Written by Michael Wolaver, Captain of Magellan Promotions

In June of 2020, I wrote a blog post on how it was time for our company to do more on diversity, equity and implicit bias. This was in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the resulting civil unrest.  As we saw it as an organization, it was time for us to be more outspoken on how we were addressing the inequities that plague our society. In the blog, I outlined initiatives that we were going to be implementing. Today I wanted to provide an update on  the initiatives we have taken to combat this issue.

Over the past 17 months, we  started down the path to address this topic head on. The most important component is that we kicked off a new culture team called I.D.E.A. (Identity, Diversity, Equity, Access).  The purpose of the group is to build a company that embraces diversity, pursues equity and develops an inclusive environment. The importance of this being a culture team is that it creates a structure for our company to continually look for opportunities  to develop as an organization.

The team identified four areas to focus on.  The areas include how we hire, providing educational opportunities for the team, and advocating for change. In addition, we are focusing on our communication strategy for this initiative, so that we are consistently sharing internally and externally our goals, achievements and areas to improve upon.

While we have more work to do, we are proud of the initiatives that we have undertaken so far. These include:

• Multiple all-team conversations on unconscious bias
• A diversity survey of our current team
• A resources document
• Changes to our hiring process to reduce implicit bias
• Use of a new job board to find diverse candidates
• Monetary donations to four different organizations

We are excited about planning for 2022 and where we want to take this initiative in the new year. Areas of focus will include implementing a Sustained Dialogues program, having measurable goals for hiring and how much we work with a diverse supplier base.

We know that this start is far from perfect, but we are proud of the momentum. We will continue to provide updates to document our progress on this important initiative.