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Table of ContentsIntroduction........................................................................................................................ 3
Why Should Companies Focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? ..................... 5
Inclusion and Equity Challenges in the Workplace ................................................... 8
One Solution: Givitas Addresses All These Challenges ............................................ 9
How Gi vitas Works .........................................................................................................10
How Givitas Helps Inclusion and Equity ....................................................................11
9 Reasons Your Team Needs Givitas ...........................................................................13
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................17
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Introduction
Corporations are scrambling to demonstrate that they get it. Some are really trying to make meaningful changes, while others are just trying to LOOK like they get it with showy and performative social media posts.
Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) employees are asking for more than a solidarity post on #BlackoutTuesday and for more than racially diverse advertisements and recruitment websites with a smiling rainbow of people happily working together.
The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests have resulted in a national awakening. Issues of racial inequity in American society are not new, but some seem to be paying attention in a new way.
Companies, allies, and diversity and inclusion professionals can do better. Not only for BIPOC but for LGBTQ employees, women, religious and ethnic minorities, workers with disabilities, workers of all ages, military veterans, and more.
The vast majority of D&I professionals are working tirelessly to create, manage, support, and advocate for evidence-based diversity and inclusion strategies. Some minorities feel well supported by their companies; many do not.
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According to PwC’s global diversity survey
“Globally, organizations are committing to D&I at higher rates than ever, with 87% of respondents indicating that D&I is a stated value or priority for their organization.
However, despite this commitment, even those who lead and execute their organization’s D&I programs acknowledge there is a long way to go, with nearly half of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing that diversity is a barrier to employee progression at their organizations.”
87%
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Why Should Companies Focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?First, it’s worth noting that diversity and inclusion are not the same thing.
The Ford Foundation’s definitions are a good place to start:
Diversity is the representation of all our varied identities and differences (race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, tribe, caste, socio-economic status, thinking and communication styles, etc.), collectively and as individuals.
Inclusion builds a culture of belonging by actively inviting the contribution and participation of all people.
Equity seeks to ensure fair treatment, equality of opportunity, and fairness in access to information and resources for all.
One great thing about a focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity is that it benefits the bottom line and also improves corporate citizenship.
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2. Diversity leads to better profits.
A study from McKinsey reports that companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits.
Gender diversity in management makes companies 21% more likely to see better-than-average profits.
Research from the Center for Talent Innovation found that 48% of companies in the US with more diversity at senior management level improved their market share the previous year, while only 33% companies with less diverse management reported similar growth.
A Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation.
Morgan Stanley released research in its 2016 study Putting Gender Diversity to Work: Better Fundamentals, Less Volatility that showed companies with high levels of gender diversity have lower volatility and a better return on equity (ROE) than companies ranked low in diversity.
1. Diversity drives creativity, innovation, and disruption.
When a wider range of life experiences and backgrounds is at the table, those differing perspectives often lead to new ways to address challenges and solve problems.
Moreover, companies practicing diversity are 70 percent more likely to capture a new market.
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3. A diverse workplace helps with recruitment and engagement.
Glassdoor found that 67% of job seekers overall look at workforce diversity when evaluating an offer.
The 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey shows that 47% of millennials are actively looking for diversity and inclusion when sizing up potential employers.
4. Diverse workforces are more productive.
According to Cloverpop, inclusive decision making leads to better business decisions 87% of the time, reaching those decisions twice as fast in half the meeting times.
Diversity makes teams work harder, and diverse teams deliver a higher quality of work.
5. It’s the right thing to do!
It’s nice to have all the data that shows that diversity is profitable, encourages innovation, and supports recruitment and hiring, but at the end of the day, a focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity in the workplace is ethically right.
Even if there were no business case for diversity (but there is!), people should be treated fairly. Everyone wants to feel valued and respected at their job.
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Inclusion and Equity Challenges in the Workplace
1. D&I has limited scope.
D&I often lives solely in the HR function and needs to be more fully integrated organization-wide. D&I isn’t just about checking a box. Extensive research shows it makes good business sense AND it’s the right thing to do.
2. D&I is about more than just hiring.
Many corporate leaders think that their job stops at hiring for diversity without understanding the need for inclusion and equity once those diverse employees start work.
