Maximizing Recognition ROI: Elevating ERGs as Culture-Driving Forces through Strategic Recognition

Hello everybody and welcome to our webinar about recognition and ERGs. I am so super excited for this. I am here with Maceo Owens, who is the CEO and founder of the ERG Movement. Now, I've been following Maceo and her content for a while, and it is spectacular. So it is a real treat to have her here today. So, real quick, if you are not following the ERG movement and you don't get the newsletter, take a minute to do that now. It is the erg movement.com. Maceo, please kick us off by introducing yourself. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Um, super excited to be here. My name is Maceo Owens. She her pronouns, all things ERGs. So much so that I literally go by the EER g homegirl on LinkedIn. Um, yeah, that's pretty much me based in Detroit, Michigan. Awesome. And I am Misha Ann Martin. I'm the VP of People Research here at WorkHuman. I'm sitting in Austin, Texas. I am a fanatic advocate of positive workplaces. I'm a workplace researcher and activist. I'm passionate about inclusion and belonging at work, and I think how you experience work is the foundation of a life well lived. So with all of that said, I am really excited to talk about ERGs today. I've been saying that community is my word for 2025. I think the world right now, people are feeling really disconnected, and I think community is more important than it's been in the past. I consider employee resource groups to be communities within organizations and a way for people to find their community and people within organizations. And even though that's important, ERGs are even more critical than that because they do other things in addition to functioning as culture, building communities, they can be drivers of engagement, leadership development, and belonging. So at this point I've said ERGA lot, and I want to pause and really explain and define what we mean when we say employee resource groups. So ERGs are voluntary employee led groups that, as we said, build community and help people feel like they're, they belong, they are formally supported by the organization and they often play a key role in building a culture of inclusion. The aim of an ERG typically is to educate and support employees, address inequities in the workplace, and lift up traditionally marginalized employees. When you do them right, they boost psychological safety and have a positive impact on how people experience work. So that's another term, psychological safety. So I'd like to define that next as well. Psychological safety is feeling like you can be your authentic self at work. Like you're safe enough to speak up when you have an idea or say that you need help if you need it. Also, it provides safety in taking risks and making mistakes as you learn. Amy Edmondson is a preeminent psychological safety researcher, and she describes it as creating a team environment where people feel safe to be themselves supported by trust and mutual respect. So here at WorkHuman we research all kinds of things about employee experience, and we also study employee resource groups and psychological safety. And we find that ERGs boost psychological safety. And that makes sense because it can function as a safe space and a place where people can get social support. We also see in some of our client data that people who participate in ERGs are far less likely to leave the organization. I tell people all the time, people do not leave communities lightly. They tend to stay within a place that they consider a community and think real hard before leaving that community. So involvement in ERGs can often come without support, even though from a practical perspective, people are doing extra work. The worst things happen when people do this extra work, but organizations do not appreciate or acknowledge the extra work that is happening much less strategically. Look at this as a development, uh, a developmental opportunity. And additionally, we're seeing a chunk of people saying that they're actually being punished for participating in ERGs in this sample that we're looking at, a third of employees say that they're being treated unfairly for their participation in the group. This is supposed to be a company sponsored thing, and two separate samples, two separate studies. We also found higher stress levels for ERG participants. So Maceo, I'll pause and give you, uh, the opportunity to react to this research. This is so interesting to me, but it makes perfect sense. So naturally we already talked about how by being part of an ERG and also therefore like you love the company more, so it makes sense while those correlate when it comes to the stress, for me, what this goes back into is what I was saying earlier in terms of hypothetically, ERGs would be amazing all the time. However, if you're actually in it, you know that ERGs, they have a lot of work to be done, especially right now in time, which again, is interesting considering the fact that they've been around for over 60 years now. But that being said, it wasn't until around 2020 when thousands of companies launched their EIG programs, while they had existed before, but they just weren't as popular. But since 2020, and a lot of those programs that were launched during the 20 20 20 and like 2023, they were launched in response to a need. So oftentimes it was very grassroots and I was like, Hey, we have a program now. Um, what are we doing? And it was just kind of jumping into it. I think that the lack of foundation with a lot of these programs is the res is why we're seeing a lot of the stress. Even then you would think for people that are part of an ERG, especially the ERG leaders, that they would be able to kind of express their creativity and just lean into the things that they love, which would decrease stress. However, there's been a huge push on all of those business operations that we were talking about, like, uh, operational efficiency to an ERG that has been put onto ERG leaders as their responsibility, which is a huge mistake for organizations. You're putting the responsibility of something that takes, again, it's a whole skill level that's packaged up in that and you're putting that on a volunteer who already is doing this just on their extra time, who really only got into this work because they just wanted to benefit their community. So there's so much that's being put on ERG leaders and therefore it makes sense why they would be stressed out. Even for members in particular. I find that interesting in terms of the stress levels, but I think that people, when they come into an ERG, they want something like they're seeking some sort of belonging community. I know when I first joined an ERG for the first time, I, when I joined, I was like, I didn't even know there was other black people at this company and it was a major tech company. But by being in that space, ironically, although I was about to leave, I definitely did stay because I was like, oh, this, this just makes me feel more comfortable despite, so I think that in general, when people are