"But the George Floyd incident stirred a lot of emotion," says Marc Olivier, the airline's senior director of talent, engagement and diversity. "Employees were writing to us saying, what are you doing, what's our commitment, what's our voice?"

Olivier says that despite all the rafts of diversity information, tools and training on the employee website, leaders realized they had to take focused action on anti-Black racism. The company held online town halls, ran focus groups for people to express their views, mounted a detailed diversity survey, and brought senior leaders into a new Executive Council on Diversity and Inclusion. It also ramped up support for Black youth scholarships and signed on to a pledge to fight systemic anti-Black racism.

Air Canada was hardly alone. When meeting with his peers at conferences, Olivier discovered that finding ways to support Black employees was on everyone's mind. "That became an extreme focal point for every organization," he says. "It was the same ripple through every company."

Indeed, that ripple flowed across Canada's Best Diversity Employers, and, like Air Canada, they responded vigorously. Most made public statements calling out systemic racism, but many also held intensive internal listening sessions. At RBC, one of Canada's largest employers, that led to an action plan that includes a $100 million commitment to help Black entrepreneurs over the next five years. Bell Canada accelerated efforts to hire more people from Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities, as did other employers. At many organizations, too, affinity groups specifically for Black employees sprang up.

In fact, says Kristina Leung, senior editor at Mediacorp Canada which runs the competition, the events of 2020—in the middle of a pandemic—seemed to bring issues to a head. "It really made people feel impatient, " she says. "They wanted to see less talk and more action to drive change, and I think that was reflected among the winners."

The listening was critical, she says. "It became really important for organizations to pause and take stock of where they are, and make sure they listened to what employees had to say about how they wanted their own organization to respond.

At the same time, many employers were expanding their efforts in the related area of intersectionality, in which one employee may self-identify as part of various communities. A woman, for instance, may also identify as a visible minority, or LGBTQ+, or all three. TD Bank Group recently refreshed its diversity and inclusion strategy with initiatives directed at the intersections of different identities. "If you were just to look at the experience of women, that would not be wholly inclusive of the experience of a female visible minority, so for TD to talk about the intersections of identity is, I think, very progressive," says Leung.

Many organizations are also deepening their efforts to gain detailed data on their workforce. "It's the concept of what gets measured gets done," Leung says. "You need to establish a baseline from which you can develop goals. The metrics help you understand what your workforce actually looks like now, where the pipelines are in terms of incoming recruitment and tracking internal movements, and where there might be barriers or challenges to having the representation that an organization is actually striving for."

In the wake of such an eventful year, Canada's Best Diversity Employers are girding to reach the next level. "Change takes time," says Leung. "We're at a point where we're ready to see more action, more movement towards commitments that have been made. Inclusion is about listening and learning, and I think we'll see much more of that in the year ahead."

– Berton Woodward

From the official magazine announcing Canada's Best Diversity Employers (2021), published March 2, 2021, and featured in The Globe and Mail.