Here’s What Successful DEI Looks Like: Essity’s Courageous Conversations Initiative (Practices)

Essity, a leading global hygiene and health company, launched global diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals in 2021, which included ensuring an inclusive environment for all employees. A driving initiative to achieve this goal is Courageous Conversations, a holistic initiative with three components—workshops, a podcast, and Inclusion Toolboxes—that was developed following global DEI focus groups. Employees overwhelmingly used the focus group opportunities to share how they wanted more forums to learn and engage around DEI, to apply it to everyday interactions in the workplace. The initiative was developed and is supported by Pia Höök, Vice President, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Amie Kromis, Director, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and Deniz Yordanov, Manager, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The results have been extraordinarily successful, including a global internal award for the Courageous Conversations community within the first year of creation.

Courageous Conversations Workshops Led by Employee Facilitators

Essity rooted Courageous Conversations in the United Nation’s international observation days as the basis for internal scenario-based workshops facilitated by employee volunteers. The days reflect many dimensions of diversity, including gender, racial/ethnic identities, LGBTQ+, disabilities, religion, and age.

Growing the Facilitator Community: Through an open call, employees applied for facilitator roles by submitting a video describing their motivation and commitment to becoming a facilitator and what skills they could bring to the program. After a thorough review process, close to 50 people were chosen to launch a community of facilitators excited to raise DEI awareness and contribute to an inclusive workplace culture.

The facilitator role is a one-year assignment approved by the manager and included in employee development plans. Facilitator training for the initial group included community building, facilitator strategies and categorized learning sessions focused on DEI fundamentals: how bias and inequities show up in organizations and how employees can reinforce an inclusive work culture through everyday behaviors and interactions. Trainings sessions were enhanced with Catalyst resources including knowledge bursts, flip the script and more. However, facilitators are not expected to be DEI experts, but rather become comfortable moderating conversations with colleagues.

Facilitators continued to organically develop and bond through a virtual forum where they shared resources, discussed dilemmas they had encountered and provided societal examples of DEI in action.

As a result of a positive experience with Courageous Conversations, and a continuously growing commitment to DEI, most facilitators decided to continue their journey with the next cohort of 45 facilitators in 2024.

Constructing Effective Workshops: Hour-long Courageous Conversation workshops are held both online and in-person with lunch provided. To be consistent, sessions always follow the same format:

• An introduction to the topic, including why the United Nations chose to recognize the specific day under discussion, and ground rules establishing confidentiality, psychological safety, acceptance of non-closure, and respect.
• A dilemma-based scenario related to the topic is presented, after which the group breaks into small groups to discuss what is happening in the scenario, how to resolve/approach the situation to reinforce everyday inclusion, and how to be an ally.
• The full group summarizes their learnings and discusses concrete ways to translate recommendations and actions from the scenario into real life.
• Feedback on the workshop is gathered through a post-event survey.

Sessions are always facilitated in pairs, and facilitators seldom work with the same partner twice, thereby building relationships amongst the facilitator community. Prior to each session, the facilitator pairs share their strengths and weaknesses with one another, so each facilitator knows when to step back or step in with relation to their co-facilitator’s skills and expertise. After each session, facilitators debrief in their pairs and collectively to discuss the workshop learnings and give input to the overall DEI Strategy and Roadmap.

Constantly Improving Workshops: Essity is already making changes to the program based on feedback to improve employee experiences.

• Each geographical location has started to customize the content for its area, such as providing translations or adding reflection moments.
• Senior leaders are being asked to host and start each session by sharing how this initiative is important to them personally and to Essity.
• Sessions are being scheduled more frequently, and new topics are being introduced.
• Virtual sessions that are longer than an hour will be offered.
• Requests for longer sessions also led to the development of the Inclusion Toolboxes and the Courageous Conversations podcast.

Inclusion Toolboxes

The Inclusion Toolboxes, which evolved out of the facilitated learning sessions, are available on Essity’s intranet and take a deep dive into different DEI issues. The toolboxes are launched in connection to relevant dates and are designed to be used by both individuals and teams in conjunction with attending a Courageous Conversations workshop. To extend workshop learning, the Inclusion Toolboxes contain individual reflection and team-building exercises created with external content including Catalyst’s Flip the Script series, TED talks on implicit bias, Harvard’s Implicit Association tests, privilege exercises, additional dilemma-based scenarios and discussions, and suggested actions as an active ally.

Courageous Conversations Podcast

The Courageous Conversations podcast, hosted by Deniz Yordanov, Manager, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, in Sweden, and Amie Kromis, Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion for North America, is a public component to the internal programming. Each episode features guests, most often two Essity employees. The hosts ask a range of questions such as:

• “How do you experience inclusion in society, related to this specific aspect of DEI?”
• “From your experience, how does this specific aspect of DEI impact workplace dynamics?”
• “What can organizations and/or teams do to reinforce an inclusive workplace culture?”
• “What can people do to be allies at work?”

