3 employers talk about how they’ve made diversity part of employer brand to attract and retain employees
Since 2004, Assiniboine Credit Union in Winnipeg has been giving new Canadians three-month, paid work placements to help them integrate into the Canadian workplace.
“At the end, the intent is to hire them,” says Lisa Anderson, manager of employment and diversity at Assiniboine.
Over the years, the credit union has retained 80 per cent of the 30 participants in permanent positions, says Anderson.
As part of the program, Assiniboine partners with the Manitoba government and two other credit unions to provide a five-week culture and integration training program to new Canadians with a banking background. They are then given the full-time work placement at one of the three credit unions.
Assiniboine carefully chooses the branches for the placements to ensure there are experienced employees to act as mentors for the newcomers, says Anderson. The participants also receive regular feedback at the 30-, 60- and 90-day mark to ensure any problems or concerns are addressed before the end of the placement.
The success of the program, as well as other diversity initiatives, have helped the credit union develop its employer brand and made it one of Mediacorp Canada’s Best Diversity Employers 2009.
“We’ve built a reputation and people who have gone through the program tell other people,” says Anderson, which means she often gets calls from other new Canadians interested in taking part in the program.
Based on the success of the immigrant integration program, Assiniboine launched an Aboriginal integration program last year.
The program is a way to provide Aboriginal people, who have traditionally had trouble finding meaningful or consistent employment, with tools to help them once they’re in the workforce, says Anderson. A big part of the program is mentorship, which has helped with retention, she says.
To ensure the programs and policies it has in place are relevant to the different population groups, such as immigrants and visible minorities, Aboriginals, women and people with disabilities, Anderson and her team work closely with different community agencies that service these groups.
“We take time to work with the community. We get to understand what they’re looking for and what the needs are of the people who are looking for work and tailoring the programs to provide them (with) the best opportunities for success,” says Anderson. “Our employees refer other employees to us now. They see that what we say is what we actually do.”
As a result, the credit union boasts a visible minority employee representation that exceeds their representation in Winnipeg. The representations of Aboriginals and people with disabilities at Assiniboine are also close to the average representations in the community.
RBC makes use of employee resource groups
Diversity is becoming increasingly important to prospective and current employees, says Norma Tombari, senior manager of diversity and workforce solutions at Toronto-based RBC Financial Group.
When job candidates come in for interviews at RBC, they often ask about the bank’s diversity initiatives and if there are employee resource groups, she says. The bank does have four resource groups for employees: Reach (for people with disabilities); Royal Eagles (for Aboriginals); Pride (for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (LGBT)) and Mosaic (for visible minorities and new Canadians).
“They were all created in support of recruitment, retention and engagement strategies,” says Tombari. “It’s very powerful to be able to reach out to peers and colleagues to better understand what’s going on in the organization. (The groups) assist both with personal and professional development.”
An employer brand is the answer to the question, “Why would I work for a given organization?” says Per Scott, vice-president of human resources at RBC. At the bank, the answer includes career growth, rewards, colleagues and access to the resources of an industry leader, and diversity weaves its way through all those aspects, he says.
“We benefit from and value different people and ideas,” says Scott. “You will be more successful if you bring your diversity.”
To ensure people succeed, RBC has programs in place to help people overcome obstacles that might have prevented particular groups from succeeding in the past, he says.
“We have a considered and thoughtful, comprehensive approach to attracting, recruiting and engaging diverse employees and really try to ensure the processes that we have are inclusive,” says Tombari.
Part of that includes training recruiters on how to interview candidates from different cultures and training newcomers so they have a better understanding of the Canadian interview process.
RBC also has a reciprocal mentoring program called diversity dialogues. The program, which has been around for about two years, matches senior leaders with women, visible minorities, Aboriginals with people with disabilities. The senior leaders provide a traditional mentoring relationship and professional development, but the protegés also give the mentors insight into their experiences in the organization, says Tombari.
At RBC, diversity is more than just about employment equity groups and includes different generations and socio-economic status, says Scott.
“It’s intended to be a very broad way that we think about diversity. That makes it much more powerful for us because everybody can see themselves in diversity,” he says.
Ernst & Young conducts annual diversity census
Professional services firm Ernst & Young also takes a broad view of diversity, says Jeannine Pereira, inclusiveness leader for Ernst & Young in Toronto.
“Our inclusiveness vision is to provide a work environment that is and feels inclusive for all our people,” she says. “Everybody is contributing to their full potential and can come to work and be themselves everyday.”
To ensure the firm is as diverse as it can be, Ernst & Young conducts an annual diversity census, asking employees to self-identify. It also looks at the representation of women and visible minorities at a variety of levels of the organization and surveys employees about diversity efforts.
“We measure ourselves and we hold ourselves accountable to make sure we’re getting better every year,” says Pereira.
To really make diversity part of the employer brand, everyone in the organization, starting from the top, needs to be involved, she says. Ernst & Young’s CEO chairs the diversity steering committee and various senior leaders are involved in the various diversity task forces that report to the committee.
“Every single person has a role to play,” says Pereira. “The roles and responsibility are spread out so that really makes it part of the employer brand.”
The firm provides diversity training from the day a new hire starts and continues it in technical training, senior staff account training and senior management training, she says. Like RBC, the firm has a reverse mentoring program that matches visible minority employees with non-visible minority partners to share their experiences.
Recently, the firm added Just Ask, a mentoring program that matches LGBT Generation-Y employees with senior partners who have expressed an interest in learning more about LGBT issues.
“There’s a bit of a generational learning as well as a diversity learning,” says Pereira.
