee Resource Groups and we actually call them Employee Networks at Chevron because they've been around for about 20 years back when people used to call them Employee Networks. So, we've kept that name going but I manage our ERGs as well as provide some governance over our Racial Equity Strategy and several other diversity and inclusion related initiatives that we have throughout Chevron. So, happy to be here. I'm located in Houston, Texas. Started my career in finance and had the pleasure of serving as our Black Employee Network President sometime throughout my tenure at Chevron which led to an opportunity of a lifetime to work in my passion - leading the program here at Chevron.

 

04:48 Overview of ERG Programs

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Excellent. Perfect. Thank you all for those introductions. Those were great. So, one thing I think that would be really important for the audience here is that we if we can get some sort of context and perspective of the overall ERG programs that you oversee. So, things such as the history of ERGs as you had just mentioned, Kristan. Perhaps the percentage of your employee population that is in ERGs as well as the geographical scope if that's North America, if that's worldwide and so forth. So, Kristan so I think you just kind of alluded to that right away. So, Kristan if you want to just go first and just give some overall context for our audience here just so they understand the nature of your program and then I'll go down my list as well.

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]:  Hi, sure. So, thanks Maneet. As I mentioned we actually started our Employee Network programs 20 years ago. So, we just had a really formal celebration with all of our Enterprise Leadership Team of our ERG programs and we started small but have now reached a point where more than 40 percent of our employee base are a part of our ERGs. And so, those are global ERGs, so Global Employee Network programs where we do have lots of structure there. So, you have myself and I actually have a support team. So, I manage kind of strategically where our ERGs are and I have a support team that manages day-to-day operations as well as handling some of the logistics and tool support that we may have associated with these groups. Global as I said and then as we look at it, we have leaders, so we know that we all have ERG leaders but we have a Global Leadership Team that's an Employee Network President and they'll have a whole team of Communication Officers and Treasurers and so forth and then chapter leaders. So, each of our respective chapters around the world also have their own leadership structure that falls in which really allows us to give kind of that that breeding ground to understand how to run a mini organization within our company. So, that just adds to some of the leadership development that our leaders get and so we have more than 100 chapters now circulating worldwide.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Excellent. Perfect. Thanks for that, Kristan. That's very helpful. So, I'll just go in reverse order here. So, Jessica if you just want to give a quick overview of your ERG program even if you have different nomenclature. Whether it's not ERG or TMRGs and so forth, feel free to articulate that as well. Just because I think it's unique, the difference is there.

 

Jessica Rice [Under Armour]:  Yeah, Maneet. I think you knew where I was going because the first thing, I was going to say is we actually call our groups TRGs so Teammate Resource Groups and it's going be be very hard for me to say ERG because I'm so used to saying TRG. So, you know what I'm talking about. So, our first one was established in 2017. It was BEAT which is Black Employees Achieving Together. Then we expanded to 11 and I think we've settled very comfortably at nine and there are about 2000 teammates that are part of our TRGs and that's about 15 percent of our total population and similar to Kristan, we are global, we have chapters that are relevant around the globe. And so, in Latin America, Mexico and Panama and Amsterdam which covers our EMEA region and then in Hong Kong and Shanghai. And Kristan did such a great job talking about the leadership structure of her groups. I won't do that again because it's a very similar structure where we've got Chapter Leads and

Leads within each ERG and then also Executive Sponsors.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. Thank you so much, Jessica. Johné, if you want to go next, just give an overview of your ERG program at Dollar General.

 

Johné Battle [Dollar General]: Sure. Similar to Jessica and Kristan, I won't regurgitate the same information because our structures are set up the same in terms of an executive sponsor etc. But we call them Employee Resource Groups. We're still very early in our journey. We hope to be like Kristan when we grow up. Dollar General sits in 46 states and 75 percent of the United States is within a five mile radius of at least one of our stores. So, we're we're not a global company. We're all North America and we are looking to mature and grow chapters in both our field and distribution centers.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. Thank you, Johné, and finally,Sheldon, do you want to just give a quick overview of your program?

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]: Sure, and before I do that, just again I want to say thank you for the panel and to everyone on this call. So again, you know HR, we call it I&D at Accenture. We put inclusion before the diversity piece, is very important and I know so many people on this call work long hours like really long hours and it's a very emotionally draining role so just a really big thank you to those are on this call because it is a very important role especially what's been happening in our country recently. So, yeah, so at Accenture so ERGs, we do call them, ERGs they started about 20 years ago with our African-American ERG first and at Accenture you know we define ERGs I think similar to my panelists as that intersection of diversity, ethnicity, Gender Disability, Faith, LGBTQ+ etc. Whereas I've seen some other companies have ERGs that kind of span the horizon of both diversity but then also non-diversity. So, for example, the Ski Club or the Running Club. We have those, we have dozens of those type of groups networks but when we talk about ERGs, we mean our I&D ERGs, right. Those that help and relate to one of our Inclusion & Diversity goals so at Accenture.

