Company: New York Life
Diversity Team Name: Office of Diversity & Inclusion
Diversity Team Leader: Kathleen Navarro
Website: www.newyorklife.com
Team Responsibility
Established in 2006, our Office of Diversity and Inclusion team consists of seven full-time employees, with efforts spanning four areas: talent acquisition, talent management, employee engagement (including our ERG program), and reporting & analytics. Two of the seven team members are in fully integrated HR roles: our Chief Diversity Officer and Head of Talent Management Kathleen Navarro, leads the company’s integrated strategies for talent management and D&I; and our Talent Acquisition Diversity Strategist sits on the Talent Acquisition team, directly aiding and advising recruiters in inclusive hiring practices and reaching diverse talent through our various partnerships.
Innovation
We have developed innovative D&I campaigns, programming, and leadership development programs, including these:
- Annual D&I Awareness Campaigns – Our campaigns help foster an inclusive workplace culture that appreciates and celebrates unique perspectives and differences. Annual themes have included What You Can Do, #InclusionMatters, #BeYourself, #PowerofPerspective, and You Belong (launched this year). Our campaign’s educational and experiential activities have garnered high levels of participation from employees across departments and locations all over the nation.
- Coming Together: Conversation Series – We created this series to provide a safe forum for courageous conversations and foster an environment of trust and engagement where complex conversations can take place. As of this year, we’ve hosted 17 courageous conversations, including sessions in partnership with our ERGs. We continue to build on this comprehensive program that includes ongoing company-wide discussions on race relations and other timely topics, a courageous conversation toolkit, guest speakers, and the sponsorship of related research projects.
Our most recent external guest speakers include PFLAG, a national LGBTQ+ organization that delivered content to enhance participants’ understanding of gender and provided tips on how to be effective allies; Louisa L., a French contemporary artist who showcased and gave remarks about her New York Her immigrant women portrait collection; and Wade Davis, an inclusion consultant who shared insights about cultivating belonging in the workplace.
With robust support from senior leadership and high participation across the company, the “Coming Together: Conversation Series” has been instrumental in shaping our culture of inclusion and setting us apart as a D&I leader in the industry.
- Amplify Program – In 2019, we redesigned the internal leadership development program exclusive to people of color to maximize the impact for participants. Several components were added to create a more robust participant experience: increasing participants’ exposure to the business by incorporating a business project; providing executive mentors; providing internal and external exposure to senior leaders; and providing participants’ managers with inclusive leadership training. The redesigned program, Amplify, will launch this year and help strengthen our multicultural pipeline.
Awards
We’ve received a variety of D&I awards for our programs, most notably we’re 17x recipients of LATINA Style’s Top 50 Award (Company of the Year in 2019); 13x recipients of NAFE’s Top 50 Companies for Executive Women; 9x recipients of Working Mother® magazine’s Best Companies for Multicultural Women; 8x recipients of Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality; a perfect 100 score from the Human Rights Campaign; and 3x recipients of Diversity Best Practices Leading Inclusion Index Company. Lastly, we’ve received Profile in Diversity Journal’s Top 10 Innovation Award in 2019 and 2017.
