DiversityNursing Blog

Four Innovative Initiatives to Attract and Retain Diverse Women

By Tina Vasquez for Evolved Employer

Recently, Working Mother Magazine released its 2011 list of the best places to work for multicultural women – essentially, a survey of the availability and usage of diversity programs, as well as the accountability of the managers who oversee them at top corporations. For the fifth year in a row, Pepsico has been named number one, along with with 23 other companies, all of which are committed to supporting women of color with strong diversity, leadership, and education programs. Here are four of the most innovative initiatives included on 2011 list, that help advance and retain diverse women.

IBM
IBM’s cutting edge Reverse Mentoring pilot program turned mentoring on its head. Ten senior executives were given the opportunity to choose a culture they wanted to learn more about and for 10 months, and multicultural women (who were primarily non-executives) from these cultures acted as their mentors, helping them better understand cultural differences. The need for the program was identified as a key initiative of the Multicultural Women’s Group at the company, whose mission it is to attract, retain, and develop women through mentoring, networking, fostering a sense of community, and exchanging information.

According to Angela Archon, IBM’s VP of systems and technology, the program promoted cultural sensitivity and adaptability and demonstrated the impact of globalization and why culture matters.

“The hallmark of the program was to increase knowledge and sensitivity around cultural differences and continuously improve global collaboration. It helped dispel myths; it provided clarity to issues related to stereotyping; and it increased cultural awareness,” Archon said. “Executive mentees gained knowledge about their mentor’s culture and how business is done in that culture and the multicultural women who served as mentors had the opportunity to build a relationship with an IBM executive and enhance their leadership capabilities.”

Deloitte
It should come as no surprise that the ever impressive Deloitte was featured on Mother’s list for the sixth year in a row.

This year, two of Deloitte’s programs were spotlighted on the list: Navigation to Excellence and the Leadership Acceleration Program. After an internal survey of almost 4,000 multicultural employees, the firm found that multicultural women desired more formal sponsorship, so Deloitte launched its Navigation to Excellence pilot program, a one-year program that matches female managers and senior managers of color with leaders who help them orchestrate a career plan, gain access to key assignments, and enhance their knowledge of what it takes to advance. The 18-month Leadership Acceleration Program even allows female partners and principals to shadow their sponsors on the job, receiving intensive mentoring and coaching.

To continue moving these types of initiatives forward, the firm has quietly invested $300 million towards the creation of a state-of-the-art learning and leadership development center that will open its doors this fall after two years of construction.

According to Barbara Adachi, the National Managing Principal for Deloitte’s award-winning Women’s Initiative, it was never the firm’s intention to be a leader, but awards and recognition such as those given by Working Mother, inspires them to keep moving forward.

“We’re our biggest critics and we’re our biggest motivators. We don’t do this for the publicity. Diversity is a business imperative here. I recently read that half the population will be comprised of minorities in 2050 and I strongly believe that by being diverse, we attract the top talent in the market and we better serve our clients,” Adachi said. “We’re not doing this because it’s the right thing to do, but because this is the way business should be done.”

Chubb Group of Insurance Companies
This is the third time Chubb has been featured on Working Mother’s list, but the company has a long-standing commitment to promoting diversity with decades old programs and initiatives in place. According to Trevor Gandy, Chubb’s chief diversity officer, in order to form lasting business relationships with customers and become a true global leader in the industry, the company must understand its customer’s “diverse cultures and decisional processes- and not merely their languages.” To do so, the company strives to create a diverse workplace through programs such as their Count Me In: A Culture of Inclusion micro inequities program. The program began over 10 years ago and aims to help the company educate their workforce on the often small details and behaviors that help build an atmosphere in which all employees feel they have a voice.

Chubb also has a 29-year-old Minority Development Council whose mission is to advance the company’s business objectives by fostering the career development of people of color into leadership roles. Even more impressive, the company’s Women of Color strategy strengthens the bonds between women of color and their managers by providing them with meaningful feedback and structured development plans. The overriding goal, according to Gandy, is to prepare the company’s female multicultural employees to compete for leadership positions.

CA Technologies
Like Chubb, CA Technologies firmly believes that their business relationships in more than 140 countries drives their commitment to workplace diversity and it enables them to create, support, and sell the best IT management software.

The company’s Women in Technology Mentoring program is geared towards female employees that are in technical and quasi-technical roles within the company’s technology and development organization. The program was established to ensure that female employees are provided with the appropriate environment, knowledge, and sponsorship to achieve their full potential within the company. The company also supports the pursuit of higher education and provides up to $5,250 a year in financial assistance to eligible employees completing undergraduate and graduate level courses. CA Technologies also offers 15,000 online courses that employees can access. An adoption assistance program includes reimbursement of adoption-related expenses up to a maximum of $5,000 per child and $10,000 per family within a two-year period.

CA Technologies also aims to help working parents, so nearly 30 percent of the company’s North American employees participate in a full-time telecommuting or work from home program. The company also has Global Marketing and Finance associate rotation programs that were developed as a way to attract and develop entry level candidates and enable them to jump start their professional career with structured training programs, job shadowing, and access to mentors.

