Webinar Snippet: Employee Resource Group Budgets

Employee Resource Group Budgets: Given below is an excerpt from the Teleskope Webinar on ‘Leveraging ERGs’ where the panelists from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Mass General Brigham and Labcorhttps://www.labcorp.com/p discuss how budgets are allocated and managed for different Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) in their respective organizations.

Watch this snippet: 55:05 ERGs and Budgets

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: How do you do budgets? Do you give them a blanket dollar amount at the beginning of the year? Is it up to their discretion to use it how they want? Are there constraints on the budget? Is it a dollar amount per member for each group? How does this work? It's probably one of the biggest questions we get all the time and every customer is going to be different. So, if there's anyone who wants to chime in on that first, Jesus, Karla or Brittnee, again feel free to share to the extent that which you can share. Of course, this is a public webinar but it's just a question that we always get. So, I do think the attendees here would really like to answer. Anyone want to chime in first here?

Karla Zevallos [Takeda]: Maybe I can just chime in with something quick because I also would like to hear from Jesus and Brittnee. Transparency is very important. Transparency and also the equitable aspect of it. So, we do have and thanks to our head of D&I, prior to the person that we have now, who set up this concept of having an annual, if you will, salary. That’s like a minimum and then after that, you help the groups that are more advanced in their maturity and give them access to those funds for events and initiatives that are aligned to the business impact. So, I would say transparency, equity and also the intentional aspect of having a business impact while utilizing that budget.

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Thank you Karla. I really appreciate you chiming in there. Brittnee, would you like to chime in on this particular question of how Mass General looks at budgeting for ERGs? Any type of insights that you can share from your end?

Brittnee Bleau [Mass General Brigham]: Yeah, so, prior to April 2022 it was all over the board because they existed at each different institution. But now that they're all being run by our D&I department, we are looking to unify this throughout the organization of ERGs. So, mainly people have been granted the budgets that they had when they were at their entities and we're hoping to this year implement action planning and make sure people from the ERG leadership can really task out their year and see what kind of budget projection they could use for the events, the activities, the swag etc. So, that's a really good way for us to kind of start the zero-based budgeting and see what we could use for all of their events, activities and allow them to flex throughout the year. Because we know that not all of this action planning is going to end up in your final year review of your ERG. So, really making sure that people have the flexibility to do what they need to do and tap into our resources.

So, currently our Women's ERGs are doing an International Women's Day event and they have all done that as an ERG. So, they have taken it out of their ERG budgets. But when it's a system-wide activity and D&I takes the lead, we use all of our ERGs to kind of influence that event, that offering and then we end up taking the pay so that they don't have to take that out of their own budgets. So, that's how we do it.

Maneet Sarai [Teleskope]: Excellent. Perfect, alright and we'll wrap up here with Jesus. Jesus any final commentary from your end on budgets, ERG budgets and how that's done within Labcorp?

Jesus Morales II [Labcorp]: Yeah, I will say kind of similar to Mass General. We've only been really having budgets in the last two years that we've had We Belong (Teleskope Affinities) platform. So, for us it's enabled to track the usage. And we've kind of backed into that in some cases because we found that some ERGs were not using the budget. So, we would reallocate that accordingly to other ERGs.

Our ERGs also help with a lot of different sponsorships and partnerships. So, some of those budgetary funds come with some of those sponsorships and partnerships because they enable us to connect with them. Similar to Out & Equal, we also do a partnership with HBA, which is Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, being part of healthcare. So, those partnerships enable the ERGs to gather more information, be able to share more content, and plan more events. And it creates some space for members to become more active participants enjoying some of these different sponsorships and opportunities. So, that's another way for us to kind of defend the budget as well. Because some of the sponsorships are not cheap. So, we have to make sure that we're getting enough. And we also align all of the budget accordingly based on a percentage of how many Chapters each of the ERGs have. So, that way, at least at the Chapter level, so that they have some funds that they can utilize to build up their chapters locally.

To watch the full webinar or read the complete transcript click here.

Webinar Details:

Topic: Webinar Topic: Leveraging ERGs in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

Moderator: Maneet Sarai, Chief Product Officer, Teleskope

Panelists:

Karla Zevallos, DEI Manager, Takeda Pharmaceuticals

Jesus Morales II, D&I Manager, Labcorp

Brittnee Bleau, Project Coordinator, DEI Office, Mass General Brigham

Key topics: Employee Resource Groups, ERG Strategy, Business Goals, Health Equity, ERG Management, Leadership Team, ERG Structures, Product & Service Innovation, ERG Metrics, ERG Budgets