 

You know, our ERGs exist for kind of three reasons, one is to create a community of people at Accenture, a community among our people. The second one is to help us achieve our I&D goals and then the third piece is to help us support our people and grow our business. And actually, I think that last one is something a lot of companies miss, right. So, they've got the creating the community piece, they've got the achieving the I&D goals but if your ERGs or BRGs or TRGs are not helping to grow the business, serve your clients, then in my opinion they shouldn’t exist, right. Everything that exists at your company should help grow your company in some way shape or form. So that's a big focus for us is you know how do we get our ERGs at the table to make business decisions, to grow our company and serve our clients.

 

You know people have said that Accenture has a somewhat mature model of ERGs. We've been around for over 25 years actually and so we have 11 ERGs in the US, we have 12 in Canada. Many of our ERGs have sub-ERGs. So, we have an Interfaith ERG for example, that also has the various faith ERGs you know Baha'I, Christian, Muslim etc and similar to my panelists our ERGs have that structure where there is a National Executive Sponsor who is a Managing Director, they have a National Lead and then there's also a National Board of Directors. In essence like people that are driving those ERGs and then that replicates at the chapter level. So, at Accenture we have 60000 employees in North America, half of them are in one ERG or another. So about 50 of our membership.

 

The other thing to point out is we do have a global model of ERGs. I'm going to focus on North America because that's kind of my fiefdom. The other thing to point out is that our HR team provides funding for our ERGs to operate and do their business. So, our ERGs, again similar to my peers, they're basically ran like small non-profits. You've got your Leader, your Sponsor, you've got your Board, they have Chapters that replicate that and then HR, we provide funding to those ERGs and then they disseminate that among their chapters every single year. So, yeah so, we've grown, we've got these large groups and then the other thing is that this is a plus one for our leaders meaning they have their day jobs nine to five whatever those hours are and they do this outside of their day job.

 

12:12 How do you incentivize ERG Leaders

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Actually, Sheldon, so that's a great segue into sort of my next set of targeted questions here and maybe we can just tee that up with you. And then I want to call on some other panelists. How are you actually incentivizing your ERG leaders? So, as you just said all these folks have day jobs, they're you know whether they're on the consultant side or in the internal side they have sort of what they need to do for the business but then they're taking on these sort of extracurricular roles, perhaps out of passion or because they want to get leadership exposure and so forth. And there's been a lot of things in the news right now about incentivizing ERG leaders as you can see from companies like Twitter and Linkedin and so forth. So, you know if we could just piggyback on your notes there, you know, what is sort of the incentivization model for your ERG leaders to take on these responsibilities because oftentimes this does require extra work and it's not you know a five-minute task, they obviously spend a lot of time engaging their ERG memberships, creating events, organizing and so forth. So, you know if we could start with you Sheldon, then I'll call on some other panelists as well.

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]: Yeah, absolutely. So, that is a big discussion that we're actually having now is how do we further incentivize our employees. So, the way it works now is again, they've got their day job, they do this outside their day job. So, why do people do this? Passion hands down is the number one reason, right. When you talk to our leaders, you talk about sponsors, they're spending lots of hours doing this work. It's because they truly, truly care and they realize that you know as they climb up the ladder, they've got to grab other people and raise them as well. So, we meet that passion with tools and resources and funding for the ERG.

 

So, as I mentioned as Human Resources, we provides significant funding to each of our ERGs every single year. But we also provide me and my I&D team. So, we provide FTEs that are there to support them through this. We don't want them just figuring these things out on their own and then we provide ample tools and resources. So, you know, we'll talk about the Teleskope platform in a little bit. That's a great tool, digital tool that we use to help them manage their ERGs. We provide like ERG playbooks, we send them to training, we send them to conferences, we actually provide a lot of professional development for some of our ERG leaders. We also do things around recognition and rewards. So, we have something that we call an ERG Rockstar Program that allows some of our distinguished ERG leaders to be noted in their performance process. So, when it's time for promotion or it's time for that talent review cycle there's a special distinction that some of our ERG members may receive that will help them during that talent review cycle. And we are in heavy conversations actually every week now discussing what else can we do to recognize and reward our employees. We know some of our peers are giving monetary awards, some are if you're a chargeable company some are playing with chargeability. So, we're actually looking at a lot of those models now to see how can we better recognize them.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent, yeah, perfect, thanks for that Sheldon and you know I'd like to call on Kristan from Chevron. I think if you could just give some details on how you incentivize your ERG leaders. I know you have a global program. This obviously takes a lot of time out of their own day jobs, but how do you continue to incentivize and continue to grow new leaders within your ERGs and so forth?

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]:  Yeah, so first and foremost it is the hot topic, right? So I think this week in particular compared to any other almost.  We do a lot of the similar things to what Sheldon has mentioned with Accenture. Some of the other things that I really hone in on is the opportunity to engage directly with our senior most leadership on a very regular basis. And that goes beyond just saying oh I had a meeting with our CEO or I had a meeting with you know maybe our Chief Financial Officer. Instead, it's offered as coaching and mentorship from those individuals. And so, all of our 12 employee networks have one of the senior most leaders as their Executive Sponsors of their networks and the majority of them have direct reports into our CEO. So, with that comes the advisor, you got that advisor role but when we walk through onboarding with our Executive Sponsors, one of those clear expectations is to mentor and coach the individuals to which they have been assigned a network or that they're working as a network. So, you get that one-on-one coaching from our senior most leaders which oftentimes turns into informal sponsorship as well as you know the opportunity to speak on what you brought to the table.