According to CA Technology’s VP of human resources, Beth Conway, the company is focused on fostering diversity both inside and outside the company.

“In addition to our efforts within the company, we’re also an active partner of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the impact of women on all aspects of technology,” Conway said. “We also sponsor ABI’s annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in the U.S. and India. We’re dedicated to helping the leaders of tomorrow develop their talents and career paths by providing and encouraging a collaborative working environment.”

from Jacob Braude is vice president for strategic planning and director of the Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Lab at the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness for Forbes.com

Health and wellness are becoming big all across marketing. Even carmakers are getting into the act. Ford, for instance, just announced plans to partner with WellDoc to build mobile health sensors into its cars. In the future your Focus won’t just get you from here to there; it will also monitor your glucose levels, adapt to a high pollen count, and even remind you to take your medicine.

But in the rush to make the most of health and wellness, there is a danger that companies will miss one of the most important aspects of wellness. It’s not technology, or supplemental ingredients, or even medicine. It’s friends.

In a talk he gave at the TED conference in 2006, Dr. Dean Ornish, who first became well known for talking up the benefits of diet and exercise in fighting heart disease, told a story about a year he spent studying under a well-known swami. As Dr. Ornish recalled it, the two of them were speaking to a room full of medical students when someone asked the swami to talk about the difference between illness and wellness. The swami went to the board at the front of the room and wrote “Illness” and “Wellness.” Then he circled the I in “Illness” and the We in “Wellness.”

It was a simple and profound way to make a point, and a recent series of studies have proven him right. Researchers have shown that what I call “we-ness” affects all aspects of our health and wellness, from how likely we are to survive killer diseases to how likely we are to carry some extra weight and how generally satisfied we are with our lives.

In one survey of almost 3,000 nurses diagnosed with breast cancer, researchers discovered that women who had fewer than 10 close friends were four times more likely to die of the disease than women with 10 or more close friends. That’s an increase in survival rate that any pharmaceutical company would be thrilled with. In another study, of men in Sweden, researchers discovered that the leading risk factor for heart attack after smoking was having only a few friends. More recent research has demonstrated that people living with a lifelong condition like heart disease do better if they share their experiences with others going through the same thing—even if those people aren’t their friends.

Having friends isn’t just about long life. It’s also about quality of life. Highly publicized work by James Fowler and Dr. Nicholas Christakis found that having a friend who became obese made you 57% more likely to become obese as well. Researchers are discovering that both good and bad habits spread socially—not just weight issues but all aspects of health and wellness, including dietary and exercise habits and stress levels. The importance of friends to a person’s health and wellness has become so accepted that in a March 2011 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. surgeon general said, “We can’t look at health in isolation. It’s not just in the doctor’s office. If you have a healthy community, you have a healthy individual.”

Given all that, it’s not surprising that a study by the RAND Center for the Study of Aging identified “social contacts and family” as the No. 1 factor affecting life satisfaction. This was a robust study, conducted in both the U.S. and the Netherlands. There were differences between the two countries in other life satisfaction elements, such as job, income, and daily activities, but the people of both countries agreed that social contacts and family had the greatest effect on how satisfied they felt.

Fiat’s new eco:Drive system makes the most of the feel-good aspect of we-ness. It began with a wellness product that lets you in put your driving habits to a program that will teach you to blow less carbon into the environment by changing the way you drive. It became a we-ness product when Fiat created Eco:Ville, a virtual town modeled on the company’s hometown of Turin. Software permits you to join Eco:Ville, but only if you’ve changed the way you drive and improved your carbon footprint.

Another marketing-related innovation that builds on the connection between we-ness and everyday health and wellness is the Nike+ system. Nike took a health product—smart running shoes that can record your distance and pace and sync the data to your iPod—and made it a we-ness product by incorporating massive social integration in the form of running teams, geographic challenges and automatic posting of runs to social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Asthmapolis, an organization that is just getting off the ground, connects we-ness to improving health for chronically ill patients by attaching a small GPS-enabled device to rescue inhalers. With today’s medications, asthma can often be well controlled but isn’t, because people rely too much on their rescue inhalers. Using Asthmapolis technology, whenever someone uses their inhaler, the time and location of use are recorded, creating a searchable map and timeline of their treatment habits that can be shared with friends, family, and physicians.

All these innovations make use of social technologies to weave we-ness into products that have a flavor of health or wellness. But we-ness doesn’t mean just plugging social media into whatever you’re selling. Coke recently rolled out special vending machines in Argentina to promote International Friendship Day. Most of us don’t associate Coke with health and wellness (sorry, Coke), but the company’s smart use of we-ness deserves to be recognized. The vending machines in Argentina were so tall that only by getting a boost from a friend could you put money in. When you did, you were rewarded with two Cokes—one for you and one for your partner.

We-ness is a part of all of our lives, so much a part that we sometimes take for granted just how good connecting with other people feels. Research proves that it doesn’t just feel good; it’s good for us. If you’re in the health and wellness market, or you’re ready to take the plunge, you will do well to include some aspect of it into what you’re selling.