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ERG Event Management

Join Rachee Powell, Manager, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at FedEx Ground, and moderator Maneet Sarai, Chief Product Officer at Teleskope, as they explore best practices for planning and managing Employee Resource Group (ERG) events.

Topics and Speakers

This webinar covers:

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  • Planning and executing ERG events effectively

  • Creative event ideas and multi-ERG collaboration

  • Approval workflows and governance for ERG events

  • Tracking event metrics, participation, and engagement

  • Incorporating feedback and optimizing future ERG events

 

Speakers:

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  • Maneet Sarai, Chief Product Officer, Teleskope (moderator)

  • Rachee Powell, Manager, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, FedEx Ground

Synopsis

Running a handful of ERG events is one thing. Running a consistent, well-governed program of dozens of events a year, across 11 different ERGs and roughly 9,000 members, is another. In this conversation, Rachee Powell, DEI Manager at FedEx Ground, walks through the operational backbone behind FedEx Ground's ERG event program, from approvals to metrics to multi-group collaboration.

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Powell opens with the scale of the program: 11 ERGs, close to 9,000 unique members, 91 events hosted between June 2022 and May 2023 alone, plus a flagship collaboration, an annual Multicultural Children's Book Drive that collected more than 37,000 books and reached 50 community organizations. Events range from career development and cultural programming to corporate social responsibility work tied to FedEx's giving program, and they're planned and run by volunteer ERG leaders.

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The core of the conversation is FedEx Ground's two-stage approval process, built to solve three real challenges: keeping events aligned with each ERG's mission rather than turning into informal social planning, standardizing communication and format across 11 different volunteer-led groups, and clearly defining each event's audience. Stage one reviews an event's purpose, audience, speakers, and budget, and routes it to the right stakeholders, including legal, when needed. Stage two is a final DEI manager review before the event goes on a shared, company-wide calendar. Powell is candid that every event, no matter how small, goes through this process, since consistency across groups matters more than exempting the small ones.

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Measurement runs through the whole program. FedEx Ground now sends a post-event survey after every event, tracks engagement and sentiment, and routes that feedback back to ERG leads through dedicated DEI team liaisons for each group. That same data feeds conversations with executive sponsors, who Powell says actively want to see participation trends and gaps by area of the business, not just attendance counts.

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The conversation closes on what's made these events grow: multi-ERG collaboration that widens each event's reach and cross-pollinates membership, executive sponsors who show up voluntarily rather than as an obligation, and a communications plan that gives events at least two weeks of visibility before they happen.

Key Takeaways

  • Run every ERG event, regardless of size, through a consistent two-stage review process (event details and stakeholder coordination, then a final policy and mission-alignment check) so quality stays consistent across every group.

  • Give every ERG a documented mission statement so events stay tied to purpose rather than becoming purely social gatherings.

  • Send a post-event survey after every event, not just occasionally, so engagement and impact data is comparable across ERGs over time.

  • Pair each ERG with a DEI team liaison who relays survey feedback back to ERG leads, so events keep improving based on what members actually say.

  • Encourage cross-ERG collaboration on events (shared invitations, joint programming) to expand reach, spark new conversations, and grow membership across multiple groups at once.

  • Secure visible executive sponsorship for every ERG and share event impact data directly with leadership, so events are seen as delivering business value, not just morale.

Chapters

  • Introduction

  • Rachee Powell, FedEx Ground: Introduction

  • ​ERG Events at FedEx Ground

  • Post Event Survey and Metrics

  • Process for ERG Events Feedback and Recalibration

  • Two-stage Approvals for ERG Events at FedEx Ground

  • Executive Sponsors for ERGs

  • ERG Events Participation

  • Multi-ERG Events at FedEx Ground

  • ERG Events Metrics, Engagement, Participation

  • ERG Events: Member Experience

  • Legal Approval for ERG Events

  • 11 ERGs at FedEx Ground Overview

  • ERG Event Approval Process Duration

Introduction

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): All right, so I think we have a pretty healthy amount of participants on the call today. So, for everyone joining the webinar today, thanks a lot for joining and taking some time out on a Friday just to listen and learn about ERG events, and all things surrounding ERG events. Just a bit of a disclaimer up front: one of our panelists is having some technical difficulties, so if she does join in at a later point, we'll get her into the Zoom webinar. But we'll go ahead and get started here with our panelist.

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I just want to take a second to quickly introduce myself, Teleskope, what we do, and then I'll pass it over to Rachee Powell to give a quick introduction. So, just by way of introduction, my name is Maneet Sarai. I do Head of Products for Teleskope. Our whole mission is really just to build your most powerful enterprise community platform. When you think about communities, these can be things like ERGs, mentoring communities, philanthropic communities, and so forth. Today's webinar is really going to be focused on ERGs, and mainly on ERG events.