 

We have a Recognition and Awards program where we do recognize every year particularly our presidents and then it goes down from there. But we do recognize them through our formal Recognition and Award program and we also send written recognition of all of the accomplishments they had for the year, directly from our Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer which in copy is our CEO and other leaders associated with that organization. So those are some of the things we do.

 

The other things, professional development opportunities, many times getting the opportunity to be a voice that hears about things like our return-to-work program when we're rolling that out, let's run it by our Employee Network Leaders, let's get them in a room and get their feedback. So, getting to be a part of those really early conversations that ultimately end in the results of the way that we move as an organization or a significant impact to that.

 

17:01 How does Dollar General structure ERGs

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  That's excellent. Perfect, thank you so much Kristan and I think those are both great remarks on behalf of Accenture and Chevron. So, I see we do have a question here this is actually targeted for Johné at Dollar General. The question does ask - With so many retail locations, how does Dollar General structure ERGs so people in the stores are able to join and participate? This is actually one of the questions I had on my list here so maybe we can just jump down and sort of take this in real time. I mean I'd also like to call on Jessica after this as well because I know Under Armour has a big retail footprint, distribution centers, fulfilment centers and really the front-line workforce there and how do you include them in your ERGs so Johné if you want to just chime in here just on sort of your plans on rolling this out to store employees getting sort of that frontline Dollar General workforce embedded into ERGs getting them engaged and so forth you can just chime in on sort of your plans and so forth and then I'll jump over to Jessica.

 

Johné Battle [Dollar General: Yeah so, it's a great question, Maneet and it's timely. One of the things I'll tell you is a key part of our plan is the partnership that we have with Teleskope and leveraging the platform that allows for us to be able to easily grow chapters in our field and in our DCs. But the other thing is the blocking and tackling and making sure that it has stickiness once it happens. And so, what we've done is for FY21, we were intentional that on each one of our ERG's leadership boards we brought two leaders along for our field and from our supply chain side of the house that are walking beside our ERG leadership and they're a part of actual events that are taking place now. So, we're in a test and learn mode this year where all of our events whether they be virtual or not have been open for both field and DC and we've seen amazing return on investment at that time because we set records when it's come to virtual event participation. And then the plan is in FY22, each one of our five ERGs will have chapters that are extended out intentionally and the ownership is with those leaders that walk beside our main chapter if you will or our home office chapters if you will this year. So, that's some of the things that we're doing to make sure that we grow at a pace that's sustainable and again that we have stickiness when it happens.

 

19:14 How does Under Armour structure ERGs

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect, that makes perfect sense, Johné.  Jessica, if you'd like to chime in from an Under Armour sort of perspective. I know Under Armour has a lot of distribution centers fulfilment centers perhaps store locations as well. How are you sort of tailoring your ERG programs and your overall DEI program to get in front of your frontline workforce there?

 

Jessica Rice [Under Armour]:  Yeah, it's a really good question. I would say we certainly haven't perfected this but we are working on it. So out of our 14000 teammates, 11000 of those are in our retail stores and distribution centers. So, such a large portion and so we've been really working to figure out what is the appropriate infrastructure to have to reach those field employees and so we've had some real success stories in our distribution centers and really it is more about kind of logistics and communication than it is about anything else. So, when are we scheduling events are we doing it at appropriate times for shift work? Can people attend on their lunch hour?

​

And I think the other thing that we've been really cognizant of is that the majority of the people leading the overarching leadership teams of our TRGS are corporate teammates. So, how do we make sure that group really understands some of the constraints that happen with our frontline workers around when they can, they can't participate, how they need to be communicated to. So, for example our store associates don't have access to Under Armour email so we really have to think about do we post something in the break room what is the most appropriate way to communicate so we've seen an absolute uptick in participation but similar to Johné,  our goal for 2022 is to really integrate more of our retail locations into the infrastructure of our TRGs.

 

20:44 How to promote ERGs within the organization

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Yeah, and you know I think just from a personal experience I think this will have massive ROIs for sort of all companies that can sort of solve this

problem both technically as well as just from a process and communication standpoint because it does sort of bridge this gap from frontline to corporate right and you know who what better candidate is there than someone who's on the front line of your workforce, who's in front of your customers, who's actually checking products out in retail store locations and so forth, to be able to sort of allow them to build these connections with their corporate counterparts, build these relationships and create this natural segue that I think we'll have massive ROI impacts for the organizations that do it right. That's great. So, my next question here just you want to pivot real quick just to the overall promotion of ERGs. How are you promoting these ERGs within your organizations? Does that include you know including ERGs in your onboarding for new hires and so forth so I think we can have a great conversation here. I'd like to ask Sheldon from Accenture if you could sort of chime in from the Accenture lens on how do you promote your ERGs? how do you get in front of as many employees as possible especially with the scope of Accenture and having such a sort of workforce with so much movement, people are going to client sites, people are sort of all over the place, you don't have this sort of centralized office everywhere and so forth. How do you actually go about promoting this to ensure that employees know what ERGs exist, how to join them and so forth?

