‘It starts at the top’: How HP is building equity into its global culture

Creating an equitable workplace requires buy-in from employees at all levels, and grassroots efforts are often the key to making changes within an organization. But at tech giant HP, a global organization with more than 50,000 employees, impact and change starts at the top.

“When we built our board — which is 42% women — we looked not just for ethnicity and for gender, but at the skills needed for us to thrive as a company moving forward,” says Lesley Slaton Brown, HP’s chief diversity officer. “What perspectives do we need to bring in? What experiences do we need to bring in?”

That commitment to diversity at all levels of the organization is helping HP work toward some lofty goals. In 2021, the company announced a goal to achieve 50/50 gender equality in leadership by 2030, the first Fortune 100 company to do so. They’re also looking to increase the number of women in tech and engineering roles to more than 30%.

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To create and sustain that kind of top-down commitment to DEI efforts, Slaton Brown and HP have created a number of strategies and culture-based policies, from two-way mentorship programs that pair board members with senior leaders, to empowered employee resource groups known as business impact networks.

Slaton Brown spoke to EBN about the many ways organizations can set aggressive culture goals and implement sustainable programs and communication systems to achieve them.

HP

When a commitment to DEI starts at the top of an organization, what does the trickle-down impact look like in practice?
We work with our employee resource groups, which we call business impact networks (BIN), and those are designed to align to our 10-year strategy of culture, talent, sustainable impact, portfolio and financial. Our board of directors, because they’re both diverse and fully engaged in the company, when they travel from site to site across the globe, they always meet with business impact networks to learn firsthand what’s happening on the ground in our culture. And that helps us build key performance indicators that hold our leaders accountable to make sure all these goals and efforts cascade down around women in management, Black and African-American hiring, and Latinx hiring.

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It’s great to have the pizza parties and build connection and camaraderie, but during COVID, those business impact networks helped us create real solutions. For working mothers, for example, we needed people to put their hands up and step in. So we used the skill sets of our BIN leaders and members to offer math, English, chemistry tutoring. To say: We’ll provide office hours to tutor the kids, to offset some of the push and demand on parents.

That’s such a great idea.
Right? So those are the things we’re doing when we think about DEI at HP. It’s about building up our culture, and in a hybrid work model it’s even more important. We recently held the first HP BIN leadership summit, where we had senior leaders come in to talk strategy and work with the BIN leaders to figure out how you map what’s needed for your particular business alongside the goals of this BIN, whether it’s recruiting, mentoring and coaching, or development for women.

For a company of your size, how do you get buy-in from employees and get them to engage in these business impact networks — and believe that they can make a real impact?
I’ll be honest with you, until about two years ago, our DEI efforts really only focused on the “D” and the “I”. So we really thought about how to bring equity into that equation, and part of it was elevating our ERGs to be these business impact networks. And we did get a bit of pushback from existing ERG members who wanted to stay focused on employees, but we told them, this transition will elevate you, and get managers in support of the work you do and better understand why it matters, because you’re really a talent pipeline. These groups have visibility across the organization, they know who might be ready for a promotion.

Read more: Why employee resource groups may be the key to more inclusive cultures and benefits utilization

You mentioned really focusing on that equity part of DEI efforts. We’re seeing a real trend develop around adding a B, for belonging, to the DEI world. Where is HP on that?
It’s already baked in. This year we’re actually working on belongingness analytics. In our annual survey, we have questions that are very specific, and out of those questions, we form our inclusion index. The next step is bringing belongingness in. And that’s where our quarterly pulse surveys come in. All those surveys study and extract data for audiences — women, Black and African-American, Latinx, Asian, so on and so forth — to make sure that experiences are consistent and equitable.

How do you set and benchmark goals around equity and belonging?
Thirty-two percent of women at HP are in leadership positions, and it’s important that we look at development, talent and succession on a regular basis. A couple of years ago, after George Floyd’s murder, we formed our first racial equality and social justice task force that aligns to our sustainable impact framework around climate action, human rights and digital equity. As such, we built 2030 goals around 50/50 gender equity, the first Fortune 100 company that established those bodacious goals. So the work we’re doing now is: what’s the math, what needs to happen over time to get there? What are the paths we need to take, what programs need to be put in place? What barriers exist that we need to break down so we can hurdle over them to get to that glass ceiling.