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Thank you for joining us today. My name is Bo English-Wiczling. I am the current chair of Oracle's Asian ERG, Opal. It stands for Oracle Professional Asian Leadership, and Opal was founded by Win Chang in 2016 and we now have more than 65100 members worldwide. And OPAL is also the fastest growing ERG in Oracle, and we did it all in our spare time. So today, I'm gonna show you, and we're gonna show you all of the secrets that we did by to start and grow a new ERG in 1 of the nation's largest tech companies in an industry dominated by men and what we did to expand it into the powerful network today. Before we get started, folks over zoom or, sorry, over this, platform, please post and chat. Like, where are you calling in from? Where are you coming from? We would love to know. Are you calling in from the US, Europe, Asia, you name it. We wanna hear. So please post and chat. 

We'd love to hear from you. And before we get started, I wanna introduce you to my very good friend Win Chang. So Wen began her career as a software engineer developing financial application solutions at Texas Eastern Corp. In 1990, she joined Oracle as a technical support manager providing exceptional customer support, and then later worked as an application sales consulting manager several years managing a global sales consulting team. Civil Systems And Hyperion also employed Ms. Chang before joining Logical App as the customer experience VP. She was responsible for several lines of business, including consulting services, customer success, education and customer support. And in 2008, Oracle acquired logical apps. Over the last few years, she's held several roles at Oracle, including a key account director role support account director and cloud accelerator director role. 

Today, she is an Oracle solution engineer director for higher education and the founder of OPAL. Welcome. When 

Thank you so much. Really glad to be here. 

Alright, folks. Before we get started, Please post and chat. Who where are you dialing in from? And I'm gonna stop sharing this slide so that we can see all of you. So I am going to ask Win some questions. And if you have a burning question, please feel free to post that in chat too. So, Lynn, let's start with our very, very first question. Tell us about OPAL and how did you get it started? 

Well, you know, I, when I returned to Oracle in 2008, I had gotten actively involved with the Oracle women's leadership and that's, the first ERG that I actively participated in and became a community leader. And, one day, my manager asked me if I would be willing to participate as a panelist for the Latino style magazine. And I was thinking, well, you know, I grew up in Miami and I know but I'm not Latinas and then I thought, what the heck? I'm gonna go ahead and do it. And you know what? I had the best time. I got a chance to, you know, learn a little bit more about the Latino community, had, had a chance to meet with these amazing leaders And then I spoke back to my manager about the experience, and and I wondered, you know, why did she start the, Ola, which is the ERG for the, Latino community. 

And I felt this warm community and wondered where is our Asian community? And I thought if I waited, I mean, you know, by then, I had already been at Oracle for well over, you know, 20 years. And I thought, well, if I keep waiting and it doesn't happen, maybe I'll just go ahead and learn what I can. And I went and spoke to the Oracle Diversity And Inclusion group to understand what does it take to, you know, create an an employee resource group. And they shared with me that there were, you know, that I would need to create a mission statement, a recruit an executive sponsor, and that they would also help fund our BRG. And so that made me think, you know what? Let's do it. 

So I recruited, you know, end of who was part of the, he was part of the development team, and I thought you know, a lot of our Asian, employees are actually part of the development team, so it probably made sense to get someone from the leadership ranks. And he you know, he said yes and and probably at the time he wasn't even sure what he was saying yes to, but he's been our, global executive sponsor for many, many years now. And, our opal, you know, community was founded in 2015. To support our Oracle employees, with an interest in the Asian heritage focused on supporting Oracle strategic objectives and business outcomes by inspiring action, accountability, and, an inclusive diverse environment. And so I sent out a survey through our, dragon mail distribution And before I knew it, we had over a hundred people saying that they were interested in having this community created And, we had our first kickoff meeting in 2015. I had no idea, how much interest there were, but it was overwhelming. 

We had over a hundred people come to our event, and we were able to build this platform of, you know, strong community focused on, employee experiences to share their experience, advocate for themselves and really helping to break down stereotypes and empower leaders and give a voice to our community. 

I think it is fantastic when that you were able to do that because imagine doing this all on your own in a company with a 160,000 employees. That just blows my mind. Alright. Tell me because, you know, the audience we'll probably wanna know since this is a women in tech, how many women are in OPAL? 