stressed, that's when they seek community. So I think that that's another interesting correlation there. Um, but yeah, I I definitely find this interesting. Yeah. So, um, this is a different study. Speaking of persona research, right? We partnered with a group called Black Men in Tech and did some research on, uh, some employee experience topics including employee resource group participation. So you can see here that more than half of this sample said that they were participating in ERGs, but only 31% of participate of ERG participants in this sample felt like that contribution was visible to people outside of the ERG. So you're doing this culture building work, but nobody is seeing it, and most people were not being thanked for the work that they were doing in ERGs. So Maceo, can you talk a little bit more about some of the dark sides of ERGs, potential dark sides of ERGs? Uh, so many, which I hate to say, but it's worth it to me if it's done right. Here's what I'll say. I think a lot of people have approached ERGs in the wrong manner, especially like I said, uh, in response to what was happening really, or really what kicked off in 2020, not just the Black Lives Matter movement, but even the pandemic. And there's just such this need for community. However, with the Black Lives Matter movement in particular, we saw a, a rise in interest in DEI and with that a lot of DEI programs adopted ERGs, which is an such an interesting dynamic because again, we're saying ERGs are scaling employee engagement. Now, I'm not saying it's wrong in terms of positioning, but hear me out here, um, I'll circle back on that point, but just keep it in mind. Mm-hmm. One of the things that I'll say when it comes to ERGs in particular, I'm trying to think if this is the way that I want to go with it, but yes, I think that is fair. Well, okay, so we talked about what ERGs are in of themselves. So with DEI adopting ERG programs, I think that DEI where it's really relevant to like all aspects of the business. Now, a lot of folks, they try to use their ERGs to scale DEI instead of scaling employee engagement. Now, when you scale DEI, there's so many different, um, places that are to be impacted, and not all of them necessarily should even be touched by ERGs. Actually, what I've seen oftentimes is that a lot of businesses and a lot of leaders, they'll struggle to articulate the value of their ERGs because they're trying to do so much. Or that's why I've been trying to tell folks really the thought of scaling employee engagement is enough. Employee engagement itself is enough. We don't have to reach for these business impacts when it's like sitting right there. And again, the employee engagement team is oftentimes much more funded than erg. So it's not like they have to prove their business case in the same way that we are trying to in other ways. At the end of the day, I think it's important to understand that ERGs are a cost center, which means that it's okay that they don't necessarily make the business money, however it is saving the business money by all the things that we just mentioned, what it can impact even for, even for the employees that are there at the time, they'll oftentimes like work harder. They, they wanna stay at the company. So even just, um, there's a word for that in terms of them like being more present as employees, but I think that that is enough and we just have to get better at articulating that. Now, the dark side of that is a lot of companies, like I said, that's not the angle that they take. As a matter of fact, again, a lot of ERGs, even just so you all know, ERGs go by a number of different names. I did a study a couple years ago and saw that within the Fortune five hundreds alone, there's over 70 different names for er g programs. So ERGs, bgs, affinity groups, employee networks, so many different things. But under those names, some companies will even try to get their ERGs to be, you know, revenue producers in a sense. Or actually, again, just touch on things that they probably shouldn't touch on. I've been really getting into unions lately and how ERGs are not unions. So I have to learn about what unions are basically, and I've learned that there's a lot of things that are ERGs have actually been told to do. That is qualifying ERG programs as illegally run unions, employer dominated unions in particular. So it's like all these things. Put the ERG in hot water. Then there's the added angle that a lot of the ERG programs aren't set up properly. Now, I mentioned this lightly before in terms of set up properly, but just to talk about it more, there's a framework that I really, really love in the business world. It's widely adopted, the three Ps of business, uh, in the business world, it is people, process, product. In the ERG space, I've kind of adapted that, turn it into purpose process programming. Just a really quick overview here. 'cause I think it definitely speaks to a lot of the dark sides. First thing with purpose, that's understanding why the ERG program exists. What's in scope, what's out of scope. Oftentimes it's not well defined and also even the strategy, uh, to the ERG program, what's also the North Star metric. And then with the strategy, it's how are we getting closer and closer to reaching our ideal goal on that North Star metric year over year. Most ERG programs don't have that process like a handbook and actually a very, very detailed handbook that takes out all the decision work of having to understand like how to, how do you do an event? How do we send out a a communication the right way? All of these like little small things that ERG leaders have to think about and figure out the process to that should already be baked out and handbook that is super, super easy. I like to say if I was to go volunteer at a food bank, they wouldn't tell me to just go do, they would tell me what to do, how to do it. It would be easy for me to show up and volunteer that does not exist at large. And also as part of that would be data metrics to support each ERG role. This way they know if they're doing good at their role. And then the third part is programming. That's when it comes to our events that we do in communications. Now, like I mentioned, a lot of ERGs were launched seemingly overnight. And with that, again, when they were launched, it's, Hey, we have an ERG program, what's our first event gonna be? What are we posting in our Slack? But with that, because those first two things were skipped and they are meant to go in order, that's why right now you do see a lot of burnout from ERG leaders and low engagement, which means also the members of the ERGs aren't participating. That is a huge dark side there. And to me, when we're talking about business impact and saying the impact of the, of these programs currently, what it actually looks like to business leaders is, well, our ERG leaders are tired. Like they're, they're tired, they're burnt out by joining an ERG and no one's participating. Hmm. It makes it very hard to articulate the business impact then. And I can see why a lot of people would start reaching