Each and every day, our more than 60,000 colleagues in over 100 countries around the world work on some of society’s most pressing issues — the future of work, climate change, emerging technologies and geopolitical developments that present new sets of risks and opportunities. Marsh & McLennan serves as a strategic partner in promoting growth, protecting value and helping clients make better decisions in this increasingly complex global environment.

As a professional services firm, our company’s greatest resource is the collective talent of the people who work here. While we have an unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion, we had no firm-wide view of what diversity and inclusion actually meant in our daily work, and no common framework to discuss D&I-related issues.

In March 2017, we launched an online learning course, “Our Voices: Making a Difference through Diversity & Inclusion,” to educate and engage our colleagues on how to navigate cultural biases and perceptions. Developed by our own D&I team, and informed by research highlighted by Harvard Business Review that traditional diversity training focusing on “negative incentives” tends to be unsuccessful, the course is centered on first-person storytelling by colleagues sharing their professional and personal lives.

Available in 18 languages, the course provides users with an experience similar to popular social media tools. All colleagues are required to take the course, including new colleagues as they join us.

Nearly 10,000 colleagues elected to complete their training within the first month of its release, demonstrating both the need and the accessibility of the program. A large part of its success is its focus on human stories and real-life scenarios, making the idea of diversity and inclusion relevant and immediate. This people focus is a core element of our internal communications strategy; the course is named after the longest-running and most popular series on our intranet, showcasing the diverse experiences and perspectives of featured colleagues.