Companies seek strategies to retain new hires as they work toward goals on work force diversity

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Trimel Fidely felt like he had a secret advantage at work – a senior executive who was deeply vested in Mr. Fidely’s success at their company, the Business Development Bank of Canada.

But when Mr. Fidely, who is originally from Trinidad and Tobago, participated in an external training program to help corporate leaders identify their organizations’ diversity weak spots, he realized that few of his peers had been afforded the same experience.

“I was able to talk about my goals, the challenges that I was facing, and how to overcome those barriers,” said Mr. Fidely, now a BDC business centre manager in Toronto’s Scarborough area who has been with the company for more than a decade. “I was fortunate. Let me be clear, though. I was the exception and not the rule.”

Three years after they signed high-profile commitments to address anti-Black racism in the workplace, Canadian institutions such as BDC are confronting a new challenge: retaining the diverse employees they have hired.

Some companies have lost Black employees as they became frustrated by a lack of mentorship or sponsorship, compensation gaps, racial prejudice and office microaggressions, experts say.

Carlson: Drop in diversity hires reflects the weak societal IQ of business leaders and puts companies at risk

These problems are not new, and continue to undermine the longer-term goals of diversifying the work force, especially in the upper ranks, and creating systemic change.

In a 2019 study, U.S.-based equity research think tank Coqual found that Black employees were at a greater risk of attrition, with those individuals reporting intentions to leave their company 30 per cent more often than white employees. Just 31 per cent of Black employees said they had access to senior leaders at work, compared with 44 per cent of their white peers, Coqual found.

In Britain, Black professionals were 35 per cent more likely than their white peers to say they planned to stay for just two years or fewer, Coqual found in a 2022 study. Also, 76 per cent of Black employees felt they had to work harder than others to advance in their careers.

At BDC, Mr. Fidely and his peers determined there was a gap within the company and across corporate Canada: Black employees were lacking opportunities to connect with each other and with potential sponsors – influential leaders who help lift others into rooms that they can’t otherwise access.

With that impetus in mind, Mr. Fidely co-founded BDC’s Black Professional Network, the Crown corporation’s internal resource group dedicated to, among other things, retaining Black talent and positioning them for leadership roles. Among their projects is a structured program to build deep, long-lasting relationships between talented Black employees and senior leadership.

Canadian companies that signed the BlackNorth Initiative – a 2020 pledge aimed at tackling systemic racism over five years – have increased their proportions of Black employees, executives and board members, a Globe and Mail analysis has found. But hiring is just the start.

“There is no point bringing Black people into a space that is not ready to receive them,” said Dahabo Ahmed-Omer, executive director of the BlackNorth Initiative. “Retention means you are giving employees opportunities to grow.”

BlackNorth, a Toronto-based non-profit organization, was founded by Bay Street financier and philanthropist Wes Hall in July, 2020, amid a wave of global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd by a white police officer.

Despite ramped-up recruitment, Black employees continue to face challenges in the workplace that disproportionately lead to them leave, said Lekan Olawoye, the founder of Black Professionals in Tech Network.

He said he frequently hears from Black employees that they feel undermined by subordinates, struggle to find executive sponsorship and continue to face microagressions, despite the anti-racism training that many workplaces have made available or even mandatory to their employees.

After working with companies directly on Black talent strategies, Mr. Olawoye said he has come to think of retention as a three-phase approach. First, a company must “create an environment.” Then, it must build internal systems. Finally, it must empower its executives.

The first stage – creating an environment – can be done successfully with employee resource groups, he said. Christianna Scott, director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Air Canada, attributes the airline’s success to one such group: Recent data from a self-identified survey suggests the airline is retaining Black employees at a higher rate than the average companywide rate of turnover.

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Ms. Scott said that in recent years, the group has run a number of targeted events ranging from dedicated flights with all-Black crews to community outreach to create a sense of belonging.

“They’re representing Air Canada within their own communities. And I think that is a huge factor when it comes to retention because it creates this sense of pride,” Ms. Scott said.

The next step, Mr. Olawoye said, is building systems to develop growth opportunities for diverse employees. For many, such as BDC’s Mr. Fidely, that means deliberately destabilizing the patterns of internal sponsorship that have historically led to little diversity at top leadership levels.

It could also take form in building courses and training sessions with executive buy-in, Mr. Olawoye said.

This is an approach being undertaken by Norton Rose Fulbright, which is a signatory of the BlackNorth Law Firm Pledge. Natasha Hyppolite, a senior associate and a member of the law firm’s racial equity council, said she and other council members have had “frank discussions” with leaders about the barriers that exist among racialized groups.