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With that said, I just want to introduce our first panelist here, Rachee Powell from FedEx. Rachee, if you wouldn't mind just jumping in and giving a quick introduction, and also giving a little bit of background and flavor on your program, the size of it, just so audience members have an indication of the context of your program.

Panelist introduction

Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): Sure. Thank you, Maneet, and I love the word flavor when we talk about ERGs. So, my name is Rachee Powell, and I am the DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Manager, at FedEx Ground. A little bit about FedEx: we're committed to building and maintaining a workplace that values inclusion, diverse perspectives and ideas that contribute to advancing and promoting the company's overall business objectives, and our Employee Resource Groups are part of that strategy.

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So, we currently have 11 ERGs, with nearly 9,000 unique members, and our members hosted 91 events between June of 2022 and May of 2023, and the number of team members impacted was over 9,000. Since June of 2023, the ERGs have already hosted 10 events, with more than 1,300 people impacted.

Post Event Survey and Metrics

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Gotcha. That makes total sense, and you picked up a good point there around post-event surveys. So, when it comes to measuring the post-impact of an event, a lot of our customers always ask us, hey, what's the follow-up, is it just how did you enjoy this event, scale of one to five or something, simply like that, or is there a bit deeper level of metrics you're trying to get to, in terms of the enjoyment of the event, the satisfaction of it, but are you also looking a little deeper, like what did you get out of that event, and are you tying that back to any other organizational metrics as well?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): So, we want to make sure the events have an impact on engagement and retention. We want to know: did people get knowledge from that event for their ongoing career development, and a place to network outside of their daily location? Did they feel included? So we send out a post-event survey, which is fairly recent, and that data is critical in capturing the team member experience and sentiment, which tells us how people felt during the event.

 

Did they feel a call to action at the end of the event, or was it just something they showed up for? That post-event survey used to be sent on occasion, but now we send it after all events, so we can measure that impact the same way across all events. Then we take that information and share it with our ERG leads, so they know if the events are hitting home, or if maybe there needs to be a bit of change.

Process for ERG Events Feedback and Recalibration

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Yeah, and when you're seeing a need for a bit of change, how are you calibrating that back with your ERG leaders, right? So, obviously you mentioned the number of events you're doing, which is immense, right. So, there's tons of events happening quarter over quarter, year over year, and things like that. So, when you're getting that feedback, what does that process look like, going back to your ERG leaders and saying, hey, do we need to recalibrate, or do we do more of these types of events? Any insights you can share there? We get these questions a lot from our customers: how are we calibrating, how are we making sure these aren't just happy hour events where everyone's just trying to have a good time, and we're actually providing business value as well as employee value? So any indication on how you're calibrating against that feedback, and what the process looks like?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): Right. So, for us we do a monthly meeting with our Employee Resource Group leads, and we talk about what events are coming up so they can collaborate, but we also give feedback. My team is divided, and they're liaisons for each of the different ERGs. There are different levels of approval, we might talk about that a bit later, but each of our team liaisons works directly with our Employee Resource Group leads.

 

For example, our Black Professionals Network Employee Resource Group has a liaison on our team, Maiia, and Maiia does a great job of working and giving feedback after the event: what were some of the things we saw in the comments, what were some of the things we saw in the survey, so the Employee Resource Groups can go back and say, maybe this event didn't hit home where we thought it would, maybe we need to make some changes, or this is what our employees would like to see. So that the Employee Resource Groups continue to provide content that's useful and timely.

Two-stage Approvals for ERG Events at FedEx Ground

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Yeah. So, you brought up a good point there, Rachee, around the keyword of approvals and things like that. So, I guess that kind of helps me segue into another topic that comes up a lot in our discussions in the industry, around governance of these events.

 

You know, traditionally, when we first started working with a lot of our customers, a lot of these events were sort of just decentralized, do the events you want to do, what you think is best for your members, but then over time, as our companies started to mature, they started to put more layers of process and governance over top of these events, really looking for better ways to ensure the events being orchestrated are aligned to corporate values, that they're aligned to the various missions of either their ERG or the overall business.

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And even detailing further into that, like the planning of the event, the budget, how much we're spending on these events, the guest speakers coming in, how are we looking at those guest speakers and making sure they also mirror our corporate values and things like that. So I'd love to pick your brain and go back and forth just around that concept of approvals, but even at a higher level, governance of these events. And maybe even historically, is this something FedEx has always done, or did it kind of start with, hey, just let the ERGs do the events they want to do, but then over time maybe some things happened where you thought, hey, we need to have a little tighter grip over these events. So any anecdotes you can share there, I think, would be incredibly helpful for the audience.

