Articles by Joseph Santana

Daniel was feeling terrible. After four years as the chairman of one of his company’s employee networks, otherwise known as an employee resource group (ERG), he was feeling a bit tired and did not see much personal return for his efforts in terms of ...

While I was recently facilitating a panel discussion at the National Affinity Leadership Congress (NALC), one of the audience members asked, “How can I get ERG communication out in a timely basis when my company requires multiple reviews by legal, HR...

Over the course of the past couple of years, as cognitive and neural scientific developments have advanced, we’ve collected an abundance of evidence that confirms somthing long suspected: That the way we perceive the world around us varies broadly de...

Last month we talked about identifying the needs of your company through my Venn diagram as a first step in developing your ERG strategy impact map. This month we’ll look at a powerful approach you can use to fully engage your current and future memb...

In my last post, I spoke about how to structure ERGs to drive value to both the members and the business. This week, let’s look at a few examples of how ERGs can specifically support the business and a few tips on how to get your ERG to start meeting...

One of the first challenges new and sometimes existing employee resource groups (ERGs) face is answering the following question: “How do we collect the information we need to fully convey the value of our employee network?” A few years ago, I develop...

As future workforce demographics in the United States continue to shift, many organizations rightly see big opportunities to increase their short-term general population and future senior-level diversity through entry-level hires. Some of these compa...

We often hear organizations talk about how they want ERGs to help with the company’s recruiting effort, but unfortunately, how the ERGs actually do this is very blurry. Beyond saying that they want ERG members to attend recruiting events to be seen, ...

Many books and articles have been written about the types of metrics you can use to present the progress and accomplishments of your ERG to your company executives. This post will focus instead on describing a simple formula that ERG leaders can use ...

What is the role of employee resource group executive sponsors? I recently read an article in the Jan. 7 edition of Forbes.com titled “Diversity Management Is Outdated and Demands a New Approach.” It quoted an anonymous senior executive stating his o...

Welcome to the Diversity Executive employee resource groups (ERG) blog, where we will focus on topics of interest to those who establish, lead, sponsor and manage ERGs. What we today refer to as ERGs, or as some prefer to call them BRGs (business res...