Hi everyone, hello again. So we're talking about building team diversity. Let's first start by defining our terms. What does diversity mean for us? And what does diversity offer? And then we can talk about how we can promote diversity from our various positions in our institutions. And then talk about some alternative or maybe opposing considerations and some concerns about it. So what does diversity mean? What are the different types of diversity? Well, we can talk about age, generation. We talk about the traditionalists, I don't believe, yes, traditionalists, baby boomers, generation X, Y, all the letters. But we're also talking not only about age in terms of years of life, but also years of experience, right? We can have a 50 year old practitioner who is in their fourth profession now in healthcare and they are relatively new in healthcare. And then we can talk about our newly minted attending who has been in medical school, internship, residency, fellowships, subspecialties, and has been living and breathing medicine for the last umpteen years. So there's not only age in numbers, but age in experience. Education, degrees, professions. We have many diverse people joining the multidisciplinary teams. We have physicians, we have PhDs, we have advanced practice providers, nurse practitioners via the nursing track, physician assistants via the medical track, RNs, respiratory therapy, physical therapy, social workers, our administrative staff, people who come to us with MPHs, Masters of Public Health, MBAs, and such. And our data analysts that are also super important when we're trying to analyze, present, and collate data. Other types of diversity we know. Race, ethnicity, background, religion, and or beliefs. And this is by no means complete, it goes on and on. It goes on and on. So what does diversity offer? Well, it depends on who, you know, let's look at the various perspectives. What does diversity offer to a future team member? Somebody who's coming new onto the team, somebody who's interviewing for a job. What does it mean for an existing team member? Somebody who is, as we mentioned before, a novice, proficient, and an expert in the field. What does diversity offer for a team leader? What does diversity offer for an organization, senior leadership? And last but not least, what does diversity offer for our patients? What do they want to see, what do they want to feel, what do they want to experience? So this is the phrase that we look for when we apply for a job. We are looking to work for a position that is based on needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social, or ethnic origin, age, sex, including pregnancy, physical, mental, or sensory disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family, medical history, or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. I think this is probably the most exhaustive, inclusive definition I could find. And joining a team, coming on, interviewing, wanting to come into a role, this is comforting for somebody who's applying. This is necessary. The top 10 benefits. This is a slide that I found from the internet. Top 10 benefits of workplace diversity. We will approach these differently and separately because I think that some of these may fall on what is similar to the graph of a Frank Starling curve. We'll start here on the left, variety of different perspectives, which will be get many others. The benefits of a variety of different perspectives, which then leads to higher innovation, faster problem solving, better decision-making, higher employee engagement, better company reputation for sure, improved hiring results and reduced employee turnover. This is attrition. This is also employee engagement satisfaction. Faster problem solving, increased creativity and increased profits. This is a little further down the line. And again, I referenced the curve of the curve I referenced the curve of we want diversity, but at the same time, we want to make sure that, and I'll get to this later in the slides when we talk about considerations and concerns. So what are some ways to promote diversity? First and foremost, we wanna educate staff and leaders on the benefits. This is an active process by your leadership teams, by creating courses to bring people together to be able to understand some of the things that we engage in on a somewhat regular basis. An example of this is unconscious bias training. How many people in the room have undergone unconscious bias training? Great. So again, this was not something that was formalized and formulated and presented. I think now more often we are seeing this being presented oftentimes when you're coming into an institution. And hopefully there's some sort of kind of recurring theme that happens on some sort of repetitive basis where we are undergoing classes such as unconscious bias training. The creation of employee led, I wanted to emphasize employee led task forces such as DEI committees, diversity, equity and inclusion. It's great if we have it coming from senior leadership, but if we have the ability to invite participation by our boots on the ground folks, multidisciplines, multidisciplinary folks to actually come and join, create and join DEI committees. That would be best. And then intentional consideration during formation of committees or task forces. Let's ask the questions. We have been doing this at the end of, we're applicable, okay? If