WBR is strengthening its commitment to accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion and address structural inequality across its own business and its event communities. As a company that brings together Fortune 500 business executives across a vast array of industries to network and share best practices, it is the company’s responsibility to cultivate a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace that in turn is reflected in the content we publish and the conferences we organize. This commitment starts at the top of the organization with the CEO, and leaders at all levels of the business are expected to help create and sustain a culture of equality by listening and advocating for their team members and all employees so everyone has the same opportunity to grow professionally and personally and can advance and thrive. 

We believe our actions speak louder than words. The following are steps the company is taking to bolster DE&I within our business and in the broader global industrial community it serves. The WBR DE&I Committee was formed by a group of employees to ensure the company remains true and accountable to the above mentioned mission and provides a platform for employees to exchange ideas, identify shared objectives and set goals. This group’s first initiative was to survey company employees to measure the current perceived and real baseline of diversity at WBR. Please see below.

As is evidenced by the data above, the business has a lot of work to do in order to diversify the employee base and is committed to doing so. We commit to increasing BIPOC representation to 40% of WBR employees by 2025. We want to put special emphasis on creating leadership opportunities for BIPOC. Alongside of asking employees to self-identify their race, we asked employees about their thoughts on WBR’s support of DE&I, leadership’s commitment to hiring, retaining & promoting diverse talent and our approach to training on anti-racism & unconscious bias. Given the answers received, the committee formulated pillars to address the major concerns of our employees.  

The committee is broken up into four pillars. Each pillar of the committee has specific priorities and meets regularly to tackle the inequalities found within our current business model:

• Education Pillar: Researches and then organizes the information sent in a monthly newsletter to our entire organization that highlights current events and suggests resources for further education on issues related to inequality and social justice. Also, keeps the whole company up to date on what is being accomplished by all the pillars. The newsletter is structured as an opt-in activity and to that end we’d like to increase our readership companywide 20% by the end of 2022.
• Internal Events Pillar: Organizes our internal town halls on topics that promote open conversations designed to confront unconscious bias and encourage an ongoing dialogue to support DE&I within our company and across our event communities. Recent town halls have focused on allyship, celebrating black history and the AAPI community. We’d like to increase attendance at these townhalls 30% by the end of 2022
• External Events Pillar: Pushes the importance of having topics on diversity and inclusion at our conferences along with promoting agendas that reflect a diverse array of perspectives so we can help to foster DE&I within the businesses that attend & sponsor our events as well. We’d like to have 30% of BIPOC speakers on each program by the end of 2022. We’d also like to remove restrictive price barriers to entry for small/women/BIPOC owned businesses that might be interested in sponsoring our events. For speakers, sponsors and attendees of our events reading this, we encourage you to ask us questions about this. We’d love to work with you on making our conferences more diverse & inclusive. 
• Business Pillar: Maintains an open line of communication with management to ensure committee goals & objectives are getting the attention needed by leadership. Promotes new mandatory training that will support our people in identifying and speaking up about racism. Develops potential plans for equitable recruitment, retention and advancement. This will involve identifying professional groups and associations for BIPOC to scout talent and or establish relationships with HBCU alumni and careers offices to post our job postings to their alumni so we can remain focused on including the broadest range of qualified individuals for opportunities. This will help us achieve our goal increasing BIPOC representation amongst employees to 40% of WBR staff by 2025. 

And this is just the beginning. Adherence to these goals will infuse WBR with a diversity of backgrounds, thought and creativity that will ultimately strengthen and enhance the organization, and enrich employee participation and satisfaction. We are going to continue to evolve and iterate on our goals above in order to make our company more diverse, inclusive and equitable both internally and externally as well as help to address and correct the structural inequality present in our society.  It will take a lot of work and effort, but we are fully committed to our goals. And we will continue to update you all with our progress.