Those discussions helped launch a career-strategies program for employees that identify as Black, Indigenous and people of colour. The program offers three separate workshops, including one dedicated to engagement and retention of early to mid-career employees, a career stage in which the firm says they typically lose racialized individuals.

“For me, this session broke new ground in terms of the discussions that are surrounding race equity and inclusion right now,” Ms. Hyppolite said. “In particular, it gave us tangible tools that the firm could showcase to racialized firm members, to show that they are dedicated to improving our experience and our professional development at the firm.”

Companies are approaching retention in various ways. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. said it finds that working with external partners such as schools and recruitment organizations are more effective than traditional in-house approaches. Enbridge Inc. said it performs an annual pay-equity analysis to better assess any gaps and make certain that differences in pay are not influenced by gender, race or ethnicity. And Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan embeds diversity and inclusion measurements into compensation for its senior leaders.

The final step companies should take, said Mr. Olawoye of the Black Professionals in Tech Network, is to promote Black executives as thought leaders, and empower them to lift others in their stead.

“As you diversify your leadership, other parts of the company will diversify. Like attracts like,” he said.

However, a major challenge to retaining Black employees will be maintaining motivation for action. While some organizations have been able to sustain their drive, others have faltered in the years since the Black Lives Matter movement, said Charles Ifechi, founder of non-profit Black Professionals Canada.

“They feel that that’s what was cool at the time, and it’s done now. Back to business, and back to the bottom line,” Mr. Ifechi said.

It’s a trend that BDC’s vice-president of talent, diversity, equity and inclusion has noticed, too. Julie St-Pierre said she has been hearing in some organizations that “unfortunately, the topics surrounding diversity and inclusion are losing interest. They’re losing momentum.”

If companies don’t build on their recruitment success, it needs to be clearly promoted and regularly reinforced, BDC’s Mr. Fidely said. Otherwise, Black employees could be left feeling tokenized.

And the signatories to the BlackNorth Initiative are still far from fulfilling their commitment of having at least 3.5 per cent of board and executive roles occupied by Black people by 2025. As of March, the Black population accounted for 4.3 per cent of Canada’s total population, according to Statistics Canada.

But BlackNorth’s Ms. Ahmed-Omer is not daunted. The organization’s original five-year pledge is just the beginning of a series of initiatives to implement tangible action, she said, and in the meantime, celebrating accomplishments by the Black community is the key to lasting success.

“Structural systemic change takes time,” Ms. Ahmed-Omer said. “That’s what we are looking for.”

With a report from Vanmala Subramaniam

More than halfway into the five-year BlackNorth Initiative pledge, many companies have established a baseline of racial data about their work force.

But the full picture of demonstrable change is yet unclear: 82 per cent of companies that signed the pledge either did not respond to The Globe and Mail’s recent diversity survey or said they did not track the racial composition of their work force.

As part of its coverage of the pledge, this year The Globe surveyed all 481 companies that signed the five-year pledge. Only 124 of the total 481 signatories responded, down from 145 last year.

Those companies that responded made small improvements on two out of three key metrics: The number of Black employees and directors improved, but the number of Black executives fell.

• The median percentage of Black employees was 5 per cent, up from 4.8 per cent last year and 3.7 per cent in 2020, before companies signed the BlackNorth pledge. The number of companies that tracked this statistic rose by 8 per cent. However, 32 per cent still do not know how many Black employees they have.
• The median number of Black board members and directors was 2 per cent, significantly up from 0.5 per cent last year and 0 per cent in 2020.
• The median percentage of Black executives was 1 per cent, down from 2 per cent last year but still up from 0 per cent in 2020.

The Globe, which itself signed the initiative in 2020, also made small improvements. The Globe doesn’t track the total number of Black employees, but says 30 per cent of employees are Black, Indigenous or people of colour, the same as in 2022 and up from 25 in 2020. Currently, 11 per cent of executive roles are held by Black employees, up from 10 last year and zero in 2020. Meanwhile The Globe has no Black directors on its board, which is unchanged from last year.

Overall, the respondents improved on four goals included on the pledge: to create a diversity leadership council, implement a diversity and inclusion plan, hire at least 5 per cent Black interns and dedicate 3 per cent of corporate donations to Black communities.

• 94 per cent of respondents have a diversity leadership council, up from 88 per cent last year.
• 96 per cent of respondents had a diversity and inclusion plan, the same as last year.
• Of the companies that hire students, 38 per cent hired at least 5 per cent Black employees, up from 35 per cent last year.
• Of the companies that make corporate donations, 68 met the 3-per-cent donation goal, up one percentage point from last year.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that 11 per cent of Globe and Mail board members are Black. The Globe has no Black directors on its board. This version has been updated.