Why Employers Must Embrace a Bold Approach to DE&I

The following is an excerpt from my FREE Workplace Intelligence Insider Newsletter. You can?access the full article in the?Newsletter Archives. And don't forget to?subscribe?so you receive the new edition every Monday morning.?

For this week’s Workplace Intelligence Newsletter, I interviewed Karthik Ganesh, the CEO and Board Director at EmpiRx Health, a category creator and the industry’s only value-based pharmacy benefits manager. Karthik has built EmpiRx Health into a high-growth, high-innovation company, and also the most clinically-advanced PBM in the industry. Under his leadership, EmpiRx Health has earned recognition as a multi-year Inc. 5000 company, Certified Great Place to Work, and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company.

Karthik’s background also includes leadership roles at Aetna, Express Scripts, Deloitte, and EY. Author of?The Happiness Model: A Roadmap to Inner Peace, Karthik is a prolific writer and speaker on healthcare issues, leadership, and resilience, and has been featured in leading industry journals and podcasts.

In our conversation, we discussed how EmpiRx Health is challenging the status quo with its approach to DE&I, and how this has helped the company earn its Great Place to Work certification three years in a row. Below is a sneak peek of our conversation — subscribe to my FREE Workplace Intelligence Insider newsletter and you’ll immediately receive the full Q&A.

And be sure to join us during our live audio event a week from today (Monday, July 11) at 11:00 am EDT, where we’ll continue our discussion on this important topic.

1. EmpiRx Health has cultivated extremely deliberate recruitment and retention practices, at the forefront of which is experiential diversity. Can you tell us more about your company’s achievements in this area, and explain what you mean by “experiential diversity”?

We have absolutely embraced deliberate recruitment and retention practices with DE&I squarely at the center, and we have exceptional numbers to show for that ― a leadership team that is 67% women, and a workforce that is also 67% women, 40% people of color, and spans four generations.

While our numbers are impressive, our focus transcends meeting or exceeding quotas. Looking deeper into the numbers, we recognize the power of curating a workforce that brings diverse ideas to the table. And when we speak about experiential diversity, it’s a much broader concept than race and gender. It’s the richness of life experiences a diverse workforce brings that holds the greatest promise.

As a thriving company leading the transformation of healthcare, what benefit is it to us to continually hire individuals in our same space with the same backgrounds and credentials? Not much, because a cookie-cutter workforce won’t help us innovate.

We know our company can think differently, challenge the status quo, and grow more effectively with different worldviews. Expanding our talent pool in several ways — ?including geographically and across industry, background, and national origin — has brought us fresh perspectives, new ideas, and innovative solutions. Our growth numbers directly reflect this.

We believe that everyone has life experiences that are strengths they can bring to the table. Strengths-based development has become a staple at EmpiRx Health for this reason. We invested in CliftonStrengths as an enterprise-wide initiative to ensure we tap into people’s strengths and lead by them.?

2.?There is a very real mental health component to DE&I that is perhaps less straightforward but just as impactful. Can you tell us more about this, and describe the steps EmpiRx Health has taken to address mental health within your DE&I strategy?

Mental health challenges and experiences shape our mindset. In the wake of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, we were and remain concerted in our efforts to hire black people. But we also recognize that people of color and those with diverse backgrounds can experience unique stressors in the workplace.

With this in mind, we adopted strong mental health support within our DE&I strategy because a diverse workplace requires it. Did we invest heavily in mental health support tools? Of course. But on a deeply personal front, we had multiple employees speak candidly to the entire company about their individual mental health struggles, personal DE&I journeys, and how they’ve coped with these challenges in their lives. A diverse workforce demands we embrace unique perspectives with the utmost respect and support of their personal journeys.

This means that companies must be unafraid to encourage these conversations. The fact that our employees felt comfortable enough to have these conversations is a testament to the inclusive culture of our workplace. Normalizing these mental health conversations nurtures a deep sense of belonging, which is critical to creating an environment that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Want to read the full article? You can access it in the?Workplace Intelligence Insider Archives. To receive the new edition every Monday morning,?subscribe?for free.

And be sure to tune in for our live audio event next Monday, July 11 at 11:00 am EDT, where Karthik and I will continue our discussion on these important topics.