Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) – sometimes called Employee Network Groups or Affinity Groups – are volunteer employee-led groups who aim to initiate impactful change for key groups (such as gender, disability, sexual orientation, etc.).
At their best, ERGs provide a space for connection, mutual support and career development for their members. They benefit the organisation by driving strategic priorities and help the communities they advocate for by addressing inequity and creating positive change.
But at their worst, ERGs can become demotivated and negative, generating additional, non-impactful work for themselves and others and create risks through organisational misalignment and agitation for change that may not be possible or desirable.
So what does an effective ERG look like, and how do we help ensure they impact our organisations positively?
We’ve pinpointed six key elements of an effective ERG that stem from the principles of building high-performance teams (which, of course, is what we are effectively trying to do here).
1. A clear purpose and strategy that is aligned to the organisation
To have the biggest impact, ERGs need to take a strategic approach to making change. This strategy should include why they exist and how they’re going to achieve their goals and measure success.
Key inputs into this include understanding where they fit into the organisational context. Ideally an organisational DEI strategy will help clarify the overall approach and the ERG’s role within it. Another vital input includes research with the community they are serving.
2. Clarity of role and scope
The role of ERGs varies by organisation. For some, ERGs are ‘doers’ with their own budgets. Some ERGs serve as communities with the primary purpose of connection. Other ERGs serve more as a feedback mechanism. Or they can be a mix of all these and more.
What’s most important is that this role is defined.
Additionally, the duties of ERG participants (leads, members, executive sponsors, etc.) need to be clearly defined with role descriptions. This is vital for setting expectations and ensuring prospective members know what they would be committing to if they signed up.
3. Defined ways of working
This applies to within the ERGs themselves as well as the governance structures in place to support the ERGs.
For example, is there a regular cadence for catch ups? What regular feedback mechanisms will ensure we measure success and whether our ERGs are adequately supported? How are we recognising and rewarding our ERGs so they know their work is valued? How is best practice being shared across different ERGs?
4. Team trust and connection
As with any team, the quality of relationships between team members (including broader support roles) is a key factor in effectiveness. Building relationships takes time and needs specific focus.
Enabling ERGs to understand how trust builds over time and the importance of taking the time to get to know each other is vital. This could look like team building sessions or even social catch ups. Demonstrating that the organisation supports this is key.
5. Diverse representation
Even though ERGs tend to primarily support one community, we need to aim for representation across levels of seniority, as well as diverse functional / geographic representation. Most ERGs invite allies to be participants as a learning experience and to ensure ERG work doesn’t just fall on the shoulders of the underrepresented groups.
6. Capacity and capability
We need to equip our teams to be able to make change. Two key priority areas here are knowledge and skill and time:
In terms of knowledge and skill, working to ensure ERG members have access to tools that foster growth in foundational skills for driving change, such as strategy development, communication and influence, project management, etc.
And regarding time, helping members secure buy-in from the organisation more broadly, and their managers specifically, to spend some of their time on ERG activity. To make this more concrete, some organisations build this time into individual KPIs?
How do I help my ERGs get there?
Hopefully these principles provide a useful starting point for thinking about how to help your ERGs become more effective.
If you want to look at this more programmatically, we recommend starting with a Maturity Assessment. This allows you to understand your ERGs current state – including strengths and challenges – and look for commonalities across different ERGs within your organisation.
A Maturity Assessment can then become the basis for designing an ERG development program that supports the above principles. This often looks like action-focussed learning where ERGs come together to learn key skills and develop their strategies and plans.
Importantly, this approach provides your ERGs space to learn from each other and look for areas of synergy. For example, after these programs we have had ERGs move from each sending their own organisation-wide recruitment communication (multiple mixed messages) to a clear joint recruitment message (covering all ERGs).
We’ve also seen ERGs move from individually looking at different policies and providing their own change requests to the HR team to instead working collectively with HR to develop a structured approach to policy review. Each policy is reviewed, with all ERGs contributing at one time.
ERG Maturity Assessments provide insight into how well we are supporting our ERGs. And when we get that support piece right, we put our ERGs in the best possible position to succeed as happy, motivated, amazing drivers of positive change.
