Leveraging ERGs in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Perfect, thank you so much, Brittnee. Alright, so we're just going to tee up the last question here before we go into some questions in the chat, and this is really all about future state. All of you have tremendous experience managing these groups over a very long duration of time, but then of course you're always looking at, hey, what's next, what's the next 12 months, 24 months, five years look like for these groups? I don't want to put any constraints on the question, because every company has forward-looking challenges at different intervals, but if you really think about where you want to take your groups, 18 months from now, 36 months, five years from now, what does that really look like? I'll start with Jesus, just because we just wrapped up with Brittnee, but maybe we'll wrap this up as our final question before we go into some of these Q&A questions, but really just thinking about future state, and what that holds for your organizations. Jesus, would you like to go first?

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Jesus Morales II (Labcorp): Yeah, that's a bit of a tough question for me, and I'll tell you why. I just want to give a little backstory. Labcorp is actually in the process of spinning off roughly about 20,000 employees into its own organization, called Fortrea, which is public knowledge now, and I'm excited to say that it's going to be wholly a drug development business, operating on its own. What's great is that we're mirroring the footprint we have within our ERG space, so Fortrea starts with a DEI program and all eight ERGs from the start, which is difficult to say about any company or organization starting out right away with ERGs. So I'm really excited to work through that, but in the same token, Labcorp will be losing a decent amount of members and leadership within the ERG community.

 

So for us it's kind of a level-set perspective right now, so we can understand where we are, in terms of the footprint of the organization leaving the organization, staying, and how we can establish the growth of the ERG going forward and maintain all eight ERGs going forward within the organization. So that's a big part of what I'm focusing on in the next year, year and a half, but I'd say long-term growth is really getting out the education of why ERGs are important, to the point where everyone in the organization understands that. We're roughly 80,000 globally, we're going to go down to about 60,000, but we still are doing mergers and acquisitions, so it's not to say we wouldn't be back up to that headcount at some point.

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So it's always going to be trying to grow, one, the education, the training, everything needed behind Employee Resource Groups, and why they add value to the organization, and once we can actually shift that into the full culture within the organization, I think that's when we'll really start to make an impact, and I think at that point I can hopefully say I don't have too much work to do. But until then, there's a lot to go around. An 80,000-person global company, it takes a lot to communicate to all those employees, when a lot of their focus is driven on the work they're doing day to day. So to get that attention into the forefront, we want to make sure everyone understands these groups are here, and they're here to support, they're also here for allyship. So if you want to learn and understand what these Employee Resource Groups do, what they're about, we don't restrict any of the information within our ERG space to any of our employee population.

 

So I know before you kind of mentioned, what's the difference between employees and contingent workers, contract workers, and so forth, we allow everyone to view the content, it's shareable to everyone within the organization, but some of our leadership roles, we do restrict to only employees, because we want to make sure we maintain the continuity of the ERG within the leadership space going forward. So some of those roles we dictate depending on the needs of those roles, but we open up all the information to everyone, and I think that's information we can also share with other companies, as we're doing now today, and I think this is a lot of value-add for others to understand what big companies are doing, little companies are doing, across not just the US but the world, because we can take some of that knowledge and really use it in our own spaces. So I'm really thankful for bringing us here, and being able to share what our company is doing.

 

Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Yeah, definitely, Jesus, and we definitely got a challenge out for you, so we'll be there to support you through your journey, and cross that finish line. But yeah, I think that's actually a really good point you brought up, with corporations, they're like organisms, they're going to dissolve, they're going to grow, they're going to expand, they're going to tighten, and things like that, and you gotta be ready for any one of those particular scenarios. So I actually really appreciate you sharing that insight, because it's not always, hey, what's two years out, what's three years out, we might need to step back and level up the entire thing again, and then regrow again. Every tree has to be pruned, right? Alright, so yeah, keeping on this question, just future state, what does that look like, love to toss it over to Brittnee, and then we'll wrap up with Karla on what future state looks like for your ERGs. Don't constrain yourself to a timeline, but whatever that looks like from the future state of today. Brittnee, if you want to chime in there?

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Brittnee Bleau (Mass General Brigham): Yeah, thanks, Maneet. So what we've kind of established is a five-year rolling plan, and it's all fluid, it moves at a different pace, but for us the future really looks like our engagement with talent acquisition, how important it will be for employees, or future employees, to know how important Resource Groups are in our system, and how they can really help this employee satisfaction portion of our metrics. Also, making ERGs a pillar of excellence within our organization, how do people really talk about our ERGs, whether that's in the employee system or outside in the community, on ERGs helping with community-based organizations and events. It also looks like the idea of giving rewards and recognition to our leaders and active ERG members.

 

Part of that is ERG leader compensation, how we're looking at making sure our ERG leaders feel engaged enough and passionate enough, but also getting paid or recognized for the hard work they're doing within these resource groups. And that also looks like promotional opportunities and career development, trying to fold that into annual reviews for performance, and understanding that this is really a stepping stone to being a leader in other spaces throughout the organization, in terms of promotion. So there are many different ways we're looking at these plans for the future, but I think most of all, it's really what Jesus said, making sure people know the ERG story, no matter who they are. We still get people who don't know what Employee Resource Groups are within our system, and that's something we want to challenge, we want people to know there are these communities for them, there are places where they can engage with people like themselves, with similar lived experiences, and also learn, because I think that sometimes that cultural acumen piece needs to be here within this ERG space, so people can learn about other cultures, educate themselves, and not tokenize the people who are actually part of these affinity groups, but allow them to learn about other cultures and other affinities.

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Maneet Sarai (Teleskope): Perfect. Thank you so much, Brittnee, and we'll wrap up here with Karla, future state, what does that look like for Takeda, Karla?

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Karla Zevallos (Takeda): Yeah, I'd say, in one word, our future looks like evolution. We were in this transformation process first, now we're evolving our group. So three things we have in mind: allyship campaigns, which leverage our Takeda Resource Groups, in a sense that everyone knows how to leverage the groups, active allyship, because there's no such thing as passive allyship. So looking for allyship from everyone in the business, and how they leverage our groups.

 

Second, also the rewards and recognition program, where they feel valued, and that could take different ways, it could be from the manager's perspective, how do they embed in, not their performance reviews, but their role and the impact these leaders have, as well as leaders in general, from their professional development, looking at promotions. So rewards as well, for their time, we're looking at some out-of-the-box ways we can start rewarding our groups, so that's coming.

And lastly, expansion, I'd say, the expansion of our groups, continuing growing chapters, across the globe, and the evolution continues into having a business impact through all three of these areas we're setting up for the next few years.