It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic has been bringing unprecedented upheaval to workplaces around the world since last year. In the wake of the crisis, organizations had pivoted the focus to their most pressing needs—adapting to the novel digital way of working, consolidating the remote workforce, and maintaining their productivity. However, now, as things are slowly regaining their lost momentum, organizations are increasingly realizing that the global setback can no longer be considered as an excuse to overlook diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as their strategic priority.
But, why? In the first place, ‘the new normal’ warrants recovery, resilience, and reimagination now more than ever— the traits which characterize organizations with inclusive nature. Besides, as the organizations vie to adapt to the new normal and provide an enhanced experience for the diverse customer base, they are concurrently being held accountable by employees, customers, and society as a whole, to do more than just publicly asserting a commitment toward DEI.
Yes, the intention is crucial, but it is only the first step! To follow through on that by taking action, what organizations and their DEI teams growingly need is a single source of truth, where anything related to DEI can be relied upon. That’s where Teleskope is cementing its cornerstone. While providing cutting-edge tools and critical insights to manage all the employee resource group programs of an organization, Teleskope is triumphantly placing DEI at the front and center of an organization’s mission.
“DEI teams have a lot of intertwined needs today that go beyond managing employee resource groups (ERG), ranging from mitigating communication gaps to mentoring employees,” says Aman Brar, CEO of Teleskope. Impressively, the all-in one platform that Teleskope offers has a comprehensive set of tailored and interconnected tools to cater to all these diverse DEI requirements.
Teleskope’s ERG management solution—Affinities—is one of them. Affinities is a SaaS solution for organizations to administer, analyze, and nurture the functioning of their ERGs. Interestingly, Affinities has a plethora of features to support end-to-end management of all ERG events. To that end, Affinities allows for automated roster management, comprehensive event management capabilities at group and chapter levels, enables branded content creation, hosts integrates survey tools, provides holistic engagement tracking, and much more. All these features, driven by rich reporting and analytics across all dimensions, helps organizations in significantly reducing the administrative burden of ERG management and provides unique insights into the performance and ROI of ERGs.
Teleskope can thus be regarded as the single pane of glass that can substantially improve recruitment, enhance retention, and boost talent management of the diverse workforce, all the while not deviating from the standards and ethos of the client organizations.
Adding on the competencies of these three solutions, Teleskope also allows seamless integration into any HRIS system and Identity Providers, offering unified user management and seamless single sign-on capabilities. Teleskope facilitates integrations with other collaboration, recruiting and financing tools as well. Teleskope can thus be regarded as the single pane of glass that can substantially improve recruitment, enhance retention, and boost talent management of the diverse workforce, all the while not deviating from the standards and ethos of the client organizations.
One may wonder what gives Teleskope and its platform such extensive DEI competencies. That’s because Teleskope has been built from the ground up as a customer ideated platform. Maneet Sarai, Chief Product Officer at Teleskope, reflects on the same, “We continuously iterate on the customer feedback, month over month, to improve Teleskope’s capabilities. This feedback comes from both the DEI leadership of organizations as well as employees who are the beneficiaries.” And since Teleskope caters to the entire spectrum, from Fortune 100 companies with millions of employees to organizations with a few thousand personnel, the company has a wide awareness of literally every industry vertical. “We can adopt any business workflow or rule and cater to different ERG governance and role structures within an organization,” Sarai enthuses. Such a boundless range of feedback integration from peers, coupled with the expansive capabilities of its leading-edge tools, indeed makes Teleskope the best-in-class.
How Teleskope assisted one of the largest professional services firms in the world, with over 500,000 FTEs, in enhancing their DEI activities represents an ideal testament to its potency. “The company was running more than 20 ERGs in the North America alone, which were managed by fragmented applications and spreadsheets. Since there wasn’t a consolidated approach from a data standpoint, they didn’t have a clear picture of their ERG program,” comments Sarai. However, Teleskope turned the situation around swiftly. Teleskope gave the company a broader picture of their overall ERG program with true insights and data on membership, rosters, events, and content. With Teleskope, they found it very simple to communicate with the ERG members. Subsequently, they started holding hundreds of large events with more than a few thousand participants and sending hundreds of newsletters every single week. “It would have been nearly impossible to do that without an application like ours,” notes Brar. The company witnessed a considerable increase—70-80 percent—in the survey participation rate as well.
Notably, this success also led the company to integrate Teleskope into their new hire onboarding. Today, every new employee in the organization is introduced to Teleskope. “The company hires around thousand employees a week. So, now, they have a couple of new segments related to ERGs and DEI during the onboarding session,” mentions Sarai. As soon as the new hires join, they can discover the ERGs offered by the organization, learn more about those groups, and join the preferred networks with a few clicks. As simple as it sounds!
Such intuitiveness of Teleskope is propelling organizations currently to broaden their scope of DEI initiatives and create and nurture more niche segments of ERGs, such as mental health and wealth awareness. And, riding on the coattails of such competencies, Teleskope is carving out a niche as the go to platform for employee programs for both large enterprises as well as the mid-market segments. In this regard, Brar believes that they have just begun to scratch the surface of DEI. “As we go deeper to understand the challenges of our existing customers and penetrate broader into new markets, we will be encountering more interesting use cases,” Brar concludes.
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