In the second half of 2020, we embarked on a journey to strengthen our culture by making Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) a core part of Living Goods’ belief system. We believe that fostering workplace diversity in a fair and inclusive way not only resonates with our organizational values, but will also be a key ingredient in our employee value proposition.

We approached this work through a bottom-up approach and sought to hear from all staff what we were doing well at organizationally, and what we needed to do differently or better to make Living Goods a great workplace where each of our staff belong, thrive, and realize their full potential. Several surveys, interviews and focus groups with the active participation of all staff and Board leadership resulted in rich and insightful data. We’ve now translated these findings into clear action plans that we’ll be implementing over the coming months and years.

We appointed a team of DEI Champions from across all countries, functions and levels who are serving as change agents, working closely with senior management to implement and track progress against our agreed-upon action plans.

Recently, we formally launched our organizational DEI Statement of Commitment and rolled out a new set of DEI Norms for staff to model their behaviors upon: Collaborate, Accept, Respect, Empathize and Empower (CARE2 or care-squared). We’ve also developed a dashboard that we’ll use to periodically track our progress as we continue this vital journey. All our country offices as well as global support functions are in the process of finalizing their respective DEI goals, which are linked to the global targets.

Rolling out Unconscious Bias training to all staff is a key priority for next year, and we look forward to sharing updates about our progress on the DEI front along the way. This will be a journey, but one we believe is essential for institutionalizing the mindset we seek.