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]: Yeah, well you know there's a great tool out there developed by Teleskope and you know to be honest a lot of us are smiling on the call because it really was a game changer. So, you know Accenture, we're the intersection of technology and business right almost everything we do has a tech component to it. We developed lots of technology but we actually still looked out in the market for a tool that could help us manage and centralize our ERG efforts and we stumbled upon Teleskope. So, what Teleskope has allowed us to do is to have that one-stop shop for all things ERG. In the past, so a year ago, it was all over the place. Some of our ERGs are using Excel, some are using Powerpoint, some are using paper. Different locations around the country, we're using different processes to sign up for ERGs.

 

So, a perfect example, our Native American ERG, which is one of our smaller ERGs, they don't have a chapter in every single city. So, you forget they don't have a chapter in Austin, Texas. So, if you were in Austin, you may not have heard about the Native American ERG. It just wasn't a consistent process. So, by moving to one platform where all of our ERGs are located it made it a lot easier. So now every single new joiner at Accenture and there are thousands every year, learn about our ERGs within their first two days because now we have a one stop shop place to go to. So, yeah, so we do infuse it into our new joiner orientation within their first two days. But even at the recruiting point, like starting earlier in the talent life cycle, we have materials that we are giving our recruiters that are going to conferences, going to campuses, that not only summarize our I&D strategy but that also mention our ERGs. So, we have a cool Youtube video that highlights our ERGs. So, we have materials where they're learning that this is something that we care about from day one. And then when they enter the doors, they're going to hear about them and then they're going to constantly be reminded about our ERGs.

 

So, one other quick analogy, so in college, you know, we had fraternities and sororities on campus and they ran everything on campus. Every party, every community service event, you name it, was hosted by one of our fraternities and sororities. At Accenture, it's very similar. Our ERGs run the social scene, the community service scene, virtually all of our events happen through our ERGs. So, you're going to hear about them one way or the other. You're going to join one or the other and it is very important to get that out there up front so that they can be part of those communities.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Yeah perfect.  Kristan, I'd love to call on you again just for sort of on this same topic of promoting your ERGs, getting new hires on board, into it your intern classes, and so forth within Chevron. What is your sort of perspective on this and lens on how you're actually promoting your ERGs?

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]:  Yeah, so one of the biggest ways that I think is most relevant right now is actually one of our ERG's, Black Employee Network, actually created an Adopt an Intern Program which affords all of our interns an opportunity to automatically be partnered with a mentor that is a part of an employee network. So, through that membership you sign up to be a mentor and then all of our interns are kind of auto-opted in unless they desire not to be to automatically be assigned. So, that's our first way of saying hey these are our ERGs and in all of their onboarding sessions and things that they have I'm always on schedule or someone from my team is scheduled to present to talk about our ERGs.

 

And similar to the analogy that Sheldon made, you know, I think of it also as when you're in college, I’m in every club organization, I'm doing all these things, you know they really look great in that same energy and passion and spirit is still there. So, when I get to the workplace, I'm still looking for some way to also fulfil my passion or something that I'm excited about just along with doing my work and learning and growing. And so, our ERGs really provide that opportunity similar to what Sheldon was saying. And so, the ERGs are always on it. Trust me it could be us bringing on a new partner or bringing on a new organization, they're at me before I can even come to them to approach to say, when are we going to get a chapter started in Pasadena, when are we going to get a chapter started here, and so it's really a joint effort between the leaders working together with my team to make sure that we really get the message out.

 

But when we're back in person, Chevron's not yet back in the office full time, but when we're back in the office we usually have membership drives multiple times a year that allow the opportunity for all of our groups our networks to come together. We have 12 to come together and actively recruit and tell about the organization and what they have to offer.

 

 

26:26 ERG KPIs and Metrics

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. So, I do want to shift gears here I know one of the big topics that a lot of people are probably interested in is learning about KPIs. This is sort of a huge question that everyone's trying to figure out how to report your KPIs? What are sort of key metrics you're looking at? What does your senior leadership within your organizations want to see? What does the Board want to see? So, I'd love to call on Johné first, from a Dollar General standpoint, where you kind of say in your role, you know, what do your superiors want to see? What does the senior leadership within Dollar General want to see from a DEI as well as an ERG perspective?

 

Johné Battle [Dollar General]: Yeah, Maneet. Thank you. So from a KPI standpoint, one of the first things I will say is when it comes to our ERGs, we value the intent because we believe that the intent should line up with the impact. And what I mean by we value the intent for every officer in our company is it is a non-negotiable that they have to be what we call a D&I ambassador and as a D&I ambassador in our company every officer is responsible for goals upon the three buckets - one is Develop to Lead, where every officer is responsible for underrepresented talent and being able to come alongside that talent in the spirit of development for a full year. And this is sponsorship, this is not mentorship but advocacy. So, the onus for the development of that underrepresented talent lives with the sponsor who is that officer.

