Building Supportive Cultures – How Organizations Must Enable Employee Well-Being, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Back in May, I wrote a blog that outlined the 7 Perennial HR Challenges we’ve defined at SAP and their intersection with the annual research from SAP SuccessFactors on the current Meta Trends in HR. I said that I wanted to keep the conversation going through a series of monthly deep-dive blogs into each challenge, and it’s about time we kicked this series into gear!?

How Do We Build Culture??

To start this deep-dive, I want to focus on the Perennial Challenge that is currently at the top of my mind as I meet with customers and work with my own team: Building Culture. It’s no secret that the foundation to building a sustainable workplace culture requires organizations to put the well-being of their people at the forefront, have a purposeful focus on diversity in thought and talent, equity across the entire organization, and inclusion from top to bottom. We have an incredible team of researchers at SAP SuccessFactors who have done extensive original research on how to build a business beyond bias and I encourage you to take a look for yourself.? A key point made by this research is the importance of incorporating elements of culture into the way companies address other perennial challenges. For example, designing jobs considering issues that impact well-being, filling roles in a manner that includes people from all parts of society, or engaging performance in a way that ensures equitable employee reviews and compensation decisions. Culture is not just something you have based on what you talk about, it is something you display through actions.?

The volatility dubbed as the Great Resignation, or as I like to call it, the Great Realignment, has proven just how powerful culture is in attracting, retaining, and nurturing your workforce. And the bottom line is simple - until every single member of your workforce feels as though they are represented, listened to, and valued, you will not have the culture to maximize your business for the future as the skills gap increases and pace of change gets faster. I am constantly working on this within my own team. Following our internal employee surveys over the last few years, we strengthened our commitment to act on the feedback. One of the actions I took was to create a team which includes volunteer ambassadors from across the globe to help identify and highlight local services and offerings from SAP that can help with all aspects of health and well-being – mental, physical, financial etc. We’ve had some great feedback on the initiative so far and I’ll keep you posted as it grows.??

An Emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) Depends on People Managers

Throughout June, I was delighted to see so many companies supporting and encouraging their employees to walk the talk of true inclusivity. At SAP, there was an incredible social campaign led by Pride@SAP with an emphasis on employees feeling comfortable in their own skin everywhere but especially at work. We have even begun to run what we call the “Inclusive Mindset Challenge,” which is a set of gamified micro-learnings that allow participants to practice inclusive behaviors to encourage, support, and leverage all the perspectives that come from diverse thinking.?

Of course, social campaigns and micro-learnings are a great first step towards building a culture with a focus on true DE&I, but how else can we get there? Like all of the perennial HR challenges, the solution starts at the very top of the organization. All the right systems and tools can be in place, but it is up to managers to drive initiatives, and create and exemplify culture within their teams. In my experience, no one has a bigger impact on building culture than managers. For instance, SAP has a strong emphasis on continuous performance management where regular employee feedback is used to shape a culture focused on goal setting, positive learning experiences, and recognition. It takes more than an annual check-in to build the trust and psychological safety that promotes belonging. More than 2,000 of our customers are using continuous performance management as well to create cultures that value feedback, growth and learning.?

How Does the SAP SuccessFactors Product Suite Fit In??

Change is not something that happens overnight, but with the use of the SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite, building a great culture can become a much more organic process. The brilliant Meg Bear recently wrote a blog about how we are constantly striving to design SAP SuccessFactors’ products with inclusivity in mind.??

With our products, our customers have at their fingertips:?

• Inclusive learning options to meet the needs and learning preferences of a diverse workforce?
• A Writing assistant and coaching advisor to help managers craft equitable and actionable feedback?
• Bias alerts to surface potentially biased performance decisions?
• Wage recommendations based on machine learning analysis of salary data and the degree of difficulty to fill roles with the salary analysis tool in our job analyzer?
• Gender bias scans to identify and recommend language replacements in job descriptions and attract a gender-balanced applicant pool?
• Forecasted diversity trends through workforce analytics?
• Real time insights and built-in action planning with Qualtrics employee engagement solutions, allowing you to gather and provide feedback to continuously improve experiences?
• And much, much more!?

What Now??

Whether an organization embraces certain cultural values is not about what it talks about; it is about how it behaves. I am proud to work for a company that walks the talk and truly believes every employee needs to feel valued, respected, and above all, psychologically safe. Every employee, from our board to our managers and individual contributors, continues to build this culture and we are fortunate to have an incredible suite of products to help us along the way.??

How is your organization using technology to change how it designs jobs, fills roles, develops capabilities or engages performance to build a more sustainable culture???