At Beam Suntory, we believe our people grow together in progressive and inclusive work environments where their unique insights, experiences and backgrounds are truly valued and respected. Embracing our differences, while leveraging our unique East-meets-West cultural advantage, is essential to fostering innovation and collaboration, empowering our people to succeed and driving business growth. 

We understand that our long-term performance will be strongest if we foster a culture of inclusivity, leveraging the power of diversity in our teams to create value for customers, consumers and our employees.

On the global front, every Beam Suntory executive has a Diversity & Inclusion goal, for which they are held accountable. We are promoting diversity through our hiring practices, striving for diverse candidate slates, and using development and internal promotion opportunities to advance our agenda. We also assess employee performance based on their “what,” meaning results and their “how,” meaning behaviors against our values. ‘Inclusivity’ is one of our corporate values and is embedded in our culture. We provide a variety of programs to build capability in inclusive leadership, like managing inclusion and unconscious bias training. We host educational events throughout the year to build awareness and knowledge about the experience of underrepresented groups. We are launching a manager toolkit with D&I resources and suggested actions for leaders as they recruit, develop, and engage diverse teams. 

Finally, we are launching Employee Resource Groups and have established a Global D&I Steering Committee, with action teams across the company to address our most immediate challenges, by area of the world, and functional area of our business. One of those established action teams is the Diversity & Inclusion Events team, whose charter is to organize experiences for leaders and teams that help challenge assumptions, grow our understanding and build a community that truly embodies an inclusive mindset.

All senior leaders have attended an inclusive leader workshop and made a commitment to inclusion. More than 500 of our people leaders have attended a Managing Inclusion or Unconscious Bias training, with more to come. Diversity and Inclusion is embedded in global communications to reinforce its importance within our business. Our efforts are resulting in a more diversified organization, with increases in representation of women in leadership roles globally and multicultural employees in the US.  

Kari Steinberg