for other things. But again, first and foremost, outside of just re correcting, I encourage a lot of people to go back and solve for those other two Ps. I would say even just redirecting what the goal of your ERG program is, and again, changing business impact to scaling employee engagement, um, that's a huge game changer when it comes to changing the narrative on your ERG program. That was a lot. It was not all over the place. You were not, I like that. I I really like the idea of, you know, instead of thinking about employee resource groups as profit centers and revenue generators, think about it as a way to scale and personalize employee engagement initiatives. So essentially, the most successful employee resource groups should be drivers and builders of your organizational culture. And that culture driving part is what will lead to the ROI. So what we wanna talk about next is how to elevate organizational culture, which is a primary function of the ERGs by linking up employee resource group work with strategic recognition in order to amplify the impact of ERGs as culture building tools. So the benefit of incorporating, um, strategic recognition into all of this is that it makes the work sustainable and rewarding. It, em, it empowers people and it takes that work from invisible and something I'm punished for and extra work to something that is truly business supported, um, and appreciated so that you avoid these negative things that we discussed before, like strain, uh, stress burnout. Let's look at what happens when people who do ERG work are actually thanked for that work. So these results come from the black men in tech sample and you can see that when people are thanked for their ERG participation, they have higher psychological safety, they're more likely to feel connected to their colleagues and to the culture. And maci, you talked about this before, stress is lower. They're more likely to feel like their identity, however they identify is safe within the organization and not perceived as a threat to the organization. The other thing that's important to know is that recognition changes the way that people see their culture. So ERGs are culture building tools, recognition changes the way that people see the culture. So in our, uh, survey research that you're looking at here, this is not the black men in tech sample. This is a completely different sample. We do lots and lots of research. We asked survey respondents to describe their culture using one word, and then we worked with a work human natural language processing team to categorize those words into themes. And then we looked at those themes based on whether people had a recognition program versus, uh, if they didn't. So did, do you have a recognition program or do you not? And as you can see here, when employees do not have a recognition program, they're more likely to say the culture contributes to things like stress and burnout. People with a recognition program feel better about the organization's culture, they use more positive words. And some of those words are things that talk about collaboration and innovation. So let's put those two things together. How does recognition line up with an ERG strategy? Well, it bridges the gap between ERG contributions and organizational appreciation, which helps communicate to the organization that ERGs are important and it's impactful to things like leadership. So in essence, when you put the two together, it reinforces the value of ERGs. So look at the impact of, um, things like visibility to the organization. So when people are participants of an ERG and that organization also has a recognition program, they're more likely to say the ERG work that I do is visible. They're more likely to be ambassadors for the company recommending the company to a friend. They're more likely to feel engaged. So at this point, Maceo, I wanna switch back over to you and talk about how all of this works in the context of some of your 2025 ERG predictions and ideas. And I think this will give us some really specific ideas around how to make ERGs work. Yeah, uh, so much to say here, but again, I do, and I think actually for people who know me, they might be surprised that I'm like thinking about recognition this importantly when it comes to ERGs. But even the context like recognition is not just, there's so many different ways that recognition shows up. Part of it is even investing in the ERG in terms of setting it up for success, but even the other aspects of recognition, they do make a huge difference in people feeling appreciated in so many different ways. So I just love to see that in the numbers as well. Now that being said, I did give some 20, 25 predictions earlier this year. Um, I think looking back some of them was maybe just wishful thinking, although they're, they haven't all happen. Maybe it's things that I'm like, I wish would happen more for folks. Um, two of the seven that I'll give you all in particular think one when it comes to event fatigue. Um, I think that it is something that I've been hearing actually since ironically, like late 2020 because there was so many virtual events. People started talking about zoom fatigue and things like that, that often. That being said, I don't necessarily think that ERG events are bad, but I do think that ERGs are leaning way too heavily when it comes to events in general. And actually I will say the most underutilized tool within an ERG is their communications channel. So whether that's Slack, um, teams, Yammer, all the different things, I do think that that's like their biggest lever when it comes to engaging their members. So that being said, wishful thinking. Something I hope to see probably this was from this prediction was, uh, less events and also just more ways to engage your members outside of a live events. I call them asynchronous activities. So just little mini projects and things you can give your members to still feel like they're involved even without, um, being on a live call, which not everyone can do based on maybe their work schedule or who knows what it might be. But I think that that was a big piece there. I think that the other one in particular was around, um, ERG softwares, which in some cases this might have been viewed as a form of recognition and investing into the program. I actually think that in general, we have a lot of tools within the workplace that can, um, actually help to set up ERG programs for success. And even then by you probably, when I say you, I'm talking about who's ever the ERG program manager who's ever over the ERG program, learning how to integrate your current tools into your ERG, that is actually an interesting take on recognition and investing in the program because you're actually then gonna be teaching your ERG leaders how to further leverage tools that are already at their fingertips and then you kind of position them to be the cool kids in the organization. I like to say, like even with Slack, I'm a Slack super fan, so I know if I teach ERG leaders how to set up automation in their slack canvas, that's something that right now