Last year, Confirmit launched a series of Employee Resource Groups. This was part of the company’s commitment to building a strong, supportive business that encourages all team members to be the best version of themselves. Five groups were launched, and I’m a member of a couple of them, but since it is International Women’s Day, I wanted to share a little about our Women’s Group.
As you might expect, we are a group of women from across the business all committed to ensuring that Confirmit is a great place for us - and the women who follow us - to work. We started our activities by agreeing on a mission statement:
To foster an inclusive environment that supports and encourages women to advance their skills and leadership potential through connection, collaboration and discussion.
Mission (certainly not impossible) defined, we wanted to understand what mattered most to our 60+ members, and how they saw the situation today. This required a survey and fortunately, that’s one thing we are very good at!
A big positive was an almost 100% response rate the survey received. Even in voluntary groups like this, it’s always good to confirm that you have real engagement from your members. Tick number one! In the survey, we asked about our team’s experiences of being a woman in their department and within the business as a whole. The important thing here was to establish a baseline which is critical if we’re going to measure our success.
We then focused on the big issues that our group would address. These were, in order of importance:
- Policies (pay, benefits etc.)
- Professional development (training, mentoring)
- Communications (How to we share our experiences so we can learn and grow?)
- Allies (encouraging men to join our work for advocacy and support).
All good stuff – though big topics! We are off to a strong start, though. For today’s IWD group meeting, we have two of our male colleagues joining to share “storyboards”, visual ways to share details of who they are, the people who support them, and their inspirations. The whole group will be creating these (you’ll hear more about them elsewhere) and we’re looking forward to seeing the examples from the men.
With our baseline established, we are now turning our attentions to what success looks like. Here again, people were clear; we are focused on building a support system. A safe place to support and encourage other women, motivate each other and to share ideas and knowledge. It’s hard to argue with that.
Like many businesses, we’re not doing too badly on this front, but we acknowledge we have work to do. Building this group (and indeed the other ERGs) is a really positive step forward for us as individuals, and as a business. I’m very proud to be part of the group and I’m looking forward to continuing to gather feedback so we can start to understand our impact.
Happy International Women’s Day to everyone!