Our focus on Inclusion and Diversity has been sustained for nearly two decades — led by our board of directors and personally championed by President and CEO Daniel J. Loepp. Our employees demonstrated their strong commitment to a culture of inclusion in 2021 through attending more than 180 Inclusion and Diversity learning sessions, participating as members and volunteer leaders of the company’s employee resource networks and volunteering as Inclusion and Diversity champions. In 2021:
- The Office of Health and Health Disparities was fully implemented and a health equity strategy with five focus areas was developed
- Juneteenth was added as a corporate holiday
- 90% of new employees completed required cultural competency learning sessions
- 92% of leaders completed required unconscious bias education
- Ten employee resource networks were sustained with 2,136 total employee members. This represents 28% total workforce participation.
- 100% of employees participated in achieving divisional goals for inclusion and diversity
- A new cross cultural coaching program was implemented
Leadership & Accountability
We recognize that leaders have a significant responsibility to promote a culture of inclusion. In our third year of the company’s “Be Inclusive” campaign, we focused on this responsibility and challenged leaders to make the pledge to Be Inclusive. More than 700 leaders made the pledge. Unconscious bias education was also implemented as a requirement for all leaders in 2021. The session emphasized the importance of understanding that we all have biases, the need to recognize our biases, and the responsibility to take action and address them as needed. Ninety-two percent of leaders completed the learning session in 2021.
Building an Inclusive and Diverse Workforce
In 2021, we increased our focus on transparency to underscore the importance of the diversity representation of our workforce. We evaluated programs and practices in how and where we recruit, what our workplace looks like, talent development to encourage retention, and how we can continue to build a diverse succession pipeline. Our action items included:
- Expanding the reporting of our workforce representation
- Including aggregate reporting on diverse candidate recruiting funnel
- Identifying, evaluating and addressing diversity representation gaps in divisions
- Expanding participation in coaching programs to strengthen growth, development and the diversity of the pipeline for promotion
- Expanding recruiting efforts for people of color to include five professional organizations, three historically black colleges and universities and three community colleges
- Expanding recruitment efforts for LGBTQ+ and veterans