because it's a newer feature, most of their teammates don't know how to do. So that's an interesting form of recognition there. But overall, I think that what's important, um, from this is that when it comes to recognition, there are some interesting tangible benefits when it comes to the ERGs. Whether it's even like how ERG leaders recognize their members, essentially by having variety in their programming. And as I mentioned earlier, even in the same way the ERG program manager should model that for the ERG leaders by having variety in how they recognize their ERG leaders. It's so interesting and kind of meta in a sense how the ERG program manager demonstrates best practices for the ERGs in what they do. But that was a lot. Oh, I'll say one other thing just 'cause I feel like it's so relevant here. When I was talking about different ways to recognize, um, people I am, I'm a big fan of like the appreciation languages in the workplace. I don't know what, what other people might call them, but there's the book on it. But even then, those five different appreciation languages really just speak to different people want to be recognized, appreciated in different ways. And that's why you should have variety in your recognition strategy. And that's why I'm saying it's a direct correlation with how either G leaders should engage their members outside of just live events because different members want to be engaged in different ways in that same way. So you should also have variety in how you're engaging folks. So it's just interesting how it all ties together when you angle it from a business lens. I love the idea of turning ERG leaders into cool kids. You know, I, that one is gonna stick with me. I also wanna pick up on this idea of ERG specific software. When things happen only in that ERG specific software, it's really insular and it doesn't help, um, it doesn't give visibility to what's happening with the ERGs. Now, when ERG work shows up on a social feed as part of a social recognition program, this is where you can get that visibility that turns those leaders and participants into the organization cool kids. So it takes appreciation from something that happens within the ERG to something that is company wide, which can a signal that this is company supported and it's something that you're supposed to be doing. It adds to visibility and it can help you recruit members because, you know, it helps people see, oh, this thing is happening. Oh, by the way, there are people other than the target group, so it can recruit additional allies, right, uh, to the ERG. And I think that that is such an underutilized tactic. I agree. Couldn't agree more. I also want to talk about this idea of personalization and um, persona and ERGs plus recognition being part of this, uh, strategy to build a more human workplace. So we find time and time in our research at work human that a one size fits all approach is not the best way to build culture. And I like how you put it in the beginning. Like there is an overall engagement strategy, but then there's also the personalization and personification of that strategy, right? So employee experience is at its best when it's tailored to employees and when employees really feel like they fit in. So employees have to be humans within the organization. We really have to listen and understand the circumstances of people's lives and order to do that. Personalization and ERGs are perfect for this, but we also have to get in the general habit of celebrating and acknowledging people as people. Our research shows that, you know, when people are recognized for things outside of what they do for a company, they're more psychologically safe than people who are not. So we find that in our independent survey research and we also find that in our client data research as well. So when people are recognized for their unique skills and the work that they do, but they're also recognized for things outside of work that is a celebration of this whole human and the wonderfully rich lives they lead outside of work, we find that the best things happen. We find that when you recognize the whole human people are three times as likely to say that they're connected to their company culture, they're three times as likely to say their company cares about their wellbeing and they're 30% more likely to say they plan to remain at the organization. So personally meaningful recognition, that is recognition that celebrates the whole human, it strengthens the employee experience and helps people feel seen, valued, and celebrates it. And these are the same principles that applies that apply when you think about building thriving ERG communities. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So Maceo, how can we give ERG members what they want? Oh, so much here. This, I'm telling you this like webinar is so exciting to me because I know for a lot of people, like they might be like, this is the fluff, but this is the actual things that we need. And again, the language that we need to articulate the value, not all of the stress that we've been putting on the ERG leaders and having them serve as like consulting arms to the business, even though they're not qualified at all and getting them into all sorts of legal trouble, it's like, wow, if they, if we could just talk more about this in the same way that customer loyalty exists, internal employee loyalty also exists, it's just, uh, I just love to see it. That being said, when it comes to giving members what they want, which also to that point would be customer satisfaction, member satisfaction. So improving our product in a sense. In terms of the programming that happens with, uh, our ERG, again, the third P in the three Ps is product in the business world programming in the ERG space, I would say think one, if I had to give some actionable tips, part of it is understanding the variety within your, uh, customer base or within your membership base. Again, we just talked about, and that's why I'm like all of this, it gets so nerdy and granular and very meta in a sense, but in the same way that businesses target sub communities, there are sub communities that exist within your ERGs. So part of that is getting better when it comes to, uh, identifying what are the variety of dimensions of diversity that exist within our communities outside of our own, and how do we do better niche programming? Um, and this is, like I said, where I get really, really nerdy with it, but I think that there's such a huge opportunity for ERGs to do this. And again, all of that falls under that third p when it comes to programming. Although most companies did skip their first two Ps altogether, oftentimes they do struggle with this third PD in general, which is to me, in other words how I'm calling this now is like community facilitation, which is ironically not taught to ERG leaders, although it is the core of what ERGs should do. So like I said, one tip when it comes to community facilitation would be knowing and understanding just the variety of experiences within your membership base and also then engaging them in a variety of different ways. And there's so much to unpack when it comes to that. Um, but I also will say, although we mentioned it before, I will reiterate if you are missing those first two Ps when it comes to not having clarity of purpose, which when I say that that is not oftentimes baked out, a lot of times I hear about, Hey, what's our mission and vision? And it's like these long jumbled paragraphs that really mean nothing to anybody. If you're not able to say it's simply five words or less, what does your ERG program do? And if your ERG leaders, all of them, they should all have the same answer. 