 

The second thing is every officer as a part of our D&I ambassador program is responsible for what we call ‘Leadership on the Move’ and Leadership on the Move is where we are to know from the standpoint of officers having a bank of resources and beyond these sort of scheduled transformation workshops that everybody gets throughout the organization all year long. They have to leverage these resources and we measure it because you already know what gets measured is what matters and what gets measured is what gets done. We measure them when we talk about Leadership on the Move and how they interact and take these learnings and it's an incredible bank of resources - different books to podcasts to movies. If we take the movie Hidden Figures, it's broken down with the leadership discussion guide for not only leaders to have their teams be able to go see it but then to come back and have these discussions and debriefs and talk about what were the barriers and the headwinds that underrepresented talent, women in this particular case, actually faced and you know how do we make sure that those barriers don't exist within Dollar General.

 

And then the third piece, that is critical, that's directly linked to our ERGs, is what we call good faith efforts. Every officer it is mandatory and a part of their goal that they must attend, sponsor, and participate in at least one ERG event throughout the course of our fiscal year. So, we're intentional about making sure that we link up there. And then the other thing that we look at through the lens of our ERGs is each ERG at the beginning of the year was responsible for presenting a business plan and within that business plan beyond what they do from a community activism standpoint and from a volunteerism standpoint. We were intentional about they must be linked to a business paying point and come alongside as a part of the solution for It. So, it was kind of like in Kristan’s case, an ERG, for example is intentional about building the bridge with HBCUs and being responsible for that mentorship program and that internship program. So, we're being intentional about bringing interns in, they mentor them throughout the summer, and then the AA ERG is the one that ensures that they have a capstone event in front of leadership at the end of the summer. And then after that capstone event, the intention is to offer them early career opportunities.

 

And then what we did was partner with Inroads and the AA ERG overseas that relationship and so in cases of underrepresented talent, not only do they get an entry-level career opportunity, they get a scholarship. So, imagine going into your senior year and you know that you're going to have a job when you graduate and you got some money to help cover expenses along the way.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  That's phenomenal. I appreciate that Johné.  I'd love to call on Jessica, from Under Armour’s perspective, I know you have sort of a solid team underneath you that helps manage your ERGs from a DEI perspective, but what are sort of the key KPIs that you want to see year over year from your ERGs? Does that mean growth in terms of programming and so forth? So, Jessica if you wouldn't mind chiming in on some of the KPIs you look for that'd be much appreciated.

 

Jessica Rice [Under Armour]:  Sure. I think maybe the first thing that's important to say is that we run our TRGs in what's called the 4C framework. So, we do a 4C assessment annually. If you don't know what the 4C stands for it stands for Culture, Community Commerce and Career. And if that's a new term to you can Google it, there's lots of information out there. But it is a really great strategic framework that helps with the operation of ERGs. So, we do an assessment every year that really focuses on the value that the TRG is bringing to the general body. So, that's really the kind of the main assessment that we do around metrics.

 

But other things that we look at is similar to what Johné was saying about the planning document. These are listed at the beginning of the year. We do periodic check-ins and at the end of the year we expect each TRG to report out and so this is membership growth, so really focused on new members, event attendance, so making sure that we

have not just quantity but also quality events and people are attending and really finding value. We also apply for external recognition and awards, that's important to our TRG that we're doing that. And then also making sure that from an overarching D&I perspective, one of the things that I'm most interested in, which doesn't get run through our TRGs, we do it from the D&I strategy or the D&I team, is engagement and retention of our TRG members versus our other teammates because really what we want to see is are the TRGs adding value to the organization as a whole from an engagement perspective.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. Thank you so much, Jessica. That was great. Sheldon if you want to chime in, just from an Accenture standpoint, what does leadership look for? What do you look for out of your ERG leaders? Any of the KPIs that you track? Would love to be able to share that with the audience here.

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]: Yeah, so Accenture, we're actually rolling out a new or an updated maturity curve around ERGs and there's four pillars to it. You know, the first pillar, because we recognize that all of our ERGs are not the same place, some are smaller some are newer, so we actually have a score card. We're rolling out a new scorecard as well that's going to measure our ERGs against this maturity curve.

 

So, the first pillar is around creating a community, right? That is kind of the base model is creating a community for their people. Every ERG, no matter what level they are, how new they are, at a minimum need to be creating a community for their people. The second one is around cultural programming and let me back up. So, with creating a community, what does that mean, you know? Having membership, tracking numbers, so what are the metrics we use we look at numbers, we look at membership growth, we look at how many chapters they're having, are they growing over time? So, that kind of falls into that creating a community piece.