3. Efforts are often seen as performative.
D&I plans are often criticized by employees for focusing more on optics than on real inclusion. Many D&I leaders report that corporate efforts are often interpreted as giving lip service rather than really moving the equity needle, even when efforts are genuine and made in good faith.
4. Diverse employees don’t have equal access to the “in group” at the company.
Black people make up 12% of the U.S. population but only 3.2% of executive jobs. Women make up more than half of financial services employees but only 15% of leadership. There is still a very real “old boys’ club.” Offices are social places, and there is evidence that schmoozing with the manager is good for your career. But if the manager is a white, male Baby Boomer and the employee is anything other than that, it can be very hard to do that schmoozing.
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One Solution: Givitas Addresses All These Challenges
Givitas is a platform that does just that. We were co-founded three years ago by respected social scientists Adam Grant, Wayne Baker, and Cheryl Baker as a place where people could easily and quickly ask for and exchange help in less than 5 minutes a week.
Give everyone equal access to the collective intelligence of leaders and peers with a digital network that encourages generosity, connection, gratitude, and trust.
“Asking for help at work is essential to a productive and meaningful life.”
“The most meaningful way to succeed is to help others succeed.”
WAYNE BAKERAll You Have to Do is Ask
ADAM GRANTGive and Take: How Helping Others Drives Our Success
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How Givitas Works• Employees are organized into groups called Givitas
“rings”, where they can ask for help, provide help, search a repository of institutional knowledge, collaborate, and connect in less than 5 minutes per week.
• In our experience, the most effective groups have between 500-5000 members, though we have had very successful groups as small as 100.
• Givitas makes asking for help incredibly easy, reducing stigmas and barriers, and you don’t have to know who to ask. This is especially important for underrepresented groups who may not be in the “in group” or have access to leaders socially or on work projects.
• Providing help is quick and efficient, with robust notifications and engagement tools to notify users when there is a need and reduce time spent in the platform; If you don’t come to Givitas, Givitas will come to you.
• Givitas creates and records organizational memory developing a valuable asset over time that captures the expertise of employees even after they leave.
• Givitas’ technology is backed by social science principles allowing it to drive positivity, generosity, gratitude, and other pro-social behaviors in a way that other general-purpose collaboration tools cannot do.
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How Givitas Helps Inclusion and EquityThere are a number of ways our corporate customers are using Givitas to increase access and exposure of diverse staff to the collective intelligence, but here are the two most common:
1. To support Employee Resource Groups
Gather employee resource groups (ERGs) into Givitas rings. Depending on the size of your company and ERGs, you could have a group just of LGBTQ employees, for example. Or you can invite all your ERGs to participate in one together. They are linked by some commonalities of experience in the workplace, and in our experience, eagerly ask for and offer help to each other. For example, if you connect members of a Black ERG with veterans with trans people and employees with disabilities all in one big community focused on exchanging help, you create amazing new relationships and connections that may not otherwise exist.
2. To give diverse staff equal access to the larger group
Creating groups for employees who have something else in common OTHER than diversity allows your underrepresented employees to get equal access to the collective intelligence of the larger group.
When you give underrepresented groups equal access to the brain trust, you’re creating equity where before, it didn’t exist.
See the next page for a few examples of the kinds of corporate groups using Givitas.
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Tactically, Givitas helps companies engage, energize and connect:
Strategically, Givitas helps companies:
• Geographically distributed and virtual teams
• Functionally common groups such as sales, support, customer success, engineering, HR, finance, etc.
• Management and leadership groups
• Cross-functional employees to bridge organizational silos
• Affinity groups for diversity initiatives
• Onboarding and new employee orientation groups
• Post-merger teams
• Build a collaborative culture of giving that supports diversity, inclusion, and equity efforts
• Reduce the stigma of asking for help, making it easy for underrepresented groups to feel supported and comfortable
• Engage, energize, and connect underrepresented employees in less than 5 minutes day
• Boost the productivity and efficiency that is already improved by having a diverse work force
• Create a repository of institutional knowledge
• Increase knowledge sharing and collaboration across silos
• Harness the collective intelligence within your organization and give EVERYONE equal access to the collective intelligence of leaders and peers, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity, religion, age, etc.
