Understanding Employee Segmentation and How to Better Target Strategies
As part of the Midland MBA program, students have the opportunity to gain real work experience by completing our Business Consulting Capstone experience. Each team of students will work alongside one of our capstone corporate partners and a mentor from the Nebraska chapter of Project Management Institute to solve a real-life business problem.
This year, we’d like to highlight one of the teams for their work with our capstone corporate partner, Mosaic. For those of you who don’t know, Mosaic is a faith-based organization serving people with disabilities. Mosaic serves more than 3,700 people in 10 states, focusing on whole-person care and quality outcomes.
The Business Problem
Due to their diverse employee population, Mosaic’s goal for this project was to learn more about best DE&I practices of leading organizations, obtain benchmarking data to provide additional perspective of the work currently underway, and gain insight on the successful creation and sustainment of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). This work will support targeted strategies tied to employee impact, engagement and retention, as well as the continued evolution of Mosaic’s multi-faceted Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Belonging (IDEB) program.
Mosaic asked the team to provide research focused on the healthcare industry and the following four main areas: Benchmarking, Best Practices in workplace Diversity programs, Best practices for Employee Resources Groups or ERG’s, and information on how to sustain diversity program initiatives.
The Plan
First, the team had conducted interviews with four additional organizations across a range of industries to get information on how each organization has implemented their own diversity program. Additionally, the team had compiled research on best practices in diversity. With the help of this information, this team will be able to provide Mosaic with a benchmark of their program to other organizations, along with information on best practices in diversity.
In 2021, Mosaic plans to develop and implement ERG’s by integrating this program with Mosaic’s vision, values, and business objectives and strategies. Through the implementation of the IDEB program, Mosaic will be focused on attraction, support and retention of a diverse workforce and its employees’ unique views, needs and options.
Next Steps
At the end of the term, the team presented the findings to the Mosaic representatives, delivering a toolkit of research and best practices of a Diversity and Inclusion program and for Employee Resource Groups. The team also offered a plan for sustainability of diversity programs by answering the following questions:
- How are organizations able to keep the focus on diversity after implementation?
- How does an organization determine the success of their diversity initiative?
Overall, their research included best practices of healthcare organizations with values and a mission that align with Mosaic and best practices outside the healthcare field.
Takeaways From The Capstone Experience
During their Capstone Experience, the team discovered there are many organizations that see the value of having established Employee Resource Groups (ERG’s). Through the team’s research, they were able to identify a different viewpoint from another organization where employee resource groups for them seemed to increase exclusion. As a result of this opinion, this organization worked on embedding diversity and inclusion into their organization’s culture by getting involved with different groups outside of the organization and participating in different programs outside of their internal ERGs.
As a takeaway from the capstone experience through the MBA program, the greatest team discovery has been the responsibility of ensuring that each team member has ownership of part of the project and that each member is able to deliver value to the client. As the term progressed, the team has noticed that the communication among the team members has improved significantly throughout the duration of the term.
The second takeaway from the capstone experience is the identification of importance of the meeting closures for their team. At the end of every meeting, this team had each team member identify where they are in regards to their do to list and what needs to be completed before the next group meeting. This helped each team member be aware where each counterpart is at and could hold themselves accountable for their actions.