'cause it should be that simple, then you have work to do. If you don't have a north star metric that is shared across all of your ERGs, you have work to do. And if you don't have a year by year strategy that outlines what success is for your ERG program, you have work to do. Same thing when it comes to that handbook under process. Yeah, under, um, process in particular. And definitely when it comes to data, because how are you even going to know if you are giving members what they want if you're not measuring the success of your programming? It's like there's so much work to be done right now when it comes to the ERG space, but eventually I'll say just in general going through the three Ps, and I don't wanna say if nothing else, but just an easy one if nothing else could be. If you're talking about the third P with programming in particular, although you will still experience leader burnout if you don't cover the first two. Um, but even if you were to just do the third one and just get better at community facilitation, I think that that's something that I hope to see more. If I was to give another bonus prediction, which again by predictions I think are really just wishful thinking, I would say community facilitation skills would be on the rise versus all the extra fluff that we add to ERG programs that add to the stress and little impact oftentimes. So We've talked a lot about ERGs, um, conceptually, right? And how they're good and how to really maximize them as culture building drivers. And we are starting to get into the specifics, right, of what to do to create a successful ERG program starting with these three Ps. And what I wanna do next is continue to give people some specifics that they can do to get more out of ERG. So we talked about the, the three Ps, but now let's talk, um, about how to evaluate and refine your ERG strategy for strategic growth. Yes. And if it sounds like I'm saying the same thing over and over again, it's because I am in different ways. I've heard that you have to say things like seven different times, seven different ways, right? For people don't hear it. So even then, here's another way to understand that the three Ps, and this is actually through five steps. If you wanna know, like the five steps into three, ping your ERG program. Mm-hmm. Um, and this is, I know I, I try to be, you know, have these catch phrases and stuff. Um, and this is actually not hypothetical. This is something that I have done and I do consistently. So I'm saying I have like a huge success rate when it comes to this. Even this can be done in as little as 45 days. That's like, that's how confident I am in it. So follow me here. This is what it takes to set up your ERG for success and to give it that strong foundation thing. One, you have to understand currently what are the opportunities with your ERG program. This sounds a little bit like fluff, but just to explain how that typically shows up. For me, I like to do a listening tour with ERG leaders, even adding some members, adding executive sponsors to say what is wrong with this? As is actually I get this whole framework. Just side note from the design thinking process, it's one of the things that I learned early in my corporate days and it's just stuck with me, which is part of it really is around solving, understanding the problem that you're solving for before you start solving. So that is really what this is all about. Now, when you hear from the ERG leaders and members, you're gonna understand more so around what needs to change with process and programming. But when you talk to executive sponsors, you're really gonna understand what is this ERG program as a whole solving for. Now that's important because if your answer you who leads the ERG program, if your answer is different than the executive sponsors, then what a waste of time that is because they're the ones who fund the program. And if you're in opposition to them for any reason, you're going to lose. So you might say that the ERGs are to scale this other business team's impact, but they might not even want that. And oftentimes in my experience they don't. I'll just say, now that being said, you have to understand ultimately what you're solving for that is your program vision, your North Star metric. Now once you do that, that's step one and you have to get to step two, which is actually creating that strategy. Again, once you have this end goal of where you wanna be, now you need to walk back year over year to understand where you're at and also how you're gonna get closer and closer to achieving that ultimate goal over time. And I'll just say, even if I was to give you a vague, not even vague, but just, I don't like giving people a goal, but just in general, something that you can anchor it off of. If you want operational efficiency within your ERG program, that means little work from the ERG leaders, lot of impact. And also for you as the ERG program manager, it actually means that the ERG program does not need you ultimately, like the ERG program is autonomous. So autonomous ERG programs that do not burn out their leads and get a lot out of it even, I'll just give you all that as a rough framework to work off of. Great. We know right now our ERG program is nowhere near that. So how do we make incremental goals over time using our North Star metrics to actually get us closer and closer to that? And that's why I have the ERG movement model, which is essentially a strategy itself. It's like a development model based on business development. So you can see what that looks like over time. Okay, step three processes. So this is where it comes to probably the most boring part. A lot of people would say, um, where this is baking out step by step, how to do everything. I say, you know, it's good when think one, a brand new employee could come in, be handed this handbook and understand what the role is, why it's important, how to do it, how they know that they're successful and not have any questions for you because it's all there. Another way that you can kind of measure the success of this handbook, well it could be like number of inquiries after it's out. So that, that's an interesting one. Um, or even just in general, I like to say based on how much time your ERG leaders spend on being an ERG leader monthly right now, that range is huge in the space. I actually would love to see a study that that answers that. There might be, I don't know. But anyway, um, oftentimes I would guess it's probably way