How To Utilize Employee Resource Groups For Diversity & Inclusion Efforts

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are becoming far more prevalent in the workplace, as firms struggle to practice diversity hiring and employee inclusion and to promote and maintain a level of employee engagement that curtails turnover. Pandora, Lever, Google, Pinterest, Workday, Hewlett-Packard, Oshkosh, Comcast NBC Universal,  and Yelp and many other companies have found that ERGs helped brand their firms as diverse and offer each employee an equal opportunity to become empowered and engaged. Shelton Goode, Ph.D., Director of Diversity and Inclusion for Oshkosh Corp., in his own research on ERG effectiveness, found that over 70 percent of the responding employers relied on their ERGs to create a workforce that reflected customer demographics. A whopping 90 percent called on ERG members to help new hires get comfortable during onboarding, and help assure their retention