How Employee Affinity Groups Can Help You Recruit and Retain a Diverse Workforce

By Carmen Van Kerckhove

Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies have employee affinity groups. These organizations (sometimes referred to as employee networking or resource groups) are made up of volunteers and usually focus on people who have been historically under-represented in the workplace: people of color, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, and the like.

It isn’t surprising that employee affinity groups are a popular diversity tactic. They are easy to set up and inexpensive to run. And when they work well, they can help companies recruit and retain top diverse talent.

Affinity groups can help increase employee retention by reducing the social isolation of being the only person of color within a department or division. A good employee affinity group can also boost the number of employees of color among a company’s new hires. That’s because under-represented employees are more likely to refer friends to their employer when they know that an infrastructure exists to support and utilize them effectively.

Finally, the social networks created in employee affinity groups can serve as a counterbalance to the “old boy’s network” and help increase diversity among managerial ranks. When a company makes it easier for employees to meet people in other departments and levels of hierarchy, it creates a greater likelihood of career advancement.

Although employee affinity groups can yield many benefits, they can also backfire. If managed ineffectively, they can become gossip or gripe sessions, where unhappy employees spread their negativity around. As a result, companies with disaffected affinity groups can actually lose employees and find it harder to recruit superior diverse talent.

If you want to avoid the potential pitfalls of ineffective employee affinity groups, keep these four strategies in mind.

1. Have the groups tackle real-life business problems.
To avoid having your employee affinity groups become glorified book clubs or gossip fests, keep the members focused on business objectives. Consider assigning brainstorming tasks focused on finding a solution to a problem faced by people from an under-represented group. At Best Buy, for instance, the women’s networking groups focus on a specific challenge, such as finding ways to attract more women customers, or working with designers to make stores more female-friendly.

2. Cultivate a diversity of seniority levels within each group.
If all the participants in your affinity groups are entry-level employees or in support roles, meetings will yield fewer valuable networking connections for career advancement. So encourage senior executives to get involved. Their insights into how the organization works and how to most efficiently get things done can be invaluable for all involved, resulting in associations that may lead upward in the ranks as time goes on.

3. Encourage different affinity groups to work together.
If different affinity groups fail to work together, each group may isolate, making it less effective and less welcome within the corporate culture. A company’s affinity groups can get more done when they pool their resources and they can demonstrate, through their cooperative efforts, the many benefits of diversity.

4. Make sure the affinity group remains within the confines of federal and state antidiscrimination and labor laws.
Since I’m not a lawyer, I’m not able to cover all areas of legality, but here are a few potential problem areas of note. It’s illegal for employee affinity groups to discuss any issues that a union would tackle, including work hours, assignments, pay, or promotion. And a company cannot show favoritism by allowing one affinity group to form but not another. If you offer meeting space, company time and other company resources to one group, you must offer similar resources to all other groups. Also, by law, an affinity group cannot exclude anyone from joining, as long as they share the same goals for the group. For example, if an Asian-American group is formed, it must allow non-Asian-American employees to join as well. Consult with a lawyer and educate yourself about all state and federal laws to ensure that your affinity group doesn’t overstep any established legal boundaries.

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Carmen Van Kerckhove, president of the diversity education firm New Demographic, specializes in working with corporations to facilitate relaxed, authentic, and productive conversations about race. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and has visited as a guest lecturer at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, among many other colleges and universities across the country. If you want to learn how to boost your career by mastering the changing dynamics of race in today’s workplace, get your FREE TIPS now at www.NewDemographic.com