Icon Diversity & Inclusion Seminar Barcelona: Todd Corley, Abercrombie & Fitch Blog Posting

Creating engagement around any initiative is important within an organization – especially inclusion. Todd Corley, SVP of Diversity and Inclusion at Abercrombie and Fitch (A&F) will address the importance of employee engagement and specifically what A&F does to ignite passion within its employees. Conference attendees will get an insider’s look into how A&F promotes Diversity and Inclusion through designated programs and initiatives such as diversity week, the A&F Diversity Champion Program and through the organization’s use of social media. See takeaways including best practices and tips for creating and maintaining a sustainable diversity program.

Icon Events Annual Global Diversity Seminar and International womans day

Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace is much more complex than gender diversity but I think it is very much needed to salute the International Woman’s Day 2011 with a post from the Diversity and Inclusion blog. It was interesting to notice E-ON and Allianz were two of the brand names jumping out at everyone on the Internationalwomensday.com website. We have worked in the past with both brands, good to see them pushing themselves out there.

I would also like to add a link from the great diversitybestpractices.com website to the 20 women’s organisations you need to know, very impressive list of organisations indeed.

It does certainly echo the great presentation made from Xerox at the Diversity and Inclusion Seminar a couple of weeks ago about the importance of women in business. It was a point that Lisa Oliver and Paloma Beamonte stressed during their presentation. Paloma Beamonte is the General Manager and CEO of Xerox Spain and is an adamant advocate of the networking power of women within business. It is something that both Lisa and Paloma do quite often and from the relationship that was on display it certainly makes wok seem a lot more enjoyable.

So a big salute to all the women out there fighting against whatever discrimination’s you come up against, the world does recognize this effort.
Gender diversity and women in the boardroom is again something that has to be brought up during out 5th edition of the diversity seminar Barcelona

Feedback from the 4th Annual Global Diversity & Inclusion Seminar: Barcelona

Well folks, after a very enjoyable but tiresome couple of days at the AC Forum Hotel in Barcelona, the Icon Events International diversity team are back in the office after a very interesting event, The 4th Annual Global Diversity & Inclusion Seminar was a great success with some of the worlds biggest brand names coming together for 2 days of lively discussion & presentations regarding the latest Diversity trends & issues affecting the world’s multi-national organisations today.

With such senior speakers like the CEO of Aviva Asia Pacific Mr.Simon Machell, Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion from ING, Jacqui Robertson, Head of Google EMEA Diversity, Mark Palmer Edgecumbe amongst our speakers, the debate was lively & full of interesting content.

I have posted below some of the most important feedback we have received below from our delegates. One thing that sticks in my mind is no matter what level of speaker we had at the event, everyone agrees that there are not far enough, in their views, to the finished product.

Todd Sears – Our esteemed Chairman
Board Room is the primary place to start with Diversity
Understand the stakeholders problems & start with that
I his experience the Board Room really supplies organisational barriers when it comes to D&I / Talent Recruitment / Succession planing.
His underlying theme is make Diversity a business issue, get your Diversity Business Partners on board!!

Reading Tips from Todd – Simon Sinek

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Diverseo :
Very insightful presentation, I would urge you to check out their website for further information: www.diverseo.com

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Supplier Diversity : If you look back on my previous posts you will find the basis of PRM Diversity Consultants, Harish Bhayani, presentation,

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Aviva:
Simon Machell’s presentation was really looking at the cultural differences coming from an Asian perspective & how they put a team together for an insurance firm taking in to account the cultural differences they encountered. For example Asian women make all the decisions when it comes to finances in the house / labor on building sites is mostly done by women. His spoke about really studying these aspects & changing a team that was almost all ex-pats from the UK to more Asian orientated.

Simon also touched upon Aviva’s Gender Balance, they are boosting women on boards.
Reverse mentoring is a very big thing for Aviva. All executive committee are coaching woman

Again, Simon was touching upon starting Diversity from the top down with CEO’s heavily involved with decisions on the diversity front.

In the panel sessions Simon was very much adhering to the aspect of treating Diversity as a business problem, solve it first from a Diversity point of view.

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ING: Jacqui Robertson,Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion
Jacqui´s main points were looking at Diversity & Talent Attraction & keeping transparency within the organisation when it comes to promoting etc.
Jacqui was also very adamant throughout her presentation & panels that it is VITAL for the support of HR. That Diversity needs to engage support of HR business partners

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One thing that the Icon Team came away with from this event that we will be implementing for next year is the idea of Diversity Marketing & how your company markets its Diversity campaigns, Aviva had a great example some years back that you might want to check out. It actually won some awards for short movies.