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9 Reasons Your Team Needs GivitasResearch shows that people are afraid to ask for help in professional settings.
Unlike all other available solutions, Givitas comes with built-in, thoughtfully-designed features and functionality that inspires people to share knowledge, ask for help, and offer help.
Integrating Givitas with existing communication and collaboration platforms makes both stronger and will yield immediate results in terms of improving business performance and boosting culture. Givitas also works just fine as a stand-alone platform.
You may be thinking, “we already have lots of ways for our diverse employees to ask for and offer help. They can use Slack or Teams or email, or even pick up the phone.”
Most people hesitate to go out of their way to help others, and general-purpose platforms like Slack, Yammer, Facebook groups, and message boards have not solved that persistent problem. They may also not know who to ask.
These challenges are especially true for BIPOC employees, women, LGBTQ staff, and others who may feel they have to work harder and look smarter. They may be afraid to ask for help without a specific framework in place to help them.
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Here are 9 reasons that only Givitas can boost knowledge sharing in a way that improves both engagement, relationships, and results:
1. Givitas is purpose-built to create psychological safety, reducing the stigma commonly associated with asking for help. Adopting Givitas goes beyond lip service and sends a clear signal that your organization supports and encourages vulnerability, generosity, and gratitude. It’s a cultural game changer.
2. Givitas is backed by research. Unlike collaboration tools that are driven by communication functionality, Givitas technology is evidence based, drawing on research from leading experts and bestselling authors Adam Grant (Wharton) and Wayne Baker (University of Michigan). Their research has proven that connecting employees to ask for and offer help has organizational and individual benefits:
Organizational benefits include making employees more effective, efficient, innovative, agile, and overall better performers. Customers and members become more loyal and engaged. Givitas boosts your business and improves your culture.
Individual benefits of asking for and offering help include making employees, customers, and members more fulfilled, happier, engaged, satisfied, and even healthier.
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3. The Givitas platform is dedicated to asking for and offering help, while other channels get noisy, crowded, and overwhelming making it easy for people to miss genuine requests even when they are willing to help. When a technology platform has a single mission, it’s much easier to ensure that mission is achieved.
4. Givitas spreads the love (and the responsibility!) among your whole team, so employees don’t have to rely on one or two subject matter experts to answer questions. In fact, they don’t even have to know who to go to—they can just throw their request out. Often the best answers come from unexpected places.
5. Givitas gives everyone equal access to the collective intelligence, knowledge, and experience of the network, regardless of who you know or don’t know. Despite our best efforts to give everyone equal access to advice, mentorship, and information, there are still people who feel shut out (whether that’s because of personality or a minority status).
6. Givitas has built-in content that teaches users about the importance of reciprocity at work. While we take features and functions seriously and work hard every day to make Givitas easy to use, we also strive to educate users on why they should be willing to ask for help and how generosity impacts their success and happiness. Using a series of in-app prompts, engagement emails, and other techniques, we’ll teach your team as they use Givitas why it’s so good for them and for the organization!
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7. Our features and functionality support our mission. Being purpose-built allows us to spend time meticulously building out features like gratitude, offer ratings, filtering, search capabilities, tagging, and more.
8. Givitas offers a searchable organizational memory of frequently asked questions with the best answers as well as extensive filtering and notification capabilities. These features are all designed to make Givitas easy and fun to use—you can search by date, topic, even by which requests haven’t gotten any offer yet, and more.
9. Givitas offers analytics and metrics that provide deeper insight on how generosity impacts a business than anything available in other collaboration tools. Community administrators can see who’s asking and who’s helping, how much time and money is saved, as well as have access to network energy diagrams that help you identify organizational strengths and weaknesses.
ConclusionCompanies around the world are struggling to prove a commitment to inclusion and equity in a world that demands it. Offering Givitas to your employees becomes powerful proof that a company is really walking the walk.
When you make Givitas available to employees, you’re sending the signal that you support them, that you want them to ask for help, and that you want them to get the help they need. When your employees are willing to ask for help when they need it, efficiency, profitability, retention, and loyalty all improve.
To schedule a demo, visit givitas.com