too much. I know that I've gotten a handbook to a good place if it is three hours or less per month actually, um, which is very doable. I've even seen one hour or less per month. And this is per ERG leader role. And it can be so, so simple. Even then you'll also, I'll give you a third way to kind of know that your handbook is in a good place. If you're able to do an onboarding call with each of your ERG leaders in 10 minutes or less and they have absolute clarity on everything, they have no questions, they feel fully supported of coming outta that call because of your handbook and the things that you're reviewing with them, that's a great, that's a great sign. Okay. Uh, after you have processes, which again, processes also include how the leaders know that they're successful in terms of they have to have a certain number to everything that they do. I call that in activity metric. So measuring the number of things that they're supposed to do in a given period and then also a results metric. What number is that going to impact? For instance, for a communications lead that might be what, how many posts per month? Something simple within your Slack or Teams channel. I like to say 12 just so you all know. And then as a result, what is your communications engagement score for everyone except people who use teams that will be 25% that you're shooting for, for people who use teams, getting a little bit nerdy but teams gives you less metrics. So I have a different, um, metric ultimately, but like a hundred percent just know I have a, a ton of resources on this. So just know there are metrics that ultimately that communications lead should be working to impact by doing 12 posts a month, it all connects. Okay? So that's also part of your processes is having that data and also having it in a place that is visualized. So you can see where that is. Technically that's step four. See I get excited when I talk about these steps, but I do love getting into the data piece 'cause it is essential. Now when you have the roles baked out, it makes it easier for you to assign different activity metrics and results metrics. But then like I said, you need it visualized in a dashboard. And that doesn't have to be difficult. I am not a data expert. I did not go to college. I come from the support world and I learned how to use data visualization tools that are free, big word free like large Studio or Power bi, which if you all use Google Looker Studios free, if you use teams and Microsoft Power BI is free, you can learn how to do this. I guarantee I just learned it off of YouTube University, which is all free itself. And then onboarding, which I kind of alluded to this earlier, but because you have all of the things in place, then you onboard the EIG leaders. For me, what I like to do, and I just mentioned it earlier and this is actually something that I unlocked last year, that's been a huge game changer. I like to do individual onboarding calls. Ugh, I know such a lot of, it's a lot of work, but wow, does it save you so much time in the future? Just dedicate three days where you're doing 10 minute onboarding calls with each of the ERG leaders. Doesn't even, it probably won't even take a full three days. But with that you can walk them through this is what the program is, this is why it exists, this is your role, this is how it helps us to achieve our why it exists AKA our metric. These are the things that you need to do your checklist in a sense with metrics. And also this is the results that we're hoping for you to kind of move the needle on with this role. Here's some resources in which to do it. And also if you have any questions on how to get it done, it's also baked out in this handbook. Now all you do is just lean in with your creative flow, make it relevant to your community. And I know that that's the thing that you're excited about. Anyway. Cool. Do you have any questions? And with that, the leads typically say, no, this is great. I feel so supported, appreciated even in a sense. Um, and also bonus points, part of the onboarding is if you do a collective planning session, that's just a great way to put a bow on onboarding. And that is the steps over and over. I've done it many, many times, dozens of times at at this point when it comes to ERG programs. And again, not just because I came up with this amazing framework, but I'm taking it from the business world, which is like decades of proven techniques just applied to ERGs. So yeah, I love this blueprint for success. I hope that you all follow it. It's really, really simple and I love that data is part of it as well, obviously because data is my love language. Okay? So take away number two, use recognition to help meet people where they are. Lean into this idea of the human workplace and celebrating the whole human. We find in our research that there is the lowest voluntary turnover when people are recognized for not just what they do for the company, so their performance, but also for their personal milestones. So you want people to feel like who they are is as important as what they do. So here at WorkHuman we recognize things called life events through our platform. And this can function as a signal that the whole authentic self belongs at the organization. And this really helps ERGs as well since they are also part of this personalization strategy. So for example, you can through our platform, recognize somebody for something like running a marathon. So this idea of celebrating the whole human beyond what they do for the company also can apply to ERGs. So instead of just recognizing and rewarding what individuals do for ERGs, you can also celebrate the ERG as a whole, like when they do things together. And that can show up on the social feed, which shows people how much the company values groups like ERGs. So the third tip is to celebrate ERG communities, uh, publicly, right? Not just in an ERG software or ERG channel on Slack. So back to the marathon example, imagine that we're congratulating somebody for running a marathon that's part of celebrating the whole human, but we're community celebrations is concerned instead of just recognizing that individual activity. That part of our platform and that aspect of our platform is really for recognizing things that people do together as a group. So let's say as an ERG, you all get together to build a playground. This is where you can see that activity under the banner of in our platform doing good together. And there's a separate space on our platform for this. But when you create that community celebration event for doing good together, it shows up on the general social feed, which means that everybody can see it. There are a few advantages of this approach. So number one, these community celebrations, they can serve as a documentation for group events. So let's say as an ERG, you have a celebratory event at the end of the year. You can go through and look at all the things you've done together under community celebrations. You can look at all the comments people made on that activity. You can take a nice trip down memory lane. It