At Dell, we believe that we can serve our customers better by reflecting them, and we also believe that if you create an inclusive environment, you’re likely to be more innovative. So for us, D&I is very much a business imperative.
It really starts at the top – we have a global diversity council that Michael Dell, our founder and CEO, chairs and our two presidents in EMEA, Aongus Hegarty and Adrian McDonald, are also very much engaged. You’ve got to have buy-in from the leadership. If they’re not fully committed, you will struggle to make any change.
Employment resource groups
First and foremost we have what we call employment resource groups (ERGs), which are designed to engage members in their careers. Built on our culture of inclusion, we’ve established groups focused on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sustainability, and others, but any team member can join any group. In fact, 25% of our global workforce has now joined one of our ERGs and as part of our Legacy of Good plan, we have a goal to have 40% of our global workforce in an ERG by 2020. We have learned a lot from them, and they are really driving the D&I agenda and inclusive culture at a local level.
Some of the work that we’ve undertaken in Women in Action, our ERG focused on women (which I lead for the region), relates to getting women into the IT sector, and we have invested in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics]. We’ve developed our own programme called ‘IT is not just for geeks’, and we go out into schools trying to reinforce for girls (and boys) the opportunities available to them through a career in IT. We also team up with other more well-known institutions, like CoderDojo and Coder Pirates, to show them what it’s really like being in the IT industry. Through these programmes and partnerships, I think we’ve now reached up to 6,000 students.
Many of our ERG chapters in individual countries are led by lawyers. To some extent it has to do with the fact that I’m very much engaged in this topic, and if your leader is engaged it tends to drive the organisation. I would definitely encourage my peers and colleagues out there to get engaged in this agenda, because I think we can really play an important part in terms of helping companies to have an inclusive culture. In-house lawyers see across all groups, we tend to know what’s going on, we tend to have good relationships across the many different functions, and we are pragmatic and process-oriented.
Men advocating real change
Another of the initiatives that has had a huge impact in Dell is a programme that Catalyst initiated called MARC [Men Advocating Real Change]. It is designed to get men engaged in the gender diversity debate, to identify unconscious bias and to help team members develop a more collaborative and inclusive leadership style. We were one of the first technology companies to get involved, and we’ve trained more than 2,000 leaders to date. We’re now working on a ‘train the trainer’ programme for all employees. When we surveyed attendees, 82% believed that it has changed the way they behave, but even more importantly, 68% said that they have seen an improvement in their leaders’ behaviour.
Men still take many of the leading positions in business, so if you don’t get them engaged you won’t see impact. When I came into Dell I was the only female on the leadership team and now 50% of the EMEA management team on the commercial side are women. That’s a massive change, and MARC has played a big role in that, giving men a tool to have the discussion and highlighting some of the privileges that men have compared to women. A practical example is that women don’t like flying late in the evening, arriving in a foreign country and having to take a cab. Being aware of small details like that has really opened men’s eyes in terms of how you schedule meetings. It has given us a common language and that has been very powerful.
Investing in the pipeline
When we look for external candidates, we have a focus on ensuring a diverse pipeline. An example of that in action has been running sessions in countries where we have identified women we thought were likely to get jobs in future, even though we weren’t hiring at that point in time. We invited them in to talk about the company, with the goal of making them interested in coming to work for us when we do have roles available. It’s about creating a pipeline of women before the jobs open up.
But we do a lot to drive our pipelines within Dell as well. We spend a lot of time on individual development plans, and everyone in the company has a plan of how to get to the next level in terms of their strengths and their development areas. We conduct sessions several times a year where we look at the pipeline and consider whether we have diversity in terms of people who are likely to move up. If we don’t, then we think about what we can do about it.
Push and pull
When I came into the company, it was important that the women who were in senior positions spent a significant amount of time being out there as role models so that people could get a feel for what it takes to get to that level: that it doesn’t mean that you have to act like a man, or be very aggressive – you can actually be yourself.
Mentoring is something that we believe in strongly at Dell. We do informal mentoring, but we have also set up an automated programme called Mentor Connect. You go online and enter what you are looking for, for example certain competencies, and it will actually pair you up with someone who says they are strong in those skills. Sometimes it’s better to find someone with whom you feel comfortable through informal channels, but we’ve found that often people would rather go through this tool and identify the skills they’re looking for. We’ve also been very successful in reverse mentoring – for example, where women have mentored men and given them feedback on their leadership style.
We do a lot of development and leadership training, and we have what we call ‘Advancing Your Career as a Woman’. We’ve had very good experiences in identifying women and helping them through this training, as well as sometimes encouraging some who may not have thought they had the right skills for a particular job. Having that push-pull strategy has made a huge difference.