Chief Human Resources Officer Ibis Reynolds recently shared how 48forty is supporting and facilitating DEI initiatives across the company. Listen in to learn more about how her team is helping the organization understand what DEI is (and isn't) and encouraging awareness throughout operations and beyond.
How do you approach DEI?
It’s a label and it’s something that’s very important but I think behaviors speak for themselves, so I think it’s quite natural in positive environments and cultures to have diversity, equity, and inclusion. So for me, it’s a behavioral way of managing a company. It’s what we do every day. It’s doing the right thing.
What are you working on currently?
For me, the equity piece is really important. So one of the things that the HR function is working on, we’re finalizing our talent framework to make sure that we understand what our jobs are, what are the scopes of those jobs, what are the salary ranges, what are the grade levels, and how competitive those jobs are with those measurable categories in every community and in the market. So it’s important that we know that information so we can measure ourselves. We want to be competitive. We want people to be paid fairly for the job they’re doing, and we want to be equitable across the company.
How do you use data to inform DEI initiatives?
One of the things we do on a regular basis is collect data about our population. So at all times, we understand what our population is made of from a gender perspective, from a background perspective, and I think that’s important that you understand where you are today. That doesn’t mean that we have specific goals related to those things, but what it does mean is we understand our environment, we understand the demographics, we understand the diversity of our workforce, and then we can look at our industry, and we can look at other organizations in the nation and relate to best practices.
How are you equipping individuals to put DEI into practice?
Right now, our executive leadership team is piloting a DEI management training program. Every month, it’s microlearnings and a manager can read, can dig in a little bit more, there’s a couple of quizzes, and then they can take it even further, if they’d like, and go deeper into the microlearning and then take maybe another class or read a little bit more in-depth about a topic that’s interesting to them. So I think this is a great start for us in helping our leaders understand what DEI is, what DEI isn’t, but also becoming more aware of how to lead by thinking about the different types of people, thinking about equity, and thinking about including everyone when you make your decisions.