Ideagen Global - Catalyze Magazine, March 2023

CREATING STRONG WORKFORCE INITIATIVES With Ernest Dupont, Executive Director, Workforce Initiatives, CVS Health George: What advice, Ernie, would you provide to other companies looking to build a strong, robust, successful workforce initiatives element in their company? Ernest: That's a great question, George, and it's one I get quite a bit, and it's really the same answer every time. There's one primary thing that's most important, and that is thinking through a long-term lens and not a short-term series of wins. When we started the workforce initiatives work that we do today at scale, it began with a persistence around creating these partnerships and looking for common ground around mission and purpose with communities and community organizations. So often, and in our experience early on, we hit a brick wall and didn't go any further with a multitude of different partnerships that we had initiated during that timeframe. It took a great level of persistence. It took some foresight about not giving up on what's important, and that is those individuals that are underserved and those individuals that perhaps just by the nature of the zip code they grow up in, don't have the same resources that we all may have had as young people. It's critically important that anybody interested in moving forward with a program like this that they take a long-term view. It took us 3 to 5 years to start to hit some of the outcomes we wanted through the course of our work, and it is based on the relationships and common purpose we build. We started small and weren't looking for big numbers early on. If you can do that and stay true to the purpose, it's critically important. Another thing that I would add, George, is that there are oftentimes things that become shiny objects along the way that can pull your attention away from the true heart of the work we're trying to accomplish. I think it's critically important to stay focused on what the work is, and that's helping to transition people through non-traditional pipelines of talent to success. It goes back to our aspirational goals, which are breaking the cycle of poverty and recognizing that every individual has potential and the ability to realize that potential if they're given the right tools. So if a company is interested in doing something like this, I'd love to talk with them. We think the more companies involved in this work, the better because it's helping communities robustly across the country. . . CATALYZE MAGAZINE | 18

THE FUTURE OF DEI & ESG F e a t u r i n g J o r d a n M i t c h e l l : A s s o c i a t e D i r e c t o r , D E I & E S G , K P M G & Z o e T h o m p s o n : U S S o c i a l S t r a t e g y L e a d , K P M G J o r d a n M i t c h e l l Z o e T h o m p s o n George Sifakis: As we look at the future of DEI and ESG, how do you envision KPMG evolving in this space? Zoe Thompson: I'll say it again; it's about business impact where I see evolving. We had such a reckoning in the United States that obviously spilled out into the rest of the world. When we talked about where we were with diversity, with inclusion, you had a lot of companies saying, 'I'm not where I want to be.' For a long time, people thought of these activities as corporate social responsibility. They thought, Monday through Friday, I do my business, and on Saturday, maybe I'll get together with some people on my team, and we'll go volunteer. Then, we've done our part to be good corporate citizens. What happened is that companies said that's not enough. We need to be more involved. We need to show our impact. We need to really integrate this into our business strategy. That awareness was fantastic, and I'm really thrilled about that. What you see happening now and where I see us going is we've started thinking about our business in terms of DEI, now, how do we actually track accountability? How do we make sure that people in charge have the resources they need, the authority they need, and the ability to circle back and say, where is the business impact, and how are we tracking that? I think KPMG and our clients across the board will look at that and say, how do we make sure this is truly treated like a business imperative, not as a nice to have, not as something that goes away when budgets get tight, but something that absolutely baked into our business with those accountabilities. You've got to be able to track, you've got to have the data, and you've got to be able to hold people accountable to say, Is this working, and if not, how do we fix that? We had the awareness, we had the desire to do more, and now I think you'll see more accountability, more tracking, and ever-evolving improvement. . CATALYZE MAGAZINE | 19