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Google:
Mark gave a very open session, he only had 6 slides, gave more of a question & answer feedback session about Google’s D&I initiatives. Basically that D&I for a Gen Y company, its in its roots. He said one of the main advantages of being in a young company that they are bringing the tradition to the company.
One aspect that did really stand out, was Google’s famous resource group that was lead by Chris ??.
It was a prime example of how resource groups can make money for the business.

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Xerox
Again, Xerox touched upon the aspect that diversity is really something that is within the framework of the company, Ursula Burns is CEO, first African American to be CEO of a multinational.
Xerox spoke about its strong senior management positions which pass down the diversity model. The business review made by the CEO includes Diversity
Xerox touched upon the strength of its resource & networking groups.

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General Feedback from Audience
Diversity trends include
*Innovative Thinking
*Knowledge Management
*Improving links to culture where you are based
*Different KPI’s
*How to create diversity dashboards
*Diversity needs to be implemented as a business driver / Connection with the market place & how it is measured.
*We are entering a period of Diversity fatigue / It needs to be defined better with a mission statement
*Finding key players within the business

Deutsche Bank should be attending Diversity & Inclusion Barcelona

After the recent firestorm that Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann caused with his flippant remarks about how women would make boardrooms more ”colourful” and ”Prettier”. Ouch!. Although the outrage is justified, are we really suprized by these comments?. It echos the recent controversy in the UK where two football commentators were caught on microphones indulging in ”lads banter” at the expense of every woman in eye shot.

There is a huge obstacle for women to overcome the ”Boys Club” that is the boardroom & my full support goes out to those that are trying to improve this ( mainly Norway & to a certain extent Spain, France ).

It is funny that Deutsche Bank has no women in the top two executive layers, whats even funnier is that Chancellor Merkel recently quashed a plan to have at least 30% women on the boards, preferring that companies increase gender diversity on their own free will. Does this answer the question Mrs.Merkel?, that that will be a very long way away.

Boardroom Diversity is something that we will be discussing on our Day One Panel, speakers from ING, Nokia & Todd Sears will also be touching upon this topic. Of course Aviva CEO, I’m sure, will have his viewpoints on this.

Niall Doorley.

Supplier Diversity at 4th Global Diversity & Inclusion Seminar Barcelona 2011

 

Below, I have attached a very interesting article supplied by our Supplier Diversity Speaker.

Supplier Diversity Briefing and Top Tips

 

You’ve barely begun to get to grips with a decent plan for employee diversity, yet people are already talking about developing supplier diversity.  As a result you may just find yourself having to significantly re-think your whole approach, so listen up.

 

More and more organisations are extending their diversity principles to their supply chains, causing their suppliers to look more closely at diversity both internally and in their own supply chains.  There is also increasing emphasis on public bodies to promote equality through procurement.  This public sector duty is present in current law in some regions.  The result of such changes in the marketplace is significant revenue and reputation risk for those who are not doing enough on diversity internally and in their own supply chains.

 

So what does supplier diversity mean for organisations like yours in practical terms?  What are the issues and what are organisations doing to develop their approaches?  Typical client support activities that we have provided in the last couple of years are :

 

• organisations engaging and assessing/comparing their Tier 1 supply partners on supplier diversity
• bid submission support
• developing employee and supplier diversity strategies
• reviewing and advising on diversity elements of recent bid submissions and equality policies
• best practice
• strategies for increasing diversity in supply chains
• case studies to profile approaches of different organisations and good/best practice
• supplier diversity training workshops for management and functional personnel

 

 

Some top tips …

 

1.    Regard suppliers as an extension of your employed workforce, which is what they are; what should you be doing about their diversity as well as your employees’?

 

 

 

2.    Put yourself in your customers’ shoes – what are their expectations with respect to diversity in their supply chain and in particular, your organisation and your supply chain?  If you don’t know, you need to find out.  Determine the benefits of supplier diversity to them – and to you.

 

3.    Take a helicopter view to consider :

a.    your organisation’s diversity philosophy and scope

b.    the diversity of your employee base

c.     how your organisation promotes diversity in its supply chain

 

4.    Think proactive not reactive.  Treat this as an opportunity to create a competitive advantage, not as a compliance exercise.  That way you are far more likely to energise your stakeholders and get results.

