All right. So thanks everyone. Sorry for the delay. Just had to get help from the excellent tech team in getting these slides to share. Really appreciate your patience. So, hi. Uh My name is Sabrina mcpherson.I am here to talk about meaningful impact, which is about making the case for an effective diversity, equity and inclusion program. So let's get started. So I'm gonna start by talking about who I am. Why should you even listen to me on this topic? I'm gonna talk about why I think we need to make the case for de I why? It's not clear that everybody knows why we should be doing this work. Then I'll talk about why should we be doing this work in a professional context? There's two main reasons then I'm going to as part of that, making the case address the critiques that come about this work from both the leftmost and the rightmost arms of the political spectrum. I'm hoping by doing that, that I can prove that this work itself is not political and then I'll wrap with some tips, some ideas, some strategies for how to set your organization up for success. When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, work so quick intro, who am I? I am a senior product manager. I work for Morningstar. If you're not familiar with us, we are a fintech company.

We gather data and research, we put it into products to help people make better investing decisions. So I myself work in data in technology and in strategy. I'm also AD E I leader. I have been the president of the Americas chapter of out at Morningstar, which is our LGBT Q employee resource group for the last two years. I've been AD E I leader in the Canada region for six years and been a partner in building internal and external DE I work streams in our technology org, both with internal partners and external partners like Amazon works um web services with um William Blair and West Monroe partners among others.

I've also led leadership training for managers, not explicitly about DE I, but when you're talking about inclusive and successful teams de I does come up and I'm also, I'm, I'm not usually in the habit of sharing my political views with a bunch of strangers, but I am also what my friends love to call a raging centrist.

And uh because I'm about to talk about political perspectives and left and right. I think it's only fair that I point out I don't have a dog in either fight. I really, I lean left on some issues and write on others And if you were to measure me, I probably went up right in the middle. I hope that gives me a relative neutral perspective to make the points that I'm gonna make later today. So enough about me, let's talk about why we need to make the case. So when you work in DE I and you talk about people with people about this work, you tend to get into echo chambers, right? Everybody thinks. yeah. Yeah, they're nodding along affirmatively. I agree with everything you're saying. But if I talk to people who don't work in this space or if I talk to friends who aren't involved in businesses that do this work, I hear, you know, oh de I, yeah, it's very on trend and unfortunately, it is a trend right now. You have a wide variety of companies that are realizing this is popular, it's important. And so they're picking up on it. And I wanted to be able to make the case outside of the echo chamber for why we should be doing this work.

I wanted to make, you know, a convincing case and particularly to those people who think that de I work is driven by a particular political agenda. I wanted to prove that it's valuable to business and that it isn't necessarily assigned to one political tribe. So I think especially now and we have so many companies hopping on this bandwagon and using these very trendy terms, we need to establish what's really impactful to people's lives and what's simply performative. So why, why should we be doing this work in business? Well, I argue that business success is all about satisfying your market and your stakeholders. The difference is that your market and your stakeholders has changed and whether you're an industry, you're an educational institution or you're a nonprofit, the list of people that your organization has to care about your stakeholders and fundamentally what they care about has changed.

So I'm gonna talk in detail about who those stakeholders are. But what it comes down to is this your business needs diversity, equity and inclusion work as part of your business strategy. And the two reasons come down to ethics and capitalism. So let's dive into that first one at a heart at its core, professional diversity and equity and inclusion work believes that everyone has an inherent right to be treated fairly and justly and that everyone should have an equal access to opportunity regardless of their identity.

So they're free to pursue it to the best of their abilities. Now, if you believe these things are true and you are an organization that has responsibility and power over individuals, whether those are clients or stakeholders or uh prospects or employees, then you have two responsibilities.

You have to acknowledge that historically, these statements haven't always been true universally, not, everybody has always been treated fairly and justice justly in a business environment, even though they have the right to be and not everybody has always had equal access to opportunity, regardless of their identity.

We know historically, that slices of identity have had significantly more access to power and opportunity than others. So if you acknowledge that these things have not been universally true in the past, then you have to commit to doing the work in your sphere of influence to bring these statements to life. That is the ethics behind de I work. And I can already hear and have heard some objections in my professional de I work, hang on, hang on. I didn't get into this business for philosophy class. Why are you talking to me about ethics? Well, if you are an organization, business or nonprofit or educational and you want to thrive over the next 40 years, you have to care about millennials and Gen Z. Millennials and Gen Z are getting older. The oldest of the millennials myself included is turning 41. This year.

Millennials and Gen Z are getting older, gaining political capital, gaining financial capital. They are looking for ways to spend their money and their influence to donate, to invest and they don't just care about the fact that you do business. They care about how you do business.