Well, you know, for our OPAL global board, we've actually got 3 male. So this is about 23% and then we've got 10 females. So that's 76% For our community leaders, we've got, 33 male and, 20 female. So it's a roughly 60% male and, 40% female. And on the executive sponsorship, we've got 23 male and 7 female. So it's a 76% male to a 24% female, which kinda goes to show that we don't have enough women leaders in the executive Franks. 

Yes. Absolutely. We gotta get more ladies out there. Alright. Wanna, how did you scale OPAL ERG across the organization? 

You know, that's a kind of a funny story. I would have never imagined that community would have grown as big as we are today. And, it's quite amazing. It's really grown very organically. And out of the we first had the headquarter community at the time, Redwood Shores with us the headquarters. And, and then Austin, came very soon after, and there was a huge, community over there and, I do remember getting a call from Beau and she was interested in finding a a simply a speaker to come to speak to the OCI community about OPAL. And although I couldn't travel, I gave Bo all of the presentation. I walked through the presentation to share for her to share with the OCI community. And before you know it, she was an OPAL fan and as you can see, she is now not only was she a com, you know, a community leader for the Seattle chapter, but she is now our open chair person. We're so incredibly, you know, grateful. 

But another community that, kinda grew organically was our Irvine can and they were one of our first communities to host a leadership event followed by a pingpong tournament. In our community, you know, not only do we celebrate, the Asian, different Asian, events and the Asian, you know, such as holidays such as lunar New Year, Hall Holly and Duwali, but we also have every year the in May, we celebrate the Asian Pacific Islander heritage month with a leadership symposium where we have, communities throughout OPAL that will host events and, that's been extremely, extremely popular. 

And over and above that, we've also had people that have stayed with OPAL and said that because of OPAL , state at Oracle. We I had I know, one such story that was, this one gal who was a business development consultant who started here at Oracle, and eventually she went into sales. And after a while, she said, you know what? I really wanna do something other than sales, and it's really because of our open community that she was able to talk to people in product development and find new opportunities for herself. And she said many times that had it not been for our open community that she may not have stayed as Oracle for as long as she did. 

I think that's fantastic that we are able to do that for so many of our open members. When I know that when you were first starting out your passion project with OPAL, you probably encountered some challenges. What were some of those challenges and what tips you have for people to overcome those? 

Well, one of the challenges that I could remember was the fact that we didn't have a registration system. And so we would use, like, a quick survey just to get people to register, but it really wasn't a great way to kind of, analyze the membership or understand what the tracking is for success or even getting. And so one of the great things about OPAL was that we spearheaded not only for our ERG, but for the entire diversity and inclusion, all the ERGs to create a a event registration system. And, I would say that that was probably one of the challenges that our our team kinda re rise to the occasion and found solutions And over and above that, I would say that during COVID, that was certainly a very challenging time. It wasn't just a challenging time, for our community, but I think you know, people in general. And, one of the things that we did was we started something called Opalohana where we met every Friday to share good news. 

It it meant having people would step up and share about their passions, good things that happen to encourage people to kind of, come together as a community through the pandemic. And, I would say that during that time, other challenges was that there, you know, We went from, an in person, primarily in person events to virtual events. But what we found was that these virtual events, really great gained momentum and created some of our events that used to be, in person to be virtual, but ended up building upon themselves and having even a greater number of people attending those events. So I think that sometimes, you know, that, like they say, you know, that crisis is a combination in Chinese crisis is a combination of opportunity and danger. And so when you have that situation, you find ways to make those, opportunities come and so that's what we did. 

You know, one of the things we hear sometimes from folks that maybe aren't supporters of employee resource groups is that we're seen as a kind of social club. What what are your thoughts around that one? 

You know what? We do, I would say that we have done a really great job, reminding our community that we're really focused on, leadership development, helping them to find their voice helping them to work on negotiations, networking, because it's really the power of this community. And although there are sometimes like our lunar New Year, which really is a celebration of those, you know, holidays. But over and above that, we also bring our leadership team to come and remind us why we're celebrating and what these celebrations are about. What do you think are things that, you know, that you've seen that we've done to help with that? 

