150 executives commit to fostering diversity and inclusion

NEW YORK

Tim Ryan had been the US chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers for about a week last year when five police officers in Dallas were killed by a sniper during a protest over police shootings of African-Americans in Minnesota and Louisiana.

A company email to reassure the accounting firm’s employees drew a response that stayed with Ryan.

“The sender wrote that when he came to work, the silence about what happened was deafening,” Ryan recalled in an interview. “I knew this was something that hit on our leadership.”

Less than three weeks later, thousands of employees sat down for a daylong discussion on race, he said.

It was a risky step, Ryan said, “because people have different views and often it’s the case that we don’t openly address these topics in the workplace, even though that’s where we spend the majority of our time.”

After talking to fellow chief executives about the experience, Ryan began enlisting many to join a new initiative to foster more open discussion about race and gender in the workplace.

That new initiative, CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion, will announce Monday that 150 corporate executives have committed to their companies’ encouraging their employees to discuss those sensitive topics. Procter & Gamble, New York Life, Accenture, Deloitte US and the Boston Consulting Group are among the companies that have joined the alliance, of which Ryan is chairman.

The group is sponsoring a website, ceoaction.com, which has more than 70 examples of the most effective efforts developed by companies, including flexible work practices and gender equality programs.

“Half of our managers are women, and a third of our employees are minorities,” said David S. Taylor, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, who helped start the initiative. In an interview from the company’s Cincinnati headquarters, where 10,000 of its 100,000 employees work, he said that Procter & Gamble had inclusion and diversity programs, including training in unconscious biases, to help workers listen to one another.

“I started on a manufacturing factory floor in South Carolina where everyone had to work together to come up with solutions,” he said, “so this idea is familiar to me.”

The company is sharing its best practices on unconscious bias training; creating an advisory board for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues; and developing a veterans’ transition programme.

Companies have said for years that they are committed to diversity. And many have increased their numbers of female and minority employees. But helping employees feel they are valued and included has been a more difficult process.

“Quantifying feelings of inclusion can be dicey,” a Harvard Business Review article said this year. A diverse workforce can give companies a competitive edge in selling products or services to customers, but the article’s authors, Laura Sherbin and Ripa Rashid, noted “a stark gap” between “recognising the leadership behaviours that unlock this capability and actually practicing them.”

Taylor of Procter & Gamble said the new initiative had decided to enlist chief executives and go public “to create an expectation that the program will accomplish something.”

There are certainly business reasons for opening workplaces up to interactions about diversity at a time when 47 per cent of the country’s workers are women and 37 per cent are minorities.

When employees are able to talk at work about sensitive topics like race relations, they feel more included and believe that their ideas are heard and recognised, according to a new report, “Easing Racial Tensions at Work,” from the Center for Talent Innovation, a non-profit think tank. The report was sponsored by companies including BP and Johnson & Johnson.

Yet the same study found that two out of three employees were not comfortable discussing race relations at the office, and that one-third felt it was never acceptable to discuss race-related bias while in the workplace.

Members of CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion are pledging to encourage workplace dialogue on diversity and inclusion, to introduce or expand education on implicit biases and to publicly share the best — and the unsuccessful — actions their companies have taken. Efforts can be searched by industry category on the initiative’s website.

The program’s steering committee plans to hold a summit meeting in November to underscore its commitment to help companies improve dialogue and opportunities for all of their workers.