The Quest for Diversity and Inclusion

In May, Google made headlines when it publicly disclosed the makeup of its workforce. This wasn’t a chest-thumping exercise. In revealing that 2 percent of Google employees are black, 3 percent are Hispanic and 30 percent are women, Google Senior Vice President Laszlo Bock responded: "Simply put, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity."

In the spirit of transparency, I can say that, at USAA, we’re also not where we want to be when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Although the diversity of our employee base tends to be stronger than industry averages, the payoff lies beyond recruiting; it is in developing and retaining a more diverse pool of candidates for our management team.

I recently heard someone describe diversity as getting invited to the party and inclusion as being asked to dance. I spent 28 years in the most diverse large organization in the world – the U.S. military. I saw how different viewpoints held by people with different backgrounds and experiences could result in better decision making.

Organizations like USAA and Google have incentive to get diversity right, beyond just the fact that it’s the right thing to do. Diverse and inclusive companies – with the benefit of different perspectives and a variety of viewpoints – perform better. In fact, their stocks outperformed the S&P by 80 percent over five years in a Top 50 Companies for Diversity study by DiversityInc. What’s more, according to the Corporate Leadership Council, maintaining a diverse and inclusive culture also has shown to increase productivity by 29 percent and improve employee retention by as much as 24 percent.

To better understand and serve your customer base is another reason to prioritize diversity. As the demographics of the country changes, customers also are becoming more diverse. And some of them are more inclined to express their spending loyalty in alignment with their political and social views. Consider the U.S. purchasing power of the following groups in 2013:

• Women: up to $15 trillion
• Hispanics: $1.2 trillion
• African-Americans: $1 trillion
• Asians: $713 billion

Smart companies strive to reflect the makeup of the markets they serve. And the considerations are not only demographic. At USAA, we serve military families, so we need veterans and military spouses to be well represented in our employee ranks.

Like many other organizations, USAA is working on building a long-term culture of diversity and inclusion. Along the way, we’re discovering several lessons that are informing our efforts:

1. It’s not all about numbers. We’re an organization that likes to quantify. But while demographic diversity is something we can and do measure – and while we are investing aggressively in recruiting, developing and retaining a diverse workforce – improving our diversity numbers is not the ultimate objective. Instead, we are looking to build a culture characterized by inclusion – one where employees feel respected, connected and encouraged to share their perspectives at work.
2. Diversity and inclusion starts at the top. If executive leadership doesn’t make diversity and inclusion a visible priority, employees can’t be expected to do the same. At USAA, we recently formed an Executive Diversity Advisory Group to champion and help embed diversity practices in the business. Also, what you reward, you get more of. So how you evaluate the performance of managers should include feedback from their employees on how seriously they think their ideas and viewpoints are considered.
3. For diversity and inclusion to become integrated into the culture, it has to be part of every employee’s job. As part of newly designed performance standards for all USAA employees, our employees are asked to "thoughtfully select diverse teams to include relevant perspectives, disciplines and departments, creating space for different viewpoints." And their performance evaluations will be judged, in part, on how well they live up to this standard.

There are undoubtedly many more lessons to be learned, but – like many other companies – we’re headed in the right direction.

Pictured: USAA President and CEO Joe Robles and his support team.