really helps to reinforce the work that people are doing together and it can help encourage your members. And then last but not least, it broadcasts that work to the entire organization. That creates visibility. It gives a wider group the opportunity to see what you're doing and it gives more opportunities for celebration and appreciation of ERGs. Um, as a group. So on community celebrations for example, you may see that the executive sponsor is always at the events. This is also a good signal for the rest of the organization to see. And now maybe people who are not involved can see, oh, this is my way to, you know, um, get involved with a senior leader or get visible to a senior leader. Or I don't have to be part of this community to be part of this community, if you get what I'm saying. Um, so this is really, really important and as I said before, I think that these signals of ERGs as important is underutilized. So the next takeaway is, uh, again, back to my love language of data, but Maceo, I'll let you go first to talk about how we measure and showcase the impact of ERGs. Yes. Okay, exciting. We already talked about the, actually since I mentioned the channel engagement score. I'll kick off with that. Well, maybe I won't actually. I'm going to kick off with what we shouldn't be doing, um, because I just so happen to know at most companies, what they measure right now with their ERG programs is how many members they have, how many people attended their events, and also, um, like maybe survey responses if they're even consistent in putting out a survey. That is just simply not enough for a number of different reasons. If you're only measuring number of members, then that means that your success metric is trying to grow the program and the highest you could ever go is a hundred percent. And even then, are we ever trying to get to a hundred percent participation with ERG programs? Not necessarily. Um, so I don't know. And even then I'll say from personal experience, I have at one point been the person who measures program growth. And actually at one company I was very excited my first company doing this work with where I was like, Hey, I was able to increase our ERG participation from 28% to over 50% in just a year. Now that being said, I was having this conversation with the CFO at the company and he was like, that's cool, but we just wanna know if the, are these programs impactful? Like, are the people who participate like, well one, are the people in the programs actually participating in them? And then two, are they getting something out of them? Which I was like, wow, that was a mind blowing moment where I realized I'd been measuring a metric that really didn't matter for over a year. So when I say don't measure it, and I'm not saying don't note it, but I'm saying don't make that your core metric. I'm telling you from experience even then, same thing with event attendance, where that can bring about bad practices, worse practices in a sense by you saying, Hey, as ERG leaders, you should just try to get the most amount of members. Well that is not prioritizing member engagement, much less member impact. And also that means that even if people, I actually said that wrong, there's a small word that a lot of people probably didn't even pick up on that I said wrong, but most amount of people, not members. Um, because then if you're just trying to get more people, that means that that can also include people who aren't members of your ERG. And now you're just doing a bunch of blend speakers or allyship trainings and things like that, which is just, it's not prioritizing your member experience first. Now on the other hand, seeing the percentage of members that are engaged in your program, that's an interesting one and one that most ERG programs do not know the answer to. If I were to ask you what's the percentage of your members and let's say with an individual ERG, what's the percentage of members with this ERG? Um, sorry, I said that wrong. Let me restate, what's the percentage of this ERGs members that have participated this year in ERG programming live or asynchronous? Now, most people wouldn't know that. What if I asked for last year, what's the percentage of your members over the course of the 12 months, January through December, the unique members that participated? Most people don't know that answer, which is wild to me. That's like a baseline metric that we should be starting off with trying to get more members to participate. And when I hear a lot of ERG programs say, Hey, yeah, we just get the same people showing up over and over again. Well, you probably aren't even looking in the metrics to see where those people are, like in terms of maybe department or tenure. Maybe you'll notice some trends and maybe you can then open up the opportunity to say, wow, we're missing this chunk of our membership. Now we can do programming that's targeted towards them. And even I use words like targeted because just like with marketing, you market to the, the opportunities that exist, but you need the data to do that. And most programs are not using their data and all the things I'm talking about, these are answers that you can like get today. Like they're so easy but we're not doing it. Um, and then with communications engagement score, I already talked about that one earlier. The reason why this is brought up on the same caliber as the member engagement score or what you see your event engagement score, which in particular event engagement score is just those live events. Some companies like to anchor those over live and asynchronous events. I'm a fan of member engagement score, but I also know that event engagement score, that's the starting point. So that's probably the easiest one for you to start off with. Communications or channel engagement score, that is also important because as I mentioned, your ERG channels are the like least leverage oftentimes within an ERG or that is where your community is built. So you should actually measure the health of that to understand the health of any other form of engagement, because that's really kind of where it starts there. So anyway, those are kind of some of the metrics that I really like. Survey responses do matter, but oftentimes we're not doing 'em well or consistently. Um, and honestly I'll say for most programs while they start with this, I think that the qualitative data there is actually going to be supplementary to the hard quantitative data that exists. All the thing, all these things that are mentioned, they're pretty easy to access. It's just a matter of grabbing them. So yeah, I love the idea of instead of broad metrics, align your metrics to how well are we reaching and serving our target audience. I think if you start with that as um, an intention and something you want to measure, then it's easier to back your way into which metrics actually answer that question for us. I also wanna plug the idea of doing research on the impact of your employee resource groups. You've seen some of work humans research on this and hopefully that inspires you to, uh, do the metrics