Article courtesy of Harvard Business Review
Becoming a more inclusive and diverse organization is not just the right thing to do — it’s essential to innovation and business success. Yet as race has become a more visible and urgent workplace issue, most organizations have not moved past episodic reactions to tragic events to creating sustainable change. The current reckoning on race in the United States has revealed that organizations have not made enough progress toward becoming truly equal workplaces.
From employees and consumers to community members and investors, the world is watching, expectations are growing, and leaders are taking a hard, long overdue look in the mirror. They are realizing that, while the journey is complex and making enduring progress can be difficult, the true risk is to do nothing.
At Accenture, we have found that the foundational first step toward creating a more diverse workforce — and realizing the many benefits it can bring to an organization — is the same as with any other business effort: setting goals.
In 2020, we published a series of ambitious goals to diversify our workforce: By 2025, we will increase African American and Black representation in our U.S. workforce from 9% to 12%, and increase Hispanic American and Latinx employees from 9.5% to 13% — in each case, this is an approximate 60% increase in the number of our people. At the same time, we will more than double the number of racially and ethnically diverse managing directors. We published additional aspirational goals in the UK and South Africa. (Similarly, in 2017, we announced our goal to become a gender-balanced workforce by 2025.) As we further expand our workforce — currently 540,000 people — to meet the growing needs of our clients, we believe that all of these goals have the potential to meaningfully strengthen the diversity of our company.
Read the full article here.