 

The second one is around cultural programming. So, we look at number of events, how many events are across ERGs - that's a big one that we're looking at. As well as, are they being good stewards of the funding that we give them. Because we have Teleskope, we're actually able to track some really cool data. So, we have a whole Giving Platform where people are donating hours or time to various community service events. We can now cross-reference that data with our ERG members. So, we can tell a story such as, you know, the Chicago chapter of the Women's ERG volunteered this number of hours this year and gave this amount of money to various community service efforts. So again, first pillar is around just creating that community for their people, the second one is around programming, the third level of the curve is around moving our I&D goals. So, you know how many events are they having related to I&D.

 

Again, because of Teleskope we can actually track recruiting efforts. So, we can tell a story such as the Pride Chapter of San Antonio referred this number of people and of those referrals this number was hired, right. So, we're able to track again, progress against referrals and bringing people into the firm and then, you know, as Jessica mentioned external recognition as well. So that falls under the I&D pillar and then the last tier which again, I'm not all of our ERGs are at yet, is around actually again serving our clients, growing our business. So, are our ERGs sitting at tables with different business units, are they, I mean, a perfect example we just had, one of our business units that developed a whole suite of new job descriptions and they were asking our ERGs to look at them to make sure they're culturally relevant and culturally sensitive. So, again, just different tiers and we grade our ERGs kind of based off of those tiers.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect, thank you, Sheldon and then finally I'd love Kristan, for you to chime in on this as well I think this is a really important topic to understand it's great to have so many different industry verticals here represented. So, Kristan if you could chime in from a Chevron lens, what are sort of the key KPIs that you track amongst your sort of core DEI team that you're in charge of? As well as, you know, on the broader perspective, what does your leadership want to see what does the CDO at Chevron want to see and so forth.

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]:  Yeah, so it's a great question. I think it's tiered for us. So, we'll look at overall kind of operational goals and success of, you know, the overall employee network group or program. There were able to look at some of our employee survey results and compare those against our employee network members to see kind of where they rank in terms of those things that we look at. So, we're able to look at that at a higher level in terms of our executive sponsors, our management sponsors. We're getting active feedback from our employee network leaders about how they're doing and you know our CEO wants to engage and know what that feedback may be, what where are the opportunities, and then we look at it you know some of the things that have already been mentioned - how many events are they having, what's their membership look like, did we see a huge decline in our membership, things like that that'll allow us to see some indicators of things we need to delve deeper into.

 

And then the final tier that I'll talk about is to the respective employee network. So, each one of them does build a business plan similar to what Johné said, and in that business plan is a requirement to identify what good looks like for them every year. So, is it a percentage of satisfaction of your members, is it how many events that you're able to throw, is it you know how much community engagement you have, and from those things they're able to make their own comparisons to see what their success is and we're able to see that as well. So, it goes kind of from the top down in terms of what we look at all the way up from senior leadership all the way down to our individual employee network members.

 

37:02 How are ERGs engaged to respond to current events

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. Now I think that was a great range of KPIs across a multitude of industries here, different types of business and so forth. You know, one of the questions that I'd like to throw out here for the group, so there's obviously, as Sheldon mentioned earlier on in the panel, a lot of things going on in the world right now. A lot of things affecting different types of communities. You can just watch the news and every day there's something new.

 

And so, my question to the panel is how are you engaging your ERGs to respond to these types of current events, you know, be it political, be it you know geographical or so forth. How are you equipping them to do the right programming, ensuring that the programming going out is timely, it's reviewed, it's not going to offend anyone else, because a lot of these groups are, you know, in very particular situations now. So, you know, Sheldon and I mean you and I have had several conversations about this during our syncs. I'd love to start with you and then we can go down through the panelists but you know within Accenture how are you empowering your ERGs to respond to these types of events? But how are you also reviewing some of the content they're putting out to ensure that that it's well-rounded and it's well said.

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]:  Yeah, let me say if my panelists have figured this one out and solved it, I'll take the solution. Because, yeah, we here talk about this a lot. It is, I mean, we know, we are in a very complex time right now and I mean, I feel we've been in a complex time for hundreds of years, but we're really at a complex time right now. And being in this space it is challenging, it's taxing, it's emotional and you know at Accenture we see our people as family and whenever a family member is hurt in your family you reach out to them, you take care of them, you give them space to vent. And it's the same thing at Accenture, right. So, you know when our Asian community is experiencing a pain and when our African-American community, our Pride community our Jewish, our Muslim communities are experiencing, that one thing that almost always happens is we do create a space for our people to be able to express themselves. We create a safe space.

 

Now there's guidelines around that. We make sure there's always an HR person in those conversations but when something does happen in the community, typically our first response is, first let's reach out for safety. Let's make sure our employees are safe, if there is something going on and if it's active. But then you know oftentimes we want to create a safe space for people to be able to talk, hear what they're feeling, hear what they need. Our top leadership, oftentimes, our CEOs are part of those conversations listening to our people, hearing what's going on and then from there we decide you know what's the appropriate action is. Does this warrant a response from our CEO internally or from our leadership internally? Does it warrant response externally? Are we posting things in social media? And if you google us, you'll find a lot of posted statements from our both North America and our Global CEO. We have a very robust process about this, my Marketing team is involved, our Legal team is always involved, our HR team is involved, Employee Relations, in case people have an instance where they need to discuss what happened, that maybe needs to be followed on. So, it is a lot of effort, every time something like this happens in the community and I'll be honest, we don't have the silver bullet of what to do each time. We have a general process that we follow but I'd love to hear from our other panels as well like, you know, what what's been working for you, what hasn't?

