Become #1 in DEI thanks to your own products.
Picture: Having a new look at things can open a new world of possibilities.
With equalithons, you can impact Society by leveraging your own products or processes.
In this first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Blog post, I’ll share a bit more about how it is possible to leverage your company’s own products or processes to unlock Diversity and Inclusion.
Hackathons are a versatile solution for DEI
I have many discussions every week about diversity and inclusion.
I don’t know any DEI leader that never felt underwhelmed by the engagement that their initiatives receive. Or by the amount of latent pushback that their bias training receives. The feedback isn’t always amazing; or if it is, the impact is short-lived, and the fight is never-ending.
I sell Equalithon to various people: nonprofits, tech talent, other diverse talent, companies, company mentors, artists, educational organizations, and investors. Among others. They all want to support diversity and inclusion. But most of them never thought of hackathons for it - although it’s a very versatile tool that they can leverage - Equalithons or other formats.
With Equalithons there’s a way to avoid this DEI fatigue, by renewing the focus on a new community, by letting volunteers know that they are actually impacting the world.
And by letting them experience DEI through a new angle: your product’s angle.
Involving your products in DEI
More and more,
DEI leaders prefer to engage their company’s employees around their own company’s products, to achieve DEI goals.
Why? It’s a matter of practicality and retention.
Engaging through your products makes DEI more practical and actionable. It’s simply more engaging for a majority of your employees. It grounds DEI into their jobs. DEI has often been criticized as a gimmick by middle management or employees - those who struggle with their day-to-day, those who can’t take enough perspective, those who say: “DEI is good for the company at some point in the future, great, but what do I get immediately with it?”. Now, if you let them experience what your products change to DEI, they see how everything connects. You’ll engage them in DEI through what they do.
Engaging your employees through volunteering involving your company’s products is also a best practice for retention. Volunteering activities are reputed to involve your employees, let them like your company, feel engaged, and retain them. Since engaging people correlates with retention, engaging them better helps retain them better. However, several research reports show that inviting your employees to volunteer for causes that are too far from your company’s purpose can be detrimental to their engagement. In some cases indeed, employees can feel like their passion is actually the cause they are volunteering for - and not your company. You may end up pushing some employees away, instead of retaining them in the company.
As a result, making your products a part of your DEI roadmap is a great idea.
But it’s not that easy to implement.
Here is a story of how we are promoting our Champion Ally PTC so they become the #1 DEI brand in Boston, by letting their employees leverage their products in our Equalithons.
PTC had 3 main goals :
Goal #1: PTC wanted to engage its employees for DEI. PTC employees value societal impact, they support diversity;
Goal #2: PTC wants to be recognized for how their employees support diversity - and wants to become the #1 inclusive employer in the area.
Goal #2: PTC wanted its employees to think about DEI through the lens of their own products so that DEI tied back to their day-to-day jobs, and so it created more sense of belonging.
After a short research and data analysis, we confirmed that it was possible to make PTC the #1 brand in DEI. Meaning that with Equalithons, PTC could quickly become, in absolute and relative terms, a/ the most impacting company for underrepresented communities, and b/ the most visible company supporting them - in the Boston Area.
How do Equalithons help achieve these goals?
Goal #1 and #2: Engagement leading to Inclusive brand recognition.
Engaging. We let a few volunteer PTC employees rotate every quarter and impact many causes per year - not only women, not only BIPOCs, not only any single cause. We will support many causes per year, in average one per quarter.
The DEI team at PTC shares a blurb with its employees, and Equalithon also invites employees directly through social media (no hassle for PTC).
Once registered, PTC employees mentor the teams - and they drive positive impact to dozens of causes and millions of people. This way, Equalithons deliver a wide-ranging impact that no other tool offers today. That’s engaging.
Inclusive Brand Recognition. In the end, as it relates to letting the word out, it’s not only us and PTC telling the story. It’s PTC employees themselves. We challenge them to share their successes online, as part of their Equalithon experience.
Last year, they brought impact to over 12 causes, 50 solutions, over a thousand participants, and 12 million end beneficiaries of nonprofit organizations that they supported in their Equalithons.
That’s how Equalithon has participated in growing PTC’s DEI culture and talent branding.
Goal #3: DEI through company products
When you take a Champion subscription, we can require Equalithon participants to use your products or processes to solve the challenges of a founder or a nonprofit. As a result, your employees mentor participant teams using your products. DEI finally connects with your employees’ jobs.
For PTC, we made this possible by customizing our selection of nonprofit projects, founders, and teams. Since PTC is an AR, IOT, and CAD company, we customized the challenges so that some required the use of AR, and IOT (see Yolaris Garcia’s challenges in the LatinX Equalithon 2022)
Then we customized the Equalithon onboarding so that Equalithon teams and their PTC mentors could understand how to meet around AR and IOT.
In the end, with this customized Equalithon, we made DEI more palatable for PTC’s employees, who see how DEI connects with their jobs.
It can be the same for you, whether you sell products that make intuitive sense for building solutions, or things or services that you didn’t believe could apply to diversity and inclusion.
Engage employees for other outcomes
Engaging through your products is just one example of how Equalithons can engage employees.
Similarly, we can engage your employees for training to DEI, for improving the sense of belonging in your company, for hiring Diverse talent in your teams.
One of the great features of Equalithons is that we can adapt their content, their targets, and their employee experiences to your goals.
More about the author:
Hugues Seureau is a professional ally, CEO and founder of Equalithon.com. He shares his and other people’s findings about DEI tools, solutions, and things that work for DEI leaders, recruiters, and talent. Follow him on Linkedin.