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): Yeah, I get a lot of questions on that as well, and there are some challenges from an Employee Resource Group perspective. One is policy and procedures, that's a common challenge, as an employee, we have our policies and procedures, but also want to impact change and work within what the mission is of that ERG. So that's one challenge. Each of our ERGs has a mission statement they look at consistently, to make sure they're hosting events that aren't just, you know, party planning. This isn't a party planning group, there's a purpose for the Employee Resource Groups, and they have a mission statement in addition to company policies we follow.

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Another challenge was the standardization of the flow of communication and processes, so we create more of a professional product for our team, and can have a greater impact. We want it to look like it came from a professional standpoint. And since our ERG leads have other jobs and responsibilities, this is a volunteer position, creating something consistent across all the ERGs was a challenge. And then the other challenge is, who is the target audience? So sometimes defining who that target audience is for the ERGs overall.

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So what we have is we utilize a two-stage automated review process, and we utilize a template for event review, so the information collected from our ERG leads is submitted in the same format from all 11 ERGs, in Stage 1. That includes the purpose, the goal, the intended audience, speakers, budget requests if there are any, and ironically, not every event has a budget request or needs a budget to be a successful event.

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So then someone from our team, on the DEI team, reviews the event and coordinates with appropriate stakeholders. That might be legal, that might be vetting a guest speaker, again budget review. And then after the liaison has completed Stage 1, they either approve or disapprove the event. If it's disapproved, the event returns to the group lead with detail on why. We want to give the why, because there's a reason they wanted to host the event, so if there's a reason, we want to go back and talk about it, maybe it's just additional details that are needed before approval is granted.

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So then, when the event is approved, the request goes to Stage 2 for DEI manager review, and this is where the final checks and balances happen, just to ensure the event adheres to our corporate policies and procedures, is still in alignment with the DEI mission statement, and to address any changes that may have come up since the initial request. And then once it's approved there, the ERG can publish the event on a shared calendar, and that assists the team in seeing all the upcoming events in one place, which goes back to the professionalism, we don't have to go look for the information, the communication is there.

Executive Sponsors for ERGs

Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): All of our ERGs have executive-level sponsors, who attend and support, and are even guest speakers for the events. And we don't have to twist their arm, they're voluntarily happy to be there, and that's a big asset in getting collaboration with our Employee Resource Groups. One very nice thing about the process is that it gives us an efficient way to add structure and professionally communicate events, and it's really helped our leads overcome some challenges in scheduling, and the outreach to the full FedEx team about the events, because we want the whole team to know. It's not any good if it's just a specific department or area that knows, we want everybody on the FedEx Ground team to be able to participate in the events.

ERG Events Participation

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Right, absolutely. And when it comes to that visibility component of it, you know, traditionally when we start working with a lot of our customers, a lot of these events are kind of all over the place, some might be on Outlook, some might be on a third-party service like Eventbrite or something like that, just depending on the nature of the event, some might be posted on a SharePoint site, or so forth. But in terms of the visibility of the events, and also trying to make sure that, not even the executive sponsorship, but everywhere down to maybe an intern who just joined the organization, knows where these events are happening, knows how to get into these events, knows the topics of these events. How have you seen the visibility of at least the FedEx Ground ERG events increase over time? Are you seeing more executives attending? Are you seeing more folks from outside the particular hosting ERG wanting to attend these events as well? Any anecdotes on that from your perspective, Rachee?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): So, one of the things we look at in impact is membership, and how that's changed. And we've seen an increase in all levels of participation, but not only participation, but wanting to collaborate across events, because now you know what's going on in some of the other ERGs. So you see people at all levels attend, participate, comment, provide feedback, which is nice, because it makes us all feel heard, everybody's included, no one's afraid to share feedback.

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What it also does is give us that professional look, there's a meeting invite, it's on our calendar, and if we want to include the full FedEx team, and not just FedEx Ground, we can do that as well. Many of the topics are the same, so if we're talking about mental health, that's important regardless of your position in the company, your title, or which operating company. So we've seen an increase in that, and that's some of the data we actually look at, and share with the ERG leads, as far as hosting that type of event.