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Definitely. That's great, Sheldon. I'd love to call on Jessica. Jessica, if you'd like to chime in from an Under Armour perspective. I think this is a very important question, it's very timely. So, I do want to give all the panelists some time to chime in on this. So, Jessica, if you'd love to chime in, that'd be much appreciated.

 

Jessica Rice [Under Armour]:  It's very timely and I think Sheldon captured it when he said it's complex and there's no silver bullet. I feel like I've been saying this a lot, as people will say, well what's the best practice, and I keep saying there is no best practice. We are in a new time and place. So, we're defining the best practice right now. And so, similar to what Sheldon said, we have a very cross-functional team that looks at these issues whether it's Marketing, Corporate communications, Legal. I think where the TRGs fit in for us is, number one - we expect a feedback loop, right. So, if there's something happening in their community that they feel we should address, whether internally or externally, we create a safe space that they can come to and we can talk about that and have a discussion about the best way to address what's happening. And then also, you know, two-way feedback is that if we feel as an organization, there's something we should speak about that's happening in their community, we are absolutely not going to do that without gathering feedback and making sure that they've provided input into our response to make sure that it feels appropriate for that particular community. But absolutely complex that, you know, I don't have the you know the answer that's going to meet everybody's needs because I think each organization also has a unique approach to it because of the nuances within that particular organization.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  That's right. Johné, Dr. Battle I'd love to call on you for this. If you have any sort of input from a Dollar General lens, we'd love to hear sort of your

views on, you know, how to handle you know just the current climate that we're in? How to leverage your ERGs to respond to those but how to make sure that there's sort of some corporate governance on top to make sure that the messaging is, right. So, Johné, if you'd love to chime in that'd be great.

 

Johné Battle [Dollar General]: Yeah, so, I think the first thing is, this starts with what does your partnership with your ERGs look like. And you know I'm sure, you know, all of the panelists, would agree this is one of those things where we have to agree on the destination but we negotiate the past along the way. And it just depends what the topic is, what that negotiation looks like and sure, yes, we got all of the basic governance in place, you know Labor Relations is involved, Legal is involved in terms of a review, certainly HR and then our CEO ultimately. But it's been great partnerships

because one of the first things we were intentional about doing very early on is creating listening sessions that were centered around nothing but myself, our Chief People Officer and the CEO and all we did with the ERGs had the platform, they had the floor, they could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, and we leaned in and then the CEO made some commitments to them in terms of some things that we would do. And so, I think a lot of it is in these challenging times, our ERGs feel empowered to address some of the things.

 

So, for example, in Black History Month, the AA ERG talked about Black Wall Street. And these are conversations, that typically wouldn't have happened before in the past, but our AA next week is having John Hope Bryant come in and talk about fiscal literacy and the importance of why especially for us where our stores said many of our customers have way more month than they do money. So, we want to come alongside and be a part of the solution of how do we turn 500 credit score communities into 700 credit score communities. So, the ERGs are immersed in the solution for our communities and for our associates that live and work in those communities, in those distribution centers by offering free credit counseling to help folks you know figure out what they can and can't do and how they can get better fiscally. So, these are some of the things that I think that is really important for us and again we all agree on the destination we have to negotiate the past along the way.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  That's excellent. Kristan, would you mind chiming in on this question as well? Just sort of how are you engaging your ERGs based on sort of the current world events if you can chime in and that'd be great. We do have some questions here, so I want to save about five minutes on the tail end of after you respond, Kristan, just to answer these questions. But if you can just chime in on this particular question from a Chevron lens that'd be much appreciated.

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]:  Sure. Okay I'm going to get this all in in one minute because that's what we have until we we're at the five-minute mark. But similar to Johné, we have a Chairman's Inclusion Council that I facilitate. So, all twelve of our Employee Network Presidents do engage directly with our Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, our Chief Human Resources Officer, our CEO and then all of his direct reports actually engage in this session. We have it three times a year, and in those meetings, we had already started this dialogue process well before the murder of George Floyd pushed us into a whole new arena. I think everybody will agree. But there you could raise any issue that you may have. It was really leadership's opportunity to get a real pulse of the organization and what was going on. So, we were talking about things that at that time weren't specific. So, we were talking about remote work and what that would look like two years ago before we knew that any of this was going to happen, right? We would say oh it's concerning because of these things, so, that's one aspect.

 

I think the other one is also for us that we have an internal social networking platform. And on that platform, our CEO really made the first efforts to start talking freely about topics, which really opened the door for everyone. So, as we've seen the Stop AAPI Hate movement, we've seen the Black Lives Matter movement and so many other things that have happened, even when we were having elections and so forth.  Our employees have a free-for-all to go there and express how they may feel, to have active dialogue and it's been something that has really been a game changer for us.