 

5.    Get your sales, marketing, procurement, HR, training and legal functions connected so that you begin to think about the subject in a more co-ordinated and holistic fashion :

a.    Share between these functions where each is with diversity and where each needs to be

b.    Work together to engage with your customers and suppliers

 

6.    The most wholesome and sustainable approaches will not be those which specify quotas, but those which actively manage diversity by closely engaging with internal and external stakeholders.

 

 

 

Harish S Bhayani

Principal

PRM Diversity Consultants UK

Links:

 

• Supplier Diversity Masterclass 1 March 2011

• PRM Website

harish@prmdiversityconsultants.co.uk or tel. +44 (0)845 330 6738

Nokia Joins the Diversity and Inclusion Seminar 2011

We are delighted to announce that Nokia’s Global Director for Diversity and Inclusion will be stepping in for Pepsi’s Chris Hoyt. We are very happy to welcome Adam who has huge experience in the Diversity field after spending many years at TNT’s diversity department. Adam also has lots of HR experience in other roles in the Netherlands with ABM AMRO where he worked in Talent Management & Change Management.

Adam will fit nicely in to our module of Global Strategies due to take place on Day Two. Adam will be discussing areas of Gender Diversity and Gender Bilingualism ( I’ll let Adam explain this ) within Nokia. After speaking with Adam over the phone Nokia truly have a very impressive diversity model in place whereby they concentrate on each individual department & how diversity can be tackled.

Adam will be speaking on Day Two at 16:10.

Niall.

Aviva CEO – Simon Machell

When we were in production for the 4th annual global Diversity and Inclusion seminar, our first thoughts were to have on the agenda a major CEO present. It was from much debate raised at the 2010 edition that we made it our mission to succeed. Again, Aviva were in audience, their CR Director and CR Consultant thought it a great idea to approach their CEO from Asia Pacific, Simon Machell, with a view to inviting him to present a viewpoint ‘From the Top’  as it were.

Here we are almost 12 months later and excited to welcome Simon to the DandI event in Barcelona next month. Simon will be focusing simply on WHY diversity is so important to Aviva. From policies to programmes, Mr.Machell will reveal the mechanics behind some of Aviva’s most coveted initiatives. It will be a special Keynote hour long presentation not to be missed.

If you would like to swot up on Simon’s background I have attached some interviews & Bio’s below. Enjoy

http://www.executiveinterviews.net/players/full/default.asp?order=UK04223

http://www.aviva.com/investor-relations/corporate-governance/executive-committee/simon-machell/

Gender Diversity, Diversity and Inclusion Seminar Barcelona

Gender Diversity has always been a very important aspect of our annual Diversity and Inclusion Seminar in Barcelona. Over the years we have been fortunate enough to welcome some of the leading minds in this area. Last year we had the amazing Alison Maitland speak on Gender & Leadership Diversity , www.alisonmaitland.com. The year before we had Cisco’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion Nikker Walker, this year for the theme on Gender Diversity we will have a panel debate with some very high level speakers & of course we are delighted to welcome Catalyst Ambassador for Gender Diversity, Mrs Pascale Marcou, www.catalyst.org

Should be a very interesting session. To accompany this post here is a very interesting article from the Financial Times,

http://www.financialpost.com/executive/Should+gender+diversity+boards/3900429/story.html

Gender Diversity

One of the main themes of this event is the aspect of Gender Diversity. Always a very important theme on all our editions of the Diversity & Inclusion Seminar Barcelona. Over the years we have had people like Alison Maitland, www.alisonmaitland.com & Nikki Walker from Cisco, www.cisco.com speak on this issue. This year we are delighted to announce the presence of Catalyst Ambassador for Gender Diversity, Pascale Marcou, www.catalyst.com. Pascale will be presenting on a recent Catalyst survey in this area of Talent & Gender Diversity.

Groups already attending the 4th Annual Diversity and Inclusion Seminar

The delegate list is already very impressive with attendees coming from some of the most recognized brand names in the world, this shows that Diversity and Inclusion Business go hand in hand. Also, very nice to see that a lot of the delegate names have already attended our Diversity and Inclusion events in the past.

Groups already onboard include Ernst & Young, Aviva, Google, Novo Nordisk, BAE Systems.

Groups looking to confirm their attendance include PWC, KPMG, AIG, Siemens just to name but a few.

Keep the interest flowing people.