When we talk about socially responsible, it's critical to this cohort. And if you want to thrive as a business, whether these are clients, donors, employees, shareholders, attracting this co or is going to need evidence of your ethics in practice. Now, there's lots of different ways you can do that. They're gonna look at your mission statement and your values statement and then look at how you do business and see how they match up. But diversity, equity and inclusion work is a key way that you're gonna be able to provide that evidence to this group. And I hope this rolls quite nicely into my second part, which is that stakeholder capitalism isn't new capitalism and business has always been about satisfying your stakeholders.

It's just that it used to be limited to the market of people who might buy your product and the people who are buying your shares. That list has significantly changed. As I said, it includes employees. Now, employees are no longer faceless resources. You can throw at the wall of your projects until they burn out they are stakeholders and you have to consider what they want. This includes potential employees. It includes your clients and your prospects who are all fully aware of your brand, whether they're con you know, contributing to your success right now or not. And so it is important to know that right now, if you can't show how you're investing in de I work, and you can't show importantly how that work goes beyond the surface layer, you're going to lose market share and you're going to lose brand capital. And on this topic, I don't necessarily want you to take my word for it. Larry Fink is the Ceo of Blackrock International. Every year, he writes a letter to CEO S and this year he included quite a section on stakeholder capitalism and socially responsible business. And he makes the point. This is not about politics, it's not about an ideological agenda, it is capitalism, it's mutual beneficial relationships. And he points out your employees, your customers, your suppliers, the community all around you and your company that you need to prosper.

So I argue that this work is truly capitalism at its finest. So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about how de I work itself is not political in nature. It can certainly be politicized, but it itself is politically neutral and I think has its most value when it doesn't ascribe to a particular political tribe. So I'm going to try and make this case by reviewing the criticisms that come of this work from the different arms of the political spectrum and then hopefully establish it doesn't really belong to either and talk about the next steps. So first, let's talk about the, the criticism that comes from the leftmost arm of the political spectrum. This group of political thinkers believes that regardless of the intentions of people inside a corporation or a capitalist organization that you can't meaningfully address inequity and injustice within that framework, the capitalism itself is inequitable. And so their argument is that you shouldn't be doing this work in a corporate setting that capitalism has to be torn now before you can even approach equity and justice. And then related to that.

Sometimes it's separate, sometimes there's a deferral of, ok, yes, you could do it in a corporate setting, but incremental settings are incomplete and in corporate settings, you can only ever get these settling for less solutions. So those are the key points that come from, from that arm.

My response here is, you know, to pull out that old Voltaire quote, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good now where I talk about the difference between helping people now and helping people in a potential future. So if I have the option of making a difference for people's lives now making strides toward pay equity in my company. So that makes a difference to people's lives or making it easier to have flexible schedules because I know that different people have different caregiving responsibilities, whether that's for Children or elders, I can make these meaningful differences right now versus helping in a potential future where something large and systematic has changed.

I would rather make the choice to help people now. And in terms of incremental advancements, I would argue that is the only way we make progress. If you think about the slow but steady changes we've seen over the last 40 to 60 years, it's been because of people making slow but steady changes within the existing system. So, you know, think about explaining de I practice to your parents or your grandparents. My, my dad was a progressive guy for his era, worked in corporate offices in the eighties and nineties and, you know, probably would have thought it's a pipe dream if I explained this kind of work to him. My grandfather, on the other hand, wouldn't, it wouldn't have mattered to him. It wouldn't have made sense to him that we do this work. He wouldn't have understand the reasons for it. Let alone me sitting here as a woman who's a leader in business, explaining it to a group of people who's eager to listen to me. So we have made significant process. It's slow, but it's steady. Now, I'm going to talk about the criticism that comes from the rightmost wing of the political spectrum. So here it breaks into three categories.

One, you'll often hear de I requires policing of speech, which is a, you know, attack on a fundamental freedom or that DE I is an attack on straight white men and it actually makes their lives worse. Finally, you'll hear people argue that DE I work being done, business is forcing leftist politics onto an organization. And that's not fair to people who signed up for an organization, not for leftist politics or political agenda. So I'll respond to that, you know, first, in terms of freedom of speech, having a social contract doesn't equal, restricting your free speech when you join an organization, particularly those of us who work in a corporate office type environment, you often walk in and you have a social contract and an agreement of how you're going to behave and how others are going to behave towards you.

My favorite example of this is asking, do you swear when you're at work? Right? When I'm around my friends or my husband, it's, you know, occasionally I swear, but when it comes to a business meeting, I am using polite and professional language. I'm holding myself in a professional way and I expect others to do the same. The only difference with de I workers that we're now explicitly saying along with polite professional language that you can't be using racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic language as part of that social contract, the agreement you make to be part of this work community, the argument about it not being fair to straight white men.