 

Another one was our Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer started really provocative topics two and a half or so years ago. So, we were talking about things like immigration and ‘I am not my hair’ and things like that both in our social media, I'm sorry, in our social platform and then also via email. So, we were having those kinds of dialogues that made people really comfortable. Now, when we think about the messaging and how it goes out, I want to make sure I'm clear here, we do have guardrails in place. We do use Teleskope’s products and through that we do have workflow processes to ensure that those messages that may be really passionate, you know, and we want to get it out but that it's going through the proper level of review. So, we're sending it through, you know, it might be a Chapter level member who's passionate about something that puts out an email. Well, that Employee Network President or some Lead designee from the Global Leadership Team is also going to have to put eyes on it and so will someone from my team, right. And so, that three-tier approach allows us to catch things, not all the time, let me be clear, not all the time but for the most part it allows us to catch things before maybe some more passion dialogue that's not necessarily aligned with the company's position on things or with our values may be put on the front street right there.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  That's great I really appreciate all the panels answering that question. Tough question to answer, no real silver bullet but the more dialogue you can get on the floor that I think you know we'll get to some solution at some point. So, I do want to jump over to these questions. We have about four minutes left. So, the first question is from Tim. Can anyone on the panel answer how often do you add new members to your council or sub-committees? So, Kristan, why don't you chime in here. I know, you know, you have a very large program, global footprint. How often are you switching out your leaders? What's sort of the cadence there?

 

Kristan Crapps [Chevron]:  Yeah, so our President's role is actually a multi-year commitment. So, we bring in people in the Vice Presidency role and they are there for two years usually. They're responsible for some signature programs, for the employee network group and so they really work those programs and support the president as they may need and then they transition for a two-year term as president.

 

The other roles either at the Chapter level or Global Leadership Team levels, we like to see a two-to-three-year rotation but there's a lot more leniency there. As you all know, with people changing we're a global company people are moving around and such you want to make sure that you know if the folks at a necessary location want to have a Chapter and there's a leader willing to lead, we're totally supportive of being there as long as they need to in order to see that success. But the presidency roles and our VP role do rotate every two years or so, to ensure that we are getting fresh perspective there and really also allowing those development opportunities that come to go to other people as well.

 

48:40 How to measure education about DEI

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. So, let's just jump down to the last question here, about two minutes left. So, this is from Jane - How can we measure education? We're trying to do DEI education but don't know what to measure other than attendance. We want to know if training is effective? Johné, Dr. Battle I'd love to call on you for this one. What are your thoughts around this? How do you measure education other than attendance? What are the other things you want to look at from a training perspective?

 

Johné Battle [Dollar General]:  Yes, so for me it's not training, it's transformation. Transformation will have a direct correlation to behaviors. Now in the beginning, the behaviors we reward are the behaviors that people will repeat. But we want to make sure that we actually align our reward system with the outcomes that we want. So our workshops are considered transformation workshops because there's an expectation come out of them that we'll see a shift in behavior and we measure and reward that.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  Excellent. Perfect. Sheldon, I’d also love for you to chime in on this. I know Accenture does a lot around D&I trainings and things like that. How are you measuring sort of D&I education within Accenture?

 

Sheldon Maye [Accenture]:  We do. We actually are. I just wrote a tool for our clients and guys I'm going to use, you know, lay terms here. It actually measures you know how woke you are on the spectrum, right? So, you know, think about it as, you know, you're an employee, you're hearing about what's going on, you care about what's going on but you don't really know how or where to get engaged. So, you take this assessment, pretty robust assessment and it'll place you on a spectrum of kind of how woke you are on that spectrum. So, even if you're an African-American and the questions are leaning towards the African-American community, maybe you're very aware of the African-American struggle but maybe you're not aware of the Black Pride

struggle, right? So, it really does kind of place you on that and then make suggestions based off where you're at, where you are on that. So, that's just one tool. Of course, we have an LMS, Learning Management system and whatnot. But, you know, I think exactly like Dr. Battle said it's got to be on transformation and that's a that's a longer-term journey as well.

 

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]:  That's right. So, we are at time here. I do just want to have some closing remarks of all of our panelists. Kristan, Johné, Jessica, Sheldon, thank you so much for taking the time out today to have this conversation. I know our audience here probably had a lot of value, a lot of great insights gleaned from this. I do just want to thank everyone. I want to thank everyone who attended, the panel, just from an attendee standpoint for listening in to our panelists here. So, thank you very much, really appreciate it. So, Charlene, back to you.

 

Charlene [Opal Group]: Alright, thank you, guys. I really love the different perspectives and enjoyed hearing about, you know, the idea and the path and strategies behind the transformation and more importantly I think a lot of people are curious about the technology that you guys have all touched on, in terms of the relation for measurement and outcomes. And so, I think that was very helpful. Really a pleasure. We are so honored to have all of you guys speaking. So, on behalf of Opal Group. Thank you guys so much.