28 countries and 24 Olympic sports.
Addressing the issue of race and ethnicity around the globe is a greater challenge, however. How does a Latino employee group go global when Latinos in Latin America are the majority and find the whole concept of ERGs foreign? How does an African American group establish a global presence when many Africans look at Black ERGs and see them as more American than African? How do companies address race and ethnicity in places like Peru, China, and France, where people prefer to talk about things other than race (even when they indeed have racial and ethnic societal tensions)?
Accelerating the evolution of ERGs so that they address both domestic and global diversity and inclusion issues will be explored throughout the book. Pushing ERGs to have a holistic value proposition as they strive toward excellence is the main focus of this book.
ERG Trends
Before launching into tips and strategies on how to achieve ERG excellence, it is important to determine the environment that ERGs are operating in today. These trends have been forming for the last 36–48 months but were accelerated in 2020 due to the global Covid‐19 virus pandemic. Employee resource groups have had to learn to pivot and adjust in a world where people are coping with a pandemic, struggling with economic uncertainty, dealing with racial inequality, and adjusting to working from home.
Yet even with all these headwinds, employee resource groups are still prevailing. Their resiliency is impressive. Such resiliency is why employee resource groups have existed in corporate America since the early 1970s. In 1970, Joseph Wilson, the former CEO of Xerox, and Xerox's Black employees launched the National Black Employees Caucus. This caucus is considered by most to be the nation's first official employee resource group. The ability for employee resource groups to evolve ever since is what keeps them relevant and what allows them to persist and endure, even in the most difficult workplace environments. With a better understanding of ERG basics and insights about the environments ERGs are operating in, let's explore the trends that are shaping ERGs today and informing how they will operate tomorrow.
Alignment with Talent Management
Organizations are leveraging employee resource groups not only to help them groom their next generation of company leaders but also to make ERGs a destination for existing leaders. ERGs help companies identify an even larger, more diverse, pool of employees who have the potential to become leaders. But now, companies are also encouraging those deemed high performers, and as having high potential, to consider becoming more actively involved with ERGs.
Employee resource groups have always provided leadership development opportunities, especially for ERG leaders. Imagine being an employee who is an individual contributor in their current role with limited opportunities to demonstrate their leadership capabilities. Now put that same employee as the leader of an employee resource group, and suddenly the employee is developing a strategy, leading a team, managing a budget, establishing new relationships with co‐workers, and raising their visibility and exposure to corporate executives. Access to such leadership experiences is often a reason many employees join an employee resource group.
However, companies do not want to create a scenario where the ERGs are helping to groom leaders only to have those leaders leave the employee resource group. Organizations need leadership continuity in order for these groups to have sustainable long‐term success. And this has resulted in the greater alignment of ERGs with talent management.
Alignment with talent management initiatives often involves ensuring that strong performers are in the leadership roles of the ERGs. If the employee resource group does not have a strong leader, companies are now starting to appoint someone to the role of ERG leader who is more capable. The person appointed is increasingly someone who is already deemed a high performer or someone with tremendous potential.
The reasons for the need to appoint strong performers into ERG leadership roles are twofold. First, companies realize that employee resource groups tend to be only as strong as their leader. Second, the demand for strong ERG leaders often exceeds the supply. And this has led to greater ERG alignment with talent management. This will be explored further in Chapter 11.
Underutilized Business Assets
There has been much fanfare about turning “employee resource groups” into “business resource groups.” The thinking goes that ERGs cannot just be the “food, flag, and fun folks” who are primarily focused on the social aspects of employee resource groups. Organizations want ERGs to have a broader value proposition. The goal is not to eliminate the social aspects of employee resource groups because we still want them to celebrate over food, waive their diversity flag, and hold events that are indeed fun. But we need to encourage ERGs to also add value in a more holistic way. This broader value proposition is something that I have been advocating for many years as a component of the definition of ERG excellence.
Yet, in my experience, ERGs are not the ones to blame if they do not have a more direct impact on helping an organization meet their goals. In working with thousands of employee resource groups for the past several decades, these ERGs want to have a direct impact on the organization. They are often more than ready, willing, and able to support business initiatives. The real problem exists with the organization itself. Surprisingly, organizations are woefully inadequate at leveraging their ERGs for business impact. This results in employee resource groups being an underutilized business asset still today. We will explore this phenomenon, and how to overcome it, in Chapter 8.
Metrics‐that‐Matter
In my experience, ERGs have long struggled with articulating the value they provide back to their members and to the organization as a whole. Any measures of success an employee resource group touts typically involves a listing of their activities and membership size. ERGs are quick to tell you how many members they have, across how many locations, and how many events they held in the past year. While these numbers help, they do not adequately convey to others how successful the ERGs are. The lack of metrics is one reason that middle managers often do not give ERGs the credibility and respect that they deserve. What is needed by employee resource groups is a more sophisticated measurement strategy, a strategy that not only highlights the ERG's activities, but also the impact of those activities.
ERGs need to have metrics that help them tell their story and inform others why they exist. I call these “ERG metrics‐that‐matter.” Without such metrics, employee resource groups are unable to track their progress or compare themselves to benchmark standards. ERGs are not solely to blame for this lack of metrics. Organizations are often reluctant to share data and information that ERGs can use to establish such metrics. Also, not having metrics makes it impossible to have a scorecard or dashboard where an ERG can easily share their results. If an ERG does have a scorecard or dashboard, it tends to usually be a qualitative analysis of their activity as opposed to a quantitative report on their impact. The lack of a measurement strategy is how many ERGs are operating today and we will explore this further in Chapter 10.
Succession Planning
One reason for greater alignment between ERGs and talent management is that ERGs do not typically engage in succession planning. The purpose of succession planning is to make sure an ERG always has the right leaders in place should a leadership change happen quickly or unexpectedly. The lack of succession planning is one reason that some employee resource groups struggle to sustain early success.
The Covid‐19 pandemic had a tremendous impact on ERG leadership. Some existing ERG leaders left their roles because
