By: Laura Sehres, VP, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

I am so excited to celebrate Pride Month! We have a lot of activities planned here at PSCU through the efforts of our LGBTQ+ Business Resource Group, PSCUnity, which started with the raising of the Pride flag on June 1 at our St. Petersburg campus – an annual tradition and a visible display of support of our LGBTQ+ employees and industry colleagues.

Celebrating Pride Month, as well as other affinity months throughout the year, is a wonderful way to help employees feel included in the workplace, but there is much more that we can do to integrate DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) into an organization. The field of DEI is expansive, and with so much that can be done, it is often difficult to know what to do or where to start. Instead of looking at all that can be done, I have found that it can be helpful for credit unions to instead focus on what should be done and when.

At PSCU, DEI has always been foundational. We have always strived to support an employee culture of inclusion and belonging. Yet in recent years, we felt like we hadn’t sufficiently “moved the needle.” To advance our journey, we narrowed our scope and created a strategy that focused on employee-wide ownership for DEI and top initiatives that drive inclusion. We created a three-year roadmap to shift our goal from responsibility to accountability, each year focusing on one of the three E’s of our DEI journey: Embark, Embed and Embody.

Creating this roadmap was a great start, but our employees felt disconnected from it and our efforts still felt fragmented. So, we went back to the drawing board, meeting with key internal stakeholders and gaining feedback from all levels of the organization to determine what actions we should take. From this, we created a new strategic framework with updated mission and vision statements and four new strategic priorities to best support PSCU’s future, ensuring a financially sound cooperative for years to come.

The strategic framework illustrates the interplay and cohesion between DEI and PSCU’s business strategy. It also informs “how” we achieve DEI goals and forms the foundation to promote organization-wide ownership of DEI. It creates a shared language for thinking about the strategy with progress in each area being measured against defined metrics.

The strategic priorities are grounding connectors to our overall DEI strategy with the mission and vision being our grounding stakes. The new strategic framework creates “buckets” of work helping our employees connect the dots between what we are doing and why we are doing it. It also allows for greater buy-in from all levels of the organization driving better adoption, ownership and accountability of DEI at PSCU. These pillars intertwined will lead to growth, innovation, talent attraction, engagement, retention and positive business results.

Our four strategic priorities are:

• People – Cultivate a demographically diverse workforce at all levels that values different perspectives and empowers all to perform to their highest potential.
• Culture – Build an exceptional workplace where employees add to an inclusive, equitable and welcoming culture through their lived experiences, allowing them to contribute fully to the organization’s success.
• Industry – Drive the value of embedding DEI throughout the industry and illustrate how to best embed practices to optimize organizational performance, employee engagement and the member experience.
• Community – Partner with organizations that reflect PSCU’s vision and mission to positively impact diverse communities and advance DEI objectives.

We also created a DEI accountability framework with three focus areas: diversifying the leadership bench, improving the perception and reality of inclusion and belonging, and increasing support and participation for DEI. We then tied the framework together with our strategic priorities as our “North Star” to inform us of what should be done to advance DEI at PSCU, with our overarching objectives informing our long-term objectives.

An illustrative example of how the strategic framework and accountability priorities work together are PSCU’s LGBTQ+-friendly benefits. For example, our medical plan includes domestic partner coverage, same-sex spousal coverage, fertility benefits and more. We also offer several mental health and wellbeing options to support LGBTQ+ parenting needs, legal concerns, counseling and work/life balance. Providing such robust benefits for our LGBTQ+ employees helps them feel heard, valued, understood and appreciated. 

I am pleased to share what we have built as an organization so that you can incorporate some of these components into your own credit union’s DEI efforts. There is no pride of ownership here – when we all actively work to ensure that each of our employees is included and has a sense of belonging, our credit unions are able to perform at even higher levels to provide the best solutions for the members we collectively serve. 

Laura Sehres provides strategic thought leadership and helps PSCU’s leadership team and financial institutions embed DEI practices to improve organizational performance and position PSCU as a DEI industry leader. As a change agent, Laura works across the organization to optimize organizational culture with a sense of psychological safety and conscious inclusion, align the organization’s DEI goals with business outcomes and enable PSCU to respond to external issues that affect organizational culture, employees or clients.