Well, I argue back that de I represents the arrival of a true meritocracy. We are effectively saying that we want to change the historical division of power and resources. We know it's always been heavily weighted to one particular group. We wanna open up access to multiple groups and provide paths of opportunity to multiple groups. Now, can that seem more difficult to some people? Yes, yes, it can. Because if you've always had access to all the power and resources, it will seem unfair that you have to now share it across multiple groups. But is it more fair to everyone? Does it represent a more just meritocracy where everyone who has the ability can go and achieve? Yes. Yes, it is more fair. Finally, I'm, I've hoped that I've established by now that de I is about sustainable business decisions, not about politics. This is true, both inside and outside your organization. Employees who feel safe and included are shown in study after study to be more innovative and more productive and stakeholders who feel that you're making responsible choices for the success of your business are willing to invest more in your business. So this is about business decisions.

It's really not about politics. So now that we've talked about that, I'm gonna talk about what we can do. How do you have guidelines for sustainable success in dei A program that lasts over the long term? So first, we need to think about when is it being done, right? How do you know when it's effective and having meaningful impact in people's lives or when it's ineffective? So when you see an effective DE I program, you're going to see them setting goals, there's going to be clear, tracking and sharing of progress you'll see incremental and consistent approve improvements. Consistency is key, constantly seeking and encouraging candid feedback and being willing to have necessary difficult conversations.

When you have people who are challenging the work ineffective DE I programs is frankly where all of the critiques come from. It is performative and it is where you see it being run like a game of buzzword bingo, right? You see executives throwing jargon at the wall and hoping that something sticks but there are no goals, there's no metrics, there's no transparency. And so there's no progress you can't prove or disprove that you've done anything. It's also ineffective to ignore the disengaged.

Oh, you don't, you don't like d er, you don't wanna talk about it So we're just not gonna talk to you. Well, that's, that's not helpful. Fundamentally, it also you can tell when people are avoiding the difficult parts of equity and inclusion. Equity is hard. Equity is about changing things in your company so that people do have equal access. That's hard work and inclusion is even harder. That's about making people feel like they genuinely belong and they have a place that's emotional and mental work on top of the daily work of doing your job and delivering to the bottom line and where it's also ineffective is where you have no training or guidance. Because how can you expect anyone from your entry level to your c suite to do this work effectively if you don't teach them? How. So here are the ways that I think you can set up a program for success. Number one treat it like any other area of your business. It has to be data driven, you have to know your baselines. What are your population demographics right now? What is your employee base saying about their satisfaction rates and how do they feel is their psychological safety level?

Ok. And find out about what your industry and market is doing are how good are they at it? Can you be better than them? Because that's a competitive advantage for you? You wanna have transparent Kpis and communications. I said that before, it's gotta be crystal clear and it requires a dedicated paid team. You are going to need an army of volunteers to help bolster and support that team. But you need someone who is being paid to direct it and lead it and you have to ask yourselves, how diverse is your DE I team? You know, do they all look the same? Can you bring in more people from the community you're trying to serve to diversify your DE I team and make it more effective. Now, you need to think about the short game and the long game helping people in a meaningful way can take time. So you've got to think about long term plans that you'll show progress with over time and then short term wins that build trust and credibility. So short term can include developing employee resource groups, providing flexible work for people, providing education and development events.

Long term, you're going to be thinking about things like pay equity and talent development and making sure that you have leadership parody. So developing your team that makes sure that your c suite eventually looks like the community you're trying to serve. That's a long game.

And so you have to think about all of those different plans. You're also gonna need to listen to and learn from experts who are already doing the work. You have lots of greed organizations right now, who will be able to put your job postings in front of communities that you want to invite into your workplace. And we'll give you all kinds of great information on strategy, but please pay them for their expertise and their services.

I shouldn't have to say this. But it is amazing how many professional organizations will go to organizations and services who are doing work in diversity and equity and inclusion and expect to get the work for free. Don't do that. Number three is really important, really, really important.

You can't shy away from the hard stuff. You can't stifle dissent and discomfort. You have to make the space for hard conversations where people are saying I don't want to do this work or I don't think this work has any business in a business place that's an important conversation to have and you have to be open to it in. Really importantly, you have to make the work about people, not about politics or policies. There's an old saying, soldiers don't fight for king and country, they fight for the men and women in the trenches beside them. And it's true, you wanna make this about the people in your company and how you're helping them and the stories about their lives, that's what people relate to and connect to and not just about policies either. Your guiding question can't be. What policy am I gonna build now?

It's how is this really gonna help people? How am I making people's lives better? These are hard questions and to do it right? These are the questions you have to answer. And finally, I'll say this is a journey. This work is never done. There's not a finish line that you can cross and say, yeah, we did it, we solved diversity. It's it doesn't work that way. You have to continue asking you're accountable to your stakeholders. That's your employees, your, your clients, your prospects, your potential candidates, your shareholders, your community, everybody.

What's next? How can we be better? But I promise you the results will show up and they will show up an improved employee satisfaction, improved retention of talent that you've taken time to develop increased engagement in your employees. And what we've seen in study after study, more innovation and creativity. And really, that's what we want. Any organization should be doing this work so that we have a group of happier people who are more committed to producing great stuff and putting it out there in the world.

I wanna thank you so much for your time.