Better understanding our associates’ voice and feelings around Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.

As Zelis built its Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) strategy, leadership prioritized conversations with our associates about how they felt we could strengthen our focus and drive a culture that harnesses DIB. Since DIB is a core part of our culture, we combined these discussions with a focus on developing our new values to make sure we were prepared to align the behaviors needed.

Below are some of the key steps we took to ensure success:

• We engaged leaders from across the organization to co-host the discussion with an HR partner to make the initiative a truly companywide commitment.
• Since we are all virtual, and we wanted high engagement from our associates, we used a new virtual tool (Mural) that helped put all ideas on the table and enabled each person to have an equal voice.
• We combined the discussions with a survey to ensure those who were not comfortable attending a session with their peers still had an opportunity to share their voice.
• We focused the discussion on DIB by looking at each of the words and their definitions. We asked where associates felt we were presently in terms of our strength in each of the areas and where they would like to see us get to, on a continuum of not so good to great. We concluded this part of the discussion by welcoming ideas for actions we could take as an organization.

We hosted nine sessions and received feedback from over 30% of our population of associates. We shared all of the results with our Executive Leadership team and finalized core unified values. As a part of our new values, we embedded inclusion with our Thrive and Rise value, which means “We build trust with integrity and unleash our potential with inclusion,” inspiring us to be the best version of our whole self. We also used associates’ feedback to help build our DIB strategies for 2021. We will measure our successes through future engagement surveys, using a DIB index aligned to Zelis.

Mitra Agcaoili, VP Talent Management