Multi-ERG Events at FedEx Ground

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Right. And have you seen a lot of your ERGs collaborating moving forward now? A lot of our customers, you know, collaboration when it comes to ERGs is kind of difficult, for one, there's two membership lists, right, and more important than that, let's say you're part of one ERG and I'm part of another ERG, and I get an invite from your group, I might be like, hey, why'd I get this invite, I'm not part of this group. So this has been something we've been trying to work with our customers on for quite a bit, just to be able to ensure that these events are true collaborative events in nature, where any person who gets that invite knows exactly why they've been invited, because it says, hey, this is a collaborative event, and so forth.

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But the other thing I'd like to pick your brain on, Rachee, is how do you see those impacting, seeing, you know, maybe your African American Network and maybe a Women's ERG coming together and sharing, discussing ideas or topics, and what do those ideas look like? Are you seeing more of that happening in the FedEx environment, around ERGs pairing up? And then dovetailing off of that too, how does that work from a governance standpoint as well, the budgets and whatnot, how are you looking at that from your purview?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): That's three questions, Maneet. We encourage our ERGs to collaborate, because the invitations, for example, our Women Moving Ground ERG, they send out an invitation to their members and it just goes to their members, but when they're collaborating, now it goes to their members and the other ERG they're collaborating with. So it increases the span of who is there.

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I'll give you an example, our Women Moving Ground and our Men Leading Inclusively, two of our Employee Resource Groups, are planning an event where they're talking about allyship. So when we send out an announcement on an event, both teams get that information, both members get it, and they can see the importance and who the ERG is that's hosting. So the question isn't necessarily there of, well, who's hosting it and why am I getting it, you can see why it's right there and available. So that's increased attendance on the calls, and then from there it increases the conversation around other opportunities, other causes, other topics they may want to hear about that are relevant to both groups.

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Even on the event I talked about, the Multicultural Book Drive, more than 37,000 books were collected, that was a collaboration across many of our Employee Resource Groups, and it also brought attention to each of the individual groups we have, thus increasing membership for all of them.

 ERG Events Metrics, Engagement, Participation

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): As you've seen these events evolve over time, and become more paramount, because now you're saying, hey, we have a very professional look, these are being routed on centralized calendars and in the inboxes of employees. And I'm sure just at FedEx, some of these groups might be huge, right, 5,000 plus members per group. Have you seen the interaction with leadership and senior executives in the organization? And are there particular metrics they want to know about these events? Are they customers of that data, I guess you could look at it from that perspective? And if so, what are the key things they're looking at, in terms of, hey Rachee, we know you're doing all these fabulous events, but is there a so-what factor here? Any insights there, Rachee, from your end, at least from the FedEx point of view?

 

Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): We love numbers, we love data, and where there's going to be impact. So absolutely, each of our ERGs has a sponsor, an executive sponsor, and we provide feedback to those sponsors. Not only do we provide feedback, but the ERG leads do as well: what do their events look like, what's been the impact, what's been the engagement, how can we take this event and share it and have an impact on our external community, external to our FedEx team, and how does that tie in.

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One example of that is our mental health calls. Our ERGs, over the last year, have hosted mental health calls. Mental health is extremely important, and making sure people have that information, but also, where do I go, what do I do, what are the next steps. So over the last year the ERGs have hosted mental health calls, and this year our ERGs are taking those mental health calls and stepping it up a level, and those are shared with the entire network, not just inside their ERG, our executive team gets on that too, and we share stories, having a common story we can share as a team is very impactful. So our ERG leads and the sponsors participate in those calls, but we can also provide data on what the impact was, and the impact is really important. We don't want to have an event where there are 500 people on the call and everybody's like, when the call is over, we want there to be a call to action, so that they tell someone else, this is a great event, and this ERG is doing well.

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Our executive team also wants to know that: what are we doing, and how has engagement improved, how has participation improved, here's a gap where we see an ERG maybe not participating as much, we don't have as high participation in this area of the company, because on our metrics we can see where our members are. So maybe we don't have as high participation in that area of the company, what can we do to increase participation in that particular area? And that's also where we use the data, and share that with our executives.

ERG Events: Member Experience

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Right, and you know, one thing I've always noticed about ERG events is that they're really big, right, hundreds of people attending these events, is that a unique thing within FedEx, at least with your ERG events, versus maybe other corporate-wide events? Of course, if there's a CEO town hall, then yeah, that's going to be a pretty big event. But the ERG ones, you know, you start really looking at some of the numbers, especially on the dashboards, when you're looking at it, you're like, there are hundreds and hundreds of people showing up to these events. Is that sort of an anomaly just for FedEx, or would you say, even in your experience, ERG events just garner that type of attention, and there's that much interest in the organization, for people to say, hey, let me take this time out of my day and go attain these resources and things like that?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): What I find interesting about ERG events is that these are volunteered, right, so when they show up to an event that's being hosted, people have intentionally taken time to join the event, unlike a call for your department, where you're kind of expected to be there. So when you have high attendance at an ERG event, someone took the time to attend, they took the time to accept the invitation, to log on, provide feedback. So we really look at that, and that's where the difference comes in. That's why it's important that we look at the impact of the event, right, we look at even the title they're sharing, does it attract interest, does it encourage people to participate? Because that makes a difference, and we work with our comms team, because I'm not a professional writer, so we get people who are to create titles, so people want to come to the event. Because there's a lot of information, you go back again, were the employees engaged, did they feel like they got some education from attending the event, did they feel like they were able to network outside the normal people they network with on a daily basis? Attending ERG events, you're able to, I'm in Indiana but I can network with people in California, and are these events providing that opportunity.

