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Weaving Together A Diverse Workplace Culture At Tapestry

SAP

By Kristin Mestre, Brand Awareness and Advocacy, SAP SuccessFactors

During her 14-year tenure at New York-based house of modern luxury lifestyle brands Tapestry Inc., Global Human Resources Officer Sarah Dunn has helped the company navigate tremendous cultural and societal change. We asked her how Tapestry is addressing the challenges of becoming an inclusive employer and about the role HR plays in achieving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) goals.

Success through diversity

Tapestry considers that having a diverse workforce is crucial to business success. “For us, difference sparks brilliance. We welcome everybody from everywhere to help us stretch what's possible,” confirms Dunn. “Diversity gives us the creativity we need in order to bring our brands to life as well as enabling us to understand and interact with our customers in the right way.”

This focus on inclusivity is even reflected in the company’s name.

“When we changed our name five years ago, ‘Tapestry’ was chosen because it represents the weaving together not only of our different brands but also of different groups of people,” remarks Dunn. “It’s certainly the case that DEIB is at the heart of our HR strategy and one of our most important strategic objectives.”

The importance of leadership

So, how does Tapestry deliver on its vision of a diverse and inclusive workplace? According to Dunn, the company’s leaders play a key role “Our local store managers really carry the flag for our brand every day – both with our employees and our customers,” she explains. “Your direct manager has the most impact on whether you have a sense of belonging and, with most of our employees working in our stores, our frontline managers are front and center of creating a culture of inclusion and ensuring that we have a diverse population.”

MORE FROM FORBESSAP BrandVoice: What Leading Brands Do Differently To Build An Inclusive Culture

In addition, Tapestry is very aware that its DEIB strategies need to involve everybody. “To be successful, people right at the top of our organization need a clear focus on the issues that must be addressed,” remarks Dunn. “For this reason, all our senior executives are incentivized to meet inclusivity targets and our leadership is held accountable for delivering our DEIB goals.”

Focus on process bias and communication

Eliminating process bias is a key priority for the company, as Dunn explains, “Our approach is not to tell managers to hire diverse candidates but to make sure they’re interviewing a diverse range of candidates for each position. By insisting on this, we anticipate that we’ll increase the diversity of our working population over time.”

Another key area of focus for Tapestry is communicating opportunities. “We had feedback that people weren't necessarily aware of all their career options. So, we worked to improve visibility of any new positions within the company by advertising them widely and in good time so that people have time to apply. This is helping reduce bias and opening up equal opportunities for all,” comments Dunn. “In addition, using the SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development solution, we’re closely monitoring who is in our succession pipeline and tracking how we are supporting and developing them.”

Measurement of DEIB program impacts

Dunn believes that to fully understand the impacts of DEIB programs, it’s important to measure progress. To this end, Tapestry has established an inclusion index based on regular engagement surveys to help show how the company is doing. Twice yearly, employees rate their response to statements such as “I feel safe to speak up,” “My manager makes inclusivity a priority,” and “I feel my workplace has an inclusive culture.”

HR then looks at how the responses vary by different groups. “We analyze the results according to race, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” explains Dunn. “This helps us see the impact of our DEIB strategies and understand where we still have work to do so that people feel included and foster a sense of belonging.”

According to Dunn, technology also plays an important role in measuring progress. SAP SuccessFactors solutions play a crucial role in helping Tapestry gather the data and perform the analysis required to provide meaningful insights that drive change. In addition, the company is connecting and empowering employee engagement by communicating with a geographically dispersed workforce through collaboration tools from SAP.

Creating an inclusive, psychologically safe culture

Dunn believes that Tapestry has made great strides in establishing an inclusive workplace culture where everyone can feel psychologically safe. “In some areas, we’re ahead of the curve,” she remarks. “For example, over 25 years ago, we were one of the first companies to enable medical benefits for same-sex partners and more recently we’ve done a lot of work on making sure that our managers are able to support gender-fluid team members.”

To focus more attention on behaviors and culture change, the company is also introducing a new learning experience, Inclusion Works, for its corporate teams and store managers. “We hope this will continue to help drive the DEIB agenda and the enable the behavioral changes we want to see,” confirms Dunn.

However, according to Dunn, there’s still more work to do. “There are many, many forms of diversity and we need every one of these in our organization,” she concludes. “I think there's still a lot to do in terms of cultural change and there is certainly a lot to do in terms of representation. However, I think we're doing the right things that will help us accomplish these in the long term.”

Learn more about how Tapestry is focusing on people sustainability, embracing differences, championing diversity at all levels of the organization, and creating a more-inclusive work environment. See the company featured in a discussion on “Forward Live”, an original series about customers of SAP SuccessFactors solutions.