Oh, I love this question. So one of the things that we did was we brought in HR folks from outside of our organization, and then we did a session on peeking behind the scenes of a talent review board. Now I don't know how many folks are familiar with a talent review board or what is called a TRB. But this is where all of the hiring managers or your direct manager and their managers get together and talk about you. So this is the this is the behind closed doors, performance reviews that happen every year. And so Most of our members did not even know that this was something that happened that they were talked about in these sessions. 

And so we actually brought in these HR folks to tell them here's what happens, and here's how you start preparing now for your performance review that may happen in 6 months to a year from now. But you need to start laying the groundwork for that. So that's one way of professional development that we were able to do. We also brought in other folks to do professional leadership training classes. So we did partner with someone, called Elevator Asian Upward, and his name is Vu He is a fantastic individual, but he helped us with leveraging our Asian heritage and our unique culture. To our advantage at work. So rather than viewing some of these things as a disadvantage, we view it as an advantage for us, like our collectiveness. Right? Asians are known for being very collectivist. And so how do we make that work for us? 

And that is a very simple answer to that, which is It parts of our Asian culture allow us to work very, definitely across multiple different individuals to get networking together, mentoring people, getting them to support us, getting our ideas out there one at a time so that we can actually get an entire stronger group together. 

At the end. So I'm super excited about the things that we've done with. So now yeah. Sorry. Go ahead with 

I was just gonna say that I remember that we also started the, you know, the mentor circles that have been very, very instrumental as well. But I'd love for you to share with us a little bit more about, you know, how did we grow open communities and kind of where we are now. 

Yes. Okay. So couple of the ways that we grew the local community I already mentioned to you was partnering with some of the other groups outside of Oracle. So we started networking with professional development coaches, for example, to leverage that Asian culture and heritage We partnered with pan Asian organizations around the world like NAF, for example, or a send, or a API against hate. Which was one of the organizations we worked with, especially during COVID, where we saw a rise in anti Asian hate. We also network and partner with Asian E RGs, in other companies. So it's not just within our group, within Oracle, but also with Asian E RGs in other companies. And then internally, we've actually built allied ships with our other employee resource groups, and we have about, I wanna say, 9 of them in Oracle. And so we found that they usually experience very similar things to what we experience. And so solutions that we found also applied to them. So we shared those secrets. 

We also network with executives across Oracle that had a passion for growing our Asian leaders. And then we ask them to help show us how did they craft that their journey, in their professional career. And then We did things around Oracle. Like, for example, we inserted ourselves into the new hire orientation classes. And so we started talking about, OPAL ERG during that time. So we can tell new people, new Oracle employees, hey. Come join OPAL for us. 

Alright. It's been really, very, very helpful to kinda grow our our footprint and grow our community. 

Absolutely. Now you're probably wondering, well, where does that then put you now? So I wanna share a slide, which I'm quite proud of. One is, you know, I mentioned this previously. We've got 65100 members worldwide. So, yes, we have about a 160,000 employees at Oracle. And at 65100 of them are members of our open ERG. And we're actually the largest and fastest growing here. So these are these VPs, SVPs, EVPs across Oracle that are sponsors of one of our chapters. We implemented new executive sponsor APIs, and we do that to measure in engagement and success of our exec sponsors. And then we were able to, as Wen mentioned, that members stay at Oracle because of the work that we do here at OPAL . 

And so we were able to retain about 15% of our OPAL members and keep them at Oracle. And last but not basically important is we were able to increase our annual strategic and operating budget by a 100% in the last 2 years. So I know that you're probably wondering, well, what are those things that you you did in order to do that? Well, all of those tips that we were telling you about building allied ships about those, partnerships externally. Those were all contributing factors to get additional funding for our groups. And then I do wanna share we hope that you will connect with us. You've got 2 QR codes on screen. These are both of our LinkedIn profiles. So please scan those and please connect with us offline. 

We would love to talk to you and love to hear about your ERG journey or strategy and where, you're running into any challenges. We would love to help you, and we would love to partner and connect. 

If there's any questions you you guys have, feel free to connect via LinkedIn. Thank you.