Cs, but in addition to the metrics, do actual research that shows right that maybe for you ERGs are positively impacting things like engagement, retention, how people feel about your culture, trust, things like that. And that can further bolster support, uh, for your ERGs. Mm-hmm. So we've come to the end of our, of our webinar. I think we've had a fantastic discussion about the intent of ERGs, how to think about ERGs, how to do them well, how to bolster them with recognition. I'm so sure that you probably have questions. Uh, one, one thing to note, Maceo and I will be continuing this conversation at WorkHuman live in Denver. Uh, and we will be joined by my partner Dr. Isha Aria, who will also talk about the research that we've done on employee resource groups with clients. So that's not to be missed at this point. I will pause for any questions you have for me and Maceo. Wow. The chat has been like just popping off and I love it. I mean, I love that people are talking about connecting. I did say that community was my word for 2025. There's a new LinkedIn group, I'm so happy. Okay, so Maceo, we've got 39 questions and there is no way we're getting to 39 Questions In five minutes. So I'm gonna try to hit the ones that were not covered in our discussion. So one of the questions somebody had was, can you repeat the name of some of those data visualization tools that you mentioned? Yes. So Looker Studio completely free. And if you, if your company uses Google, uh, the Google Suite at all, then you have it for free. So, um, that's that one. And then if you're a Microsoft company, power BI is the Looker Studio equivalent. I am a Google girly, so I love the Google version, but Power bi, again, it's free and both of them are learnable, uh, relatively easy. Thank you. Okay. How do you describe the differences between employee resource groups and affinity groups, and when do you recommend going with h Personally? For me, I feel like it's all like semantics just in terms of names. Mm-hmm. Again, in that study that I did, there's over 70 names for ERG programs like Affinity Group, business Resource Group, ERG, employee Network, affinity Business Network. Mm-hmm. Like, there's so many variations for me it's about what is it? At the end of the day, it's an employee community. Okay, got you. So for me, it doesn't really matter really. I think that traditionally people say Affinity Group is a less mature version of an ERG, but if we're being honest, the state of the er g space, most ERGs, most bgs are also like in all reality an immature version of an ERG because they don't have structure, they don't have data. And it's almost like the wild, wild west of Free for all. So personally I'd say it's just a name, but I will say I've seen companies that have just a Slack channel that's like an informal community versus a formal community that has backing in terms of budget essentially. Amazing. Okay. So, um, another question about something you said. Can you speak more about community facilitation? What does that look like? And do you have any resources that you can share? Uh, so much to unpack there, because again, I feel like that should be everything like that ERG leaders are really trained on is how to be better at connecting their community. And again, that's what these groups are at the end of the day. So even when we talk about community facilitation, I take facilitation instead of community building because you can't force people to have connections, but you can create opportunities for them to connect. And for me that means live and non-live. And for, that's also kind of how I break down engagement, live opportunities for people to connect non-live opportunities for people to connect or at least get involved. Community can also be educational, resourceful, so to get resources. So for me, I feel like it just breaks down into those pockets. Like I said, there's so much more there. But you know, I will say I have a ton of resources on the erg movement.com just all over where I nerd out about that in detail. I was hoping that you would mention that again because I mean, you are here because I've followed your content for so long and I, and I love it. Right? And so you do have a lot of great resources. Your newsletter is fantastic. So again, I'm gonna put a plug out for that if, if, you know, people are not yet subscribed. So I'll pick up on, uh, something you mentioned about, you know, live and non-live. One question is, are there any strategies that work well or best in remote environments? Any obstacles that emerge that are unique to remote collaboration? I'm, here's where I'll, I'll do a plug for strategic recognition again, because that social feed is clutch. Like when I joined WorkHuman, I was sitting in Memphis by myself as a remote employee. I didn't know anybody in the organization. And so it was really helpful for me to see stuff like that and to see, you know, what people were doing and how I could connect. And plus one to that. I do think that to that point, things that are non-live are gonna be really impactful. When it, the question was around asynchronous or around remote? I heard two things remote. Okay, well those are two completely different answers. But if I was to give, um, for asynchronous things, again, for me, I, I view that as like little mini projects that you can give your members to do in time to feel involved. There's so many creative things that we can do there for remote employees. I think, yes, virtual programming and also a strong communications ca channel. I can't emphasize enough that's like the most underutilized space for ERGs where most ERGs over index on events and they just use their communication space as a promotion space. Truly, your communicate your community starts with your communication channel. And I mean, I'll do a plug if I can. And the ERG recipe book is on pre-order. So I will say I have in there examples of creative programming and how you're able to execute it. So, like I said, plug because I can't go into detail, but also if you're at WorkHuman Live, definitely would love to nerd out more on this too. Absolutely. Okay, so we're pretty much like out of time over time, but any quick, there's a question about your YouTube University resources. Is there anyone that you'd like to mention that people might find particularly helpful? Um, I'll say YouTube University just in general. I put out a video recently on, um, 17 legal things to know with your ERG program. Um, a lot of people have really appreciated it, so I, I'll say check that out. Our YouTube channel is the ERG movement and again, the erg movement.com has so many free resources for you all in the space. Also, people asked about unions, Maceo talks about that as well on our channel and in her newsletter. So again, check that out, y'all. You have done my heart so good. I personally, uh, joined the LinkedIn, uh, community that somebody started, and I'm so happy to see all of this happening and I really, really hope to see some of you at WorkHuman Live. Thank you so, so very much.

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