Organization’s annual reports and other publications

Instructions: complete an assessment of the organization's responses to diversity and multiculturalism using a guide provided by your faculty.

Guide:

Week 2 Guide for Assessing Organization’s Responses to Diversity & Multiculturalism

Goal: Using only publicly available information, investigate the extent to which the organization you select appears to be fully committed to building, supporting, and nurturing a diverse workforce.

Premise: Sometimes organizational leaders SAY they are committed to diversity and inclusion but the evidence suggests otherwise. Or, sometimes it proves more difficult than would be good to find concrete evidence of this commitment.

Seeking evidence: Here are some examples of places to look:

Organizational Website – attention to diversity/multiculturalism, evidence of actions/investments matching words?
Organization’s annual reports and other publications – inclusion in reporting?
Speeches by CEO and other leaders (see, for example, the journal Vital Speeches of the Day) – what have the company’s leaders said about this topic.
Stories in business and other publications?
Work in scholarly publications – have scholars included the firm in their research?
If you discover other publicly available sources please share your ideas with all of us.
Presenting your findings: Provide a succinct (approximately 400 – 600 word) synopsis of your findings as your first post this week.

Xerox provides an interesting example

Brief synopsis: Our examination of Xerox found evidence that actions have been taken to recruit, retain, and develop a diverse and multicultural workforce. The fact that Xerox operates in more than 180 countries makes this almost inevitable. Our search found evidence of diversity in its leadership (Ursala Burns), among its officers, and on the company’s Board. The company’s mission and core values do not speak directly to a commitment with respect to diversity or multiculturalism. However, Burns has spoken publicly about the importance of this issue for the firm, most recently in a September 15th PBS story profiling the company on this issue. While Xerox has not always been an exemplar on this topic (see, for example, the 2001 settlement over a race discrimination claim), we found good evidence of actions being taken to continuously improve the company’s performance on the diversity and global representativeness of its workforce. The fact that the company publishes data about its performance on these factors on its website suggests a commitment that extends beyond mere words.

Are there things Xerox might do to distinguish itself even further by building a workforce and leadership team that is truly representative of the customers it serves and the communities in which it operates? Our assumption is that the CEO would answer this in the affirmative. One thing that we found we could not easily confirm is whether there is any evidence of an interest in or commitment to these goals from stockholders.

As a related aside, at a -sponsored leadership panel a couple of years ago CEOs from the greater DC metro area were asked specifically about why attention to diversity was not among their top goals. The response from the four panelists was clear and universal. To quote one member, this is a “Been there done that!” issue that doesn’t really need further attention. We’ll be interested to know whether you reach the same conclusion after you share the results of your research.

Here are some of the things we found:

This September 15, 2014 PBS story reminded us of Xerox’s reputation for being a leader on this issue: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/xerox-employees-arent-carbon-copies/
So we asked ourselves: “Hmm! I wonder what kind of evidence we can find to corroborate this story?”
We began by looking at Xerox’s Home Page: http://www.xerox.com and, to be honest, saw nothing there that we thought distinguished Xerox from any other company. However, we understood that Web pages are intended primarily for customers who perhaps do not care whether this is a company that wishes to distinguish itself by hiring and developing a diverse workforce.
We extended our search of Xerox’s website, looking at “About Xerox” (way down at the bottom of the home page, which is usual) and noticed that one of the four rotating banners says “Through our diversity, we’re a stronger company.”
On the Company Facts page we found the mission and core values but didn’t see any specific mention of commitment to diversity or multiculturalism. However, on that same page we see the link to Ursala Burns’ bio and it is unusual to have a CEO who is both a woman and a person of color. We also noticed that Xerox has approximately 140,000 employees worldwide and operates in some 180+ countries so it certainly qualifies as geographically dispersed and almost certainly has a multicultural and multinational workforce.
Next we looked at Xerox’s leadership page focusing first on the corporate officers. There are 32 of them and 9 are women. There are a few people of color and some international members. Without a comparison it is difficult to deduce much from this one “data point.” We also looked at the eight member Board of Directors, two of whom are people of color, half of whom are women. We will have to see what others find when they look at the companies they chose but Xerox’s Board’s gender distribution is probably pretty unusual.
A further search of the company’s website found the 2013 Report on Global Citizenship. This report includes the following eight goals intended to develop the workforce. Two relevant for our focus are: Be Diverse and Hire a Global Workforce.
Drilling down, we found a detailed report on diversity, including a listing of awards and recognition, information about the company’s Executive Diversity Council, a Non-discrimination policy statement, and data on representation by race, ethnicity, and gender. The Website also includes a brief report on its global workforce goal.
We thought it would be good to look at Xerox’s Annual Report to see whether its goals and progress with respect to diversity and multiculturalism are included in what shareholders typically see. A link to the company’s Global Diversity & Inclusion Programs and EEO-1 Reports is included under Additional Information on page 10. The fact that Xerox was the first Fortune 500 company to have a woman CEO hand off to another woman is recognized.
Conducting a brief search on the Web for News relevant to our topic we found an ABC News story about a $12M settlement over race discrimination as a result of a 2001 lawsuit. As part of the settlement the company agreed to establish an employee task force to focus on the issues behind this lawsuit.
We also took a quick look to see whether Xerox might have been included in scholarly work on diversity and found a reference in a 2000 article by Gilbert and Ivancevich where the authors cite the firm as an organization that was transformed in large part because of the vision, focus, and commitment of its CEO to distinguish itself by valuing diversity. Given that we know Ivancevich is considered one of the top modern management scholars and that this was published in a leading journal, we give some credibility to this assertion. However, this is a dated article and we realize it will be important to look for more current work on this topic that has included Xerox as an example. This will take more time than we have at the moment so we are opting to pause here and plan to keep or eyes open for more information when searching the journal literature in the future. (Reference - Gilbert, J.A., & Ivancevich, J.M. (2000) Valuing diversity: A tale of two organizations. Academy of Management Executive, 14(1), 93 – 105. Doi:10-5465/AME.2000.2909842.)