Each podcast includes links to resources listeners can delve into as part of their learning journey.

Senior leadership support for the initiative is strong, including the podcast. The first episode featured two members of the executive leadership team, sending a powerful message to the organization about their personal connection to DEI and the business relevance of DEI to Essity. Most of the following episodes highlight different members of the facilitator community and their lived experiences in relation to different DEI topics in different geographical contexts. Although there is always a specific DEI topic in focus (gender, racial/ethnic identities, LGBTQ+, age, religion, etc.), the conversations also include an intersectional component. One special episode featuring external guest David Glasgow centered around allyship at work and how to foster a coaching culture in organizations.

Addressing Challenges

While the Courageous Conversations initiative is highly successful, there is also continuous development to further grow participation and impact:

• Senior Leader Participation: To remove the intimidation factor, senior leaders were initially asked to not participate in the sessions, but rather endorse them before they took place. But after the first workshops, the team discovered that participants wanted senior leaders to attend. Thereafter, at least one senior leader attended every session, but more of them could attend in the future.
• Gender Equity in Participation: As of early 2024, 80% of both participants and facilitators are women. Essity is examining ways to better engage men and more accurately reflect its employee population.
• Including Employees on Manufacturing Sites: While the primary focus of the program has been on office employees, the team is now figuring out how to engage with site and field employees. Facilitators are rethinking the format to create the same type of experience and level of engagement for these important employees.
• Navigating the Way Forward: For every topic, facilitators need to create a balance of sparking productive, insightful discussion and encouraging participants to share their experiences. As the program matures, the same topics may need to be explored in a deeper way. As both awareness and expectations of change are raised, Essity must be able to show important and tangible proof of progress.

Success Indicators

We know the initiative is successful because:

• As of early 2024, over 3,000 employees have participated in in-person and virtual workshops.
• 98% have given positive feedback about the experience.
• 97% feel more comfortable engaging in conversations about DEI.
• The first six episodes of the Courageous Conversations podcast have been played over 2,500 times, only through organic reach; most podcast listeners complete the full episodes although they are quite lengthy (between 40-50 minutes long).
• Members of HR are present in each of the workshops to answer questions about Essity’s policies; HR also learns from the sessions.
• Most of the executive management team have attended at least one session.
• Many attendees took topics back to their teams for discussion.
• Some people leaders have reported that they implemented the practice of developing ground rules as a norm in their own everyday team meetings after attending a session.
• At Essity’s 2023 company-wide awards event, two facilitators accepted a barrier-breaking award for improving collaboration at Essity on behalf of the Courageous Conversations community.

Learn From Essity

What can we take away from the success of Essity’s Courageous Conversations workshops, podcast, and Inclusion Toolboxes? How might you apply what you’ve learned to your organization?

First, Essity met its employees where they are: everywhere. By choosing to base conversations around international observance dates, Essity leveled the playing field for its global workforce. And by choosing an external authority like the United Nations, the focus is on the wider society as well as Essity as an organization. Participants may feel more inclined to engage in thoughtful and possibly critical conversations if they know they are not speaking out about their organization directly. Thus, this approach allows Essity to raise awareness of different lived experiences among Essity employees, as well as customers, consumers, suppliers, and other stakeholders in over 150 countries where Essity products can be found.

At the same time, the insights gleaned from these conversations can be acted upon by the HR personnel and senior leaders in attendance. In this way, there is less potential for the space created by these conversations to become combative.

By asking for volunteers to act as facilitators, Essity ensures that these workshops are run by the people in their organization who are most passionate about their success. Providing training and building a community of these facilitators reinforces and informs that passion. And positioning the role as a development opportunity makes this effort worth it.

Allowing the Inclusion Toolboxes and Courageous Conversations podcast to evolve out of this internal initiative gives managers and individuals the autonomy to share their learnings and instills a sense of pride in workshop participants as the global DEI community and health and hygiene industry learns about the work they’re doing. And reacting to feedback from participants enables the initiative’s architects to iterate on it and steward it as it continues to evolve to include all employees while celebrating successes.

Looking to implement a DEI initiative at your organization? Follow Essity’s lead:

• Start small. A series of conversations may be all that you need to begin to change your company’s culture.
• Meet your employees where they are and create your programming according to their needs.
• Enlist passionate employees to be advocates and facilitators.
• Invite your senior leaders but let them lead by listening.
• Don’t try to control the shape the initiative takes; let it grow organically as it gains momentum.
• Ask for feedback often and be prepared to make changes in response.
• Use the data you gather to celebrate wins and iterate on areas for improvement.