Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Power Innovation

Part 1: Why DEI is Necessary for Innovation

I’m grateful to be part of a community at The Hartford that is ramping up accountability and actions for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.?There are many important reasons for this and many outstanding benefits for our teammates, our company, and our customers.?Let me highlight one DEI benefit for you (really an imperative) that I’m particularly passionate about: Innovation.

I’ve been with The Hartford for 18 years in a variety of roles but have always found a way to get involved in finding new and improved ways to do things in insurance.?Innovation is not an episodic phase or new fad.?Innovation is an ongoing, core competency that every exceptional company must have in order to enhance, adapt, transform, survive and thrive.?It needs to be a part of every unit, process, product, service, and team.?It requires many incremental changes and revolutionary transformations.?Great companies must be great innovators.?(BTW - all those same statements are also true if you replace the word “Innovation” with “DEI”)

What I’ve learned in my 18 year career at The Hartford is that effective Innovation requires sincerely embracing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

When I use the term Diversity here, I mean it in its broadest sense across every dimension, including: skills, experiences, philosophies, race, culture, education, age, abilities, tenure, personality type, marital status and more.

And when I talk about Inclusion (an often-under-appreciated component of DEI, without which diversity doesn’t reach its full potential), I mean really hearing and valuing the unique points of view that are created because of our differences and starting from a baseline assumption that someone else’s idea is better than your own.

To me, Equity goes hand in hand with Inclusion and is about everyone having access to what they need to make a positive impact with respect to work tools, leadership access, and development opportunities.

Why Innovation Requires DEI:

·??????New ideas and humility – The notion that one person can sit down and come up with all the best ideas for new products, services or procedures is misguided.?Good Innovation is about stimulating a diverse array of ideas from a broad group of people and deliberately challenging norms.

·??????Customer focus – Our customers are diverse, so our innovators need to be diverse as well in order to appreciate customer needs and anticipate how customers will respond to new ideas.

·??????Collaboration, communication, and trust – it’s really hard to create change, especially when you’re intentionally challenging the status quo.?It requires an environment where contributors feel they can speak their minds and they will be heard.

·??????Vision and belief – The process of creating ideas, prioritizing new things to focus on, and operationalizing them needs to be inclusive and equitable because the future state vision has to be created by the team, not handed down to them, if they’re going to be willing to power through the inherent setbacks, challenges, and bad days.?

Part 2: How Diverse Teams Deliver Better Outcomes Through Inclusiveness

For the past 3 years, I’ve been building and leading The Hartford’s Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Team.?DEI has been a foundational strategic tenant from Day 1.?If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this blog because the IoT Team would have failed and would no longer exist.

While we still have work to do to further diversify, I love how diverse our small team is.?

·??????We have teammates with decades of experience in insurance and others whose only knowledge of insurance before we hired them was their personal auto policy.?

·??????We have teammates who are deeply technical and others (me) who can barely schedule a Teams meeting.

·??????We have classic introverts and strong extroverts

·??????We have people who are wired to dive in and start figuring out how things work and people who prefer to understand the intricate details before making decisions

·??????We are over 40% female and are making strides in racial and ethnic diversity

·??????We have people who process ideas visually and people who think out loud by talking

·??????We have cat lovers and dog lovers

·??????I’ve never asked, but I’m pretty confident we have a good mix on political and worldviews as well as many other dimensions of diversity

The key point is: every person on the team brings something uniquely valuable to our collective identity.

Some examples of diversity manifesting in better outcomes through inclusive practices on our team:

·??????When we see a critical process that needs to be improved (e.g., increasing conversion rates on our water damage prevention customer pitch presentations), we routinely pair up experienced subject-matter experts with people who have very little background in the current state but who know root cause problem analysis and who ask a lot of questions… and it works to help us rethink from scratch and focus on critical path.

·??????Annually we get our full team together to grade ourselves on and update our shared guiding principles and standard operating routines – which results in everyone having a voice in everything from our decision-making criteria to what meetings we all attend.

·??????We encourage everyone on the team to generate new ideas and pitch them back to the group.?We also review experiment concept designs and in-flight experiments together to identify gaps and brainstorm ways to pivot around barriers.?As a result, we’ve been able to pivot mid-experiment many times toward better outcomes that might have otherwise yielded failed experiments.

Because we have the shared belief in our collective vision, collaboration, communication, trust, and customer focus that come from embracing DEI we can weather the inevitable frustrations that come with Innovation while never having to worry about a lack of constructive feedback or flow of new ideas.

Do you have examples of how Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have contributed to better outcomes in your work? Join @TheHartford and @InsurTechHartford for a discussion on furthering that progress on November 3. ?Industry Thought Leadership: Focus on Talent & DEI Tickets, Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 4:00 PM | Eventbrite

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