Tracking Employee Resource Group (ERG) membership and coordinating thriving participation.
The Challenge: Supporting the Operations and Growth of a Diverse Workforce
In addition to incorporating many facilities, the healthcare system is a high-diversity environment. Its ERGs are a key factor in the organization’s ability to connect with and reflect its workforce’s wide variety of communities. The client always boasts many of these groups at any one time, though exact numbers vary over time: as of May 2024, it has 17 ERGs total, with plans in motion for a further five groups by the end of the year.
In early 2020, these employee-led groups lacked dedicated tools through which leaders could manage budgets, events, and membership. Instead, this critical information was managed through a dispersed and disconnected collection of documents and spreadsheets by different leaders.
These files inevitably offered an incomplete picture of ERG operations—healthcare employment is a particularly fast-paced environment, with individuals regularly transferring to different facilities or leaving and re-entering employment. ERGs at this time were also location-specific and available only to employees at those facilities.
Therefore, the organization identified the need to secure a new ERG platform to extend ERG access to the entire healthcare system, help ERG leaders expand engagement, and reduce the administrative burden of their role.
The Solution: An Easy-to-Use Platform for Advancing ERG Activity
After an internal audit to uncover the full range of challenges ERGs faced, the client’s DEI Program Director reviewed several ERG platforms before opting for Affirmity’s solution. This process included input from ERG leaders and the organization’s supply chain and digital teams.
The Affirmity ERG platform helps the organization’s ERGs manage their budgets, promote events, and offer key information, all in a central repository for their activity. Furthermore, the platform can accurately track membership through integration with the organization’s Human Resources Information System (HRIS), ensuring that lists are updated to reflect relocations within the network and account for people leaving or joining. This has allowed the organization’s ERGs to offer membership to over 80,000 employees in the workforce while reducing administrative burdens on ERG management teams.
The tools make it easier for ERGs and the organization’s office of diversity, equity, and inclusion to measure group performance, quantify ROI, and provide insights that help enhance, grow, and scale the ERGs.
Affirmity has supported the client throughout the process: firstly, with onboarding training during an initial soft launch of the platform to ERG leaders, and later by providing regular training schedules to introduce newcomers to the platform.
“Working with Affirmity has been easy as pie. I’d give them an A-plus plus in terms of customer service. They’re always responsive. I love that they offer us weekly training sessions. Whenever I contact the team, I get an almost immediate response. We can also set up meetings with Affirmity to discuss the various pieces. So, I have absolutely no complaints about the customer service.” – Client’s DEI Program Director
The Results: Embracing an All-In-One ERG Solution
While the organization could previously offer ERGs at just four of its locations, the ERG platform now allows it to offer membership across the entire system. This has resulted in a corresponding and significant rise in ERG engagement and employee representation as a direct result.
The platform has since become a hub for information about digital and in-person events, advocacy, volunteering, and employee engagement. Since the platform’s implementation in June 2021, the ERGs have published over 400 announcements and 200 newsletters, while also using the platform to organize 250 events.
With ERGs thriving, the client has been able to better advance its outreach efforts to different local civil rights, advocacy, and volunteer organizations. Employees can add themselves to various waitlists for external events and mentorship opportunities in their community, and the organizations are regularly invited to present during ERG leadership meetings.
In fact, group creation has even been opened up to non-ERGs due to interest in the platform’s reach, with the organization’s government affairs function the first to launch a presence.
“People were skeptical at first, as you can imagine. But there’s now a resounding endorsement and embracing of the platform. We have other internal and external groups that come to us to promote their activities through the platform because they know they’re going to get results. They recognize that an employee that takes the time to be involved in the platform is an employee that’s invested in their career, while also being invested in employee engagement and carrying the message across.” – Client’s DEI Program Director