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Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): That makes total sense. I'm just keeping an eye on the clock here. We do have some questions in the chat that are directed for you, Rachee. So let me just jump into these.

Legal Approval for ERG Events

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): So the first one is, does your DEI group ever need legal to approve any of these events?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): Yes. Yeah, so part of our process is, the DEI team is very familiar with our policies and procedures, but we do submit for legal review, just to make sure we stay in compliance with company objectives.

 

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Gotcha, and when you're interacting with legal, are they just kind of looking at this from the lens of, hey, we're not crossing any of our risk thresholds or anything like that, or are there other ways they're weighing in, in terms of privacy regulations you might have to adhere to, what you're displaying about the event? Is it sort of a one-point thing legal is looking at, or is it really like a matrix of things they have to analyze?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): So, the DEI team, my team, really does all that during Level 1, Stage 1, just based on the policies, procedures and best practices we share. So we try to make it as easy for our legal team as possible, and address anything that comes up from Level 1. Once we send it to our legal team, they do an overview, making sure we're in compliance with company standards and policies, and if there's any feedback at that point, they give us that feedback.

11 ERGs at FedEx Ground Overview

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Perfect. All right, so just jumping into this next question here. So I guess at a high level, they just want to know, could you give us an overview of the 11 ERGs at FedEx? Maybe not list out all 11 if you don't have them off the top of your mind, but maybe a couple of them if you would. But then there's a second part to that question, that says, do you ask for the automated process for all event initiatives, or just key signature events? So I guess that's a pretty good question there. Is this just for the big signature events, or are you running every single ERG event through the process as well?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): So, every single one of our events goes through that process, regardless of the size of the event, just so we're consistent in our professionalism across all events, and how it's communicated and shared out. So every event goes through and is looked at, and the more familiar the ERG lead is with the process, the easier it is.

Okay, and so you're going to test my knowledge and my memory. So we've got an Asian and Pacific Islander Network, a Black Professionals Network, EPIC, which is Emerging Professionals Inspiring Change, enABLE, which is Enabling All Employees, HAN, Hispanic Action Network, Men Leading Inclusively, Parents Delivering Purple, Project Professionals Enablement League, Pride and Allies Network, Veterans Network, and Women Moving Ground.

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ERG Event Approval Process Duration

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): There you go, that's how you know you're the leader of them. All right, so we probably have time for one more question here, let me just look through the list. All right, so how long does the approval process take, and how far in advance does an ERG need to submit an event for approval?

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Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): Good question. So we actually have a process in place for our ERG leads, because we want to make sure the event has enough time to get out in front of people to attend. So once it's submitted, we usually ask for a week, just to make sure our team can get through Level 1 and get to Level 2, and sometimes there's a catch with that, there's more research that needs to be done, more bases touched. So usually a week is what we ask.

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For our communications plan, we like to get everything out at least two weeks in advance, so people can see it. If you share it the week of, people's schedules are different, you might be on vacation. So to get the maximum participation, we do have a communications plan in place that we share with our leads, and we follow that plan.

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Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Yeah, perfect, excellent. All right, so for the audience, I know we're at time here, we're capping this at a 30-minute webinar. There are a couple other questions we'll take note of, and perhaps send them out to our panelists here for them to respond to, and then we'll send a note out.

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We do thank everyone for joining here, we had really good participation throughout the call. We will have a recording of this as well, which we'll distribute for folks who might not have been able to attend due to scheduling conflicts. But foremost, I just want to say thank you to Rachee Powell for joining the webinar, spending some time on a Friday, and giving this insight, because a lot of our customers, these are questions that come to us throughout the industry, so sometimes hearing it firsthand from an actual practitioner is super helpful, and just things you can take back. So Rachee, thank you so much for joining today, and we really appreciate everyone for joining. Thanks a lot, everyone, really appreciate it.

 

Rachee Powell (FedEx Ground): Thank you.

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