'Those discussions start to inform awareness and build that understanding of diverse perspectives and challenges'
When Erin Prefontaine, who is Metis, was looking at joining a new company, it was the identity of one HR staff member that sealed the deal.
“One of the most important aspects to me becoming a KPMGer was that there is an Indigenous recruiter — which I have never run across before — and so getting to know her, and knowing that she was an advocate keen to add me to the organization, gave me so much more confidence in the skills I already have,” says Prefontaine, manager, advisory services, people and change, diversity and inclusion at KPMG Canada in Calgary.
As a member of the company’s employee resource group (ERG) for Indigenous persons, she can regularly get together with other employees and share stories and experiences.
And when KPMG Canada wanted to institute new benefit offerings that would connect with diverse employees, it looked to those groups for guidance.
“2018 was the year we introduced changes that were more specifically informed by collaboration with our people networks. They’ve been around since prior to, but that’s when we started engaging with them to inform our benefits programs,” says Emilie Inakazu, director, benefits and wellbeing at KPMG Canada in Toronto.
‘People networks’ provide insights
By engaging with what the company calls “people networks,” KPMG has added a host of new plans in recent years: gender affirmation benefits in 2018, daily-living equipment for disabled employees in 2021, and enhanced family-leave definitions in 2022.
Recently, it also added surrogates as eligible dependants to the benefits program.
“There’s a lot of costs that goes with IVF, and… previously, that was limited to an employee and their dependants so we expanded that to include surrogates this fall,” says Inakazu.
“These are examples of ideas, thoughts, perspectives that have been raised by our people networks, and we were able to collaborate with them to bring those things to life within the context of our existing programs.”
Another employer has also leaned heavily on its ERGs in order to drive the DEI initiative.
Indigenous benefits
The most recent offering for a diverse workforce was the Indigenous wellness benefit, introduced in December.
For Prefontaine this new wellness offering was welcome and “ground-breaking.”
“People are blown away that we have this Indigenous wellness benefit, because it’s so foundational and helping us not only bring wellness for our personal daily routines, but helps us reconnect or connect more easily to our communities,” she says.
“Having that easy access to medicines, it’s phenomenal and the fact that an organization that, for lack of a better way of putting it, resides within a colonial context, [that is] corporate business in Canada in providing this, it’s just ground-breaking, it’s really phenomenal.”
When conducting its annual benefits plan reviews, the KPMG’s HR team has begun to rely on feedback from the ERGs, says Prefontaine.
“What will happen is that if these types of things bubble up, the IDE [inclusion, diversity and equity] team will then reach out to our benefits team and say, ‘We’re hearing this, can you come to our next meeting and let’s have a discussion around what it is they’re looking for?’ It’s a little more informal.”
By having these groups available to diverse employees, “it really helps to add value to the employees’ voices, we know that we’re being seen and we know that we’re heard. Regardless of what it’s named, we know that we’re all a piece of how it came to be,” says Prefontaine.
Supporting national Indigenous reconciliation efforts is viewed as important for half of employees recently surveyed by Proof Strategies.
Focus on upbeat news
For First Nation people in Canada, the news about their experiences is often tragic and heartbreaking, but in the KPMG group, they focus on more positive aspect of Indigenous life.
“We hear about murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit peoples; we hear about that hugely, massively disproportionate number of incarcerated people who are Indigenous. So the other thing we talk about a lot is ‘How do we celebrate Indigenous success?’ We really try to highlight Indigenous professionals who aren’t necessarily part of KPMG, but who are of a benefit to our community and relationships at large,” says Prefontaine.
The existence of these groups also points the level of how “socially mature” the organization is, meaning there is a correlation with diversity and inclusion success, according to Prefontaine.
“When we have a client come to us and say, ‘Hey, we have an equity program in place, we know we’re missing the mark on some things, can you help us?’ When we go in and look at what they’re doing, they’re already quite mature, and the guidance we have to give them is much… more focused than a client who comes to us and says, ‘Hey, we don’t know what we’re doing, help us start.’”
By promoting the work that resource groups accomplish inside the organization, this can move forward the diversity efforts, she says.
“Organizations can start really small, like everything from sharing equitable writing practices that, for example, break down the binary and invite the breadth of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and so instead of using ‘he’ and ‘she,’ using ‘they.’”
Conversation starters
While not every idea will come to full fruition, engaging with ERGs has been positive for KPMG, says Inakazu.
“Regardless of whether or not actual change comes out of those conversations, in the form of a benefits program or an event, those discussions start to inform awareness and build that understanding of diverse perspectives and challenges that any one group might be facing or experiencing.”
“It enables us to step back and even rethink our own perspective and any biases that we have, and that is really important for leaders to do on a regular basis so when you’re in those conversations, it puts you in a position where you need to do that and that’s, for me, the bigger value,” she says.
