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Diversity in Corporate Culture
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The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), formerly the Human Resource Institute, is the world’s largest private network of corporations focused on improving workforce productivity. We connect corporate executives and human resource professionals from many of the world’s top companies in an exclusive network that allows members to interact with industry experts as well as peers in other organizations. Members utilize HR research and workforce productivity research on how to attract, develop and retain key assets: their employees.
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Mary Ann Downey | i4cp
October 10, 2009
The year 2009 has been a watershed year for diversity issues in the U.S. From the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January to the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, diversity issues have consistently been top of mind for corporations this year.
Given the changing landscape and rising interest among i4cp member companies, we adopted a comprehensive strategy to investigate organizations’ diversity approaches, one that includes benchmarking practices, extensive interviews and literature reviews.
In April of this year, a group of such companies met in Atlanta to form a Diversity Accelerator group. This group brainstormed the challenges their organizations were having in approaching diversity. Based on the discussion and interviews with these members, i4cp developed a survey instrument to further explore these issues.
i4cp also interviewed a number of non-member companies to get a better understanding of the state of organizational diversity issues. Overall, the community of diversity professionals has been extremely generous with its time and insight. As a preview of upcoming reports, here is a quick look at two of the highlights.
Non-HR professionals are leading more corporate diversity efforts
Based on interviews, having professionals from outside the HR function lead diversity initiatives is a growing trend. We spoke with professionals who started their careers in sales, communications, labor relations, and marketing as well as the more traditional HR, compliance and legal functions.
For the non-HR leaders, there were several common themes. For one thing, this work is much harder than they anticipated but also more rewarding. The challenge comes in two forms: pace and building a common understanding. Leaders who have spent the majority of their careers within the business find the pace of diversity progress painfully slow and frustrating.
They clearly see the benefits of diversity initiatives and the value such initiatives can bring to their organization, but they have come to recognize that showing business results can be elusive and people metrics such as representation move slowly. The reward is playing an integral role in changing the culture, complexion and impact of the organization.
