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Dell cultivates an inclusive culture through 14 ERGs

Dell has released its first 2020 Legacy of Good update following its merger with EMC late last year.

The report summarises its CSR efforts of fiscal year 2017 (1 February 2016 - 31 January 2017), among which includes efforts to cultivate an inclusive culture by offering 14 different employee resource groups (ERGs) and extending its flexible work programme to legacy EMC team members.

Separating the initiatives into four categories - people, community, environment, and supply chain - the report highlights include:

People

Cultivating an inclusive culture through its 14 different ERGsAs of December last year, 23% of team members are engaged in employee resource groups.

One of the fastest growing resource groups is Pride - Dell's ERG for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) team members and allies. Much of the growth came through new chapters in locations where identifying as LGBT is not always widely accepted such as Asia - which still lags in offering LGBT employees equal benefits.

In APJ, Dell launched the Sydney chapter of Pride employee resource group – the first chapter in the region. Its success led to the launch of a remote chapter to meet immediate demand from others in the region outside of Australia.

Expanding flexible work programmes to Dell EMC team membersDell has expanded its flexible work programmes to legacy EMC team members, encouraging eligible employees to work in a way most productive for them. Dell’s goal is to increase global participation to 50% by 2020.

Integrating two cultures to create an employer of choiceLast year, the company initiated the development of a culture code. This included collecting feedback from more than 75,000 Dell and EMC team members about the cultural attributes most important to the success of the new, combined company.

According to Dell's November 2016 employee survey, 82% of team members felt inspired; and although work to integrate teams is ongoing, 81% already felt like they were part of the Dell team.

Developing future talent through mentoring hackathonsAt the Smart India Hackathon 2017 organised by India's Ministry of Human Resources and Development, more than 40 employees from Dell EMC in India volunteered to mentor teams. The event saw 32,000 students work on more than 600 problems provided by India’s government, with first and second place going to teams mentored by Dell engineers.

READ MORE: How Roche’s CSR programme helped bring staff together

Community

Over 3.3 million hours of community serviceSince FY14, Dell employees provided over 3.3 million hours of community service in the areas in which they live and work. Dell’s goal is to provide 5 million cumulative hours of service by 2020.

Environment

Engaging employees in sustainabilityDell gave team members the opportunity to select where they wanted a tree planted to commemorate the first day as an integrated company. More than 41,000 employees participated and Dell added additional trees to bring the total number planted up above 140,000. Many team members chose to have theirs planted in Indonesia (in areas to support the Malaysian Tiger’s habitat) via WWF.

Dell's goal was to plant 1 million trees by 2020 - which it reached shortly after January 1, 2017.

Supply Chain

Promoting a positive work experience in its supply chainIn FY17, Dell expanded its weekly working hours monitoring programme to include more than 190,000 workers across 121 supplier facilities in China. This programme tracks working hours and rest days, as well as any use of student workers, dispatch workers and workers under the age of 18. Executives then review this data weekly and discuss suppliers’ individual performance at quarterly business reviews.

In FY17, 91% of the workers we monitored worked fewer than 60 hours per week—an increase over the previous year's compliance.

Providing joint management trainings to suppliersIn APJ, Dell is also providing joint management trainings to suppliers in partnership with IT companies, for example in Malaysia and Singapore, to build awareness and help identify strategies related to forced labour and human trafficking.

ALSO READ: LOOK: How Marina Bay Sands’ CSR initiative creates real business value

Photo / 123RF

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