we are talking about, if we're creating a committee about trying to better certain staffing hours of say, advanced practice providers, do we necessarily need a physician on that? Probably not. But if we are creating committees that really do affect multiple disciplines at the beginning or at the end, we can stop and pause and say, do we have all the stakeholders that are needed here? Can we expand? Is there anyone that should be a part of this? And then ask the questions, who gets invited to the table? How can we broaden our representation and thereby invite all of the other things that we noted as benefits? Who can we bring to the table to help us expand participation, help foster innovation and bring together better ideas to be able to get to a better outcome faster? Thank you. Diversity, equity and inclusion. I liked this particular definition. It resonated with me. Actions taken in order to shift mindsets, behaviors and practices towards equitable and inclusive leadership for individuals, teams and organizations. At Emory, we call it the idea committee. Inclusion, diversity, equity and anti-discrimination. And we've invited them to not only give us follow up and feedback, but present at our various forums, town halls, monthly leadership meetings, round in the ICU, come to the ICUs, meet with folks, have a presence, pay attention to optics, come, be present, show yourselves, ask, be involved and let them know that there is an idea committee that is not only present, but accessible and willing to kind of incorporate any and all thoughts and ideas. Other ways to promote diversity, incorporate them into training programs. When you're first coming into the organization as a part of all of the initial onboarding procedures and processes, we have our badge and our parking and our lab coats and our lockers, et cetera, et cetera. You have your 15 courses that you have to take. We also have X, Y and Z courses. We also have an introduction to all the committees that are available, including DEI. This is when they meet, this is how often they meet, this is where they meet and this is the history of how this came about, when it came about, when it became important and introducing them early on when they joined the organization. Celebrate diversity. The idea committee was instrumental during this past MLK weekend. Around the holidays, around anything that we have as an opportunity, be able to highlight, remind, reinforce and celebrate any sort of moment, even if there are personal stories. Our idea committee highlighted the particular pathway of one of our physicians who joined from a particular country. We highlighted a pathway of one of our pharmacists, highlighted a pathway of one of our advanced practice providers and just told their story. And just the variety and the different stories by which they now are a part of the team, but what they went through, what was their path, what was their journey to be able to come and be a part of the team. It is, as we mentioned before, it is a snippet of an experience that allows people to pause and just reflect on how diverse our teams actually are. We are at the bedside doing the work, but it was nice to know that PA Bakshi had this pathway. And mix up your teams. Allow for there to be a start and a finish to a team. Oftentimes we talk about this. Okay, let's bring a team together. How long is the required commitment to the team? Is it a year, is it two years, is it six months? And then what we do is we hit refresh, we hit reset. And then we can kind of invite a new collective for each team. These are questions that we want to be intentional about. And we identify it as, okay, from a diversity aspect, we'd like to ask the following questions. Who should be a part of the team? Who else can we invite to the team? How long should the team be in effect? When can we hit the reset button? When can we re-invite, re-engage? So considerations or concerns. What are some of the barriers or alternative aspects to thinking about diversity? Well, I thought about this. We've all heard of that phrase, too many cooks spoil the broth. Do we want a team of 10 or do we want a team of 100? And if we, and this is what I was referring to when we were looking at that diagram of some of the benefits, is there a concept of too much, too many? So where is that sweet spot where we feel like, and this is a question that we should be asking if we're forming specific committees and if we're talking about the diversity representation of this committee. We may be benefited to be able to ask, okay, should this be a committee of two? Should this be a committee of 10? Should this be a committee of 20 and why? Put it out there. Let's invite input and say, okay. Does this apply? Too many cooks spoil the broth. Does that concept apply to this? And if so, how do we carve, limit if needed, or expand as needed? Each committee, each organizational committee or anything specifically that we're working on. There will be skepticism. There is skepticism. Ah, I don't know if this is gonna work. Yeah, I'm not sure. We combat this on a daily basis. And it's okay to acknowledge that, but at the same time, we want to identify the fact that we still want to be able to move forward and the way to move forward is to bake in diversity in any and all ways. And there are, as always in everything, implementation challenges. Things move really slow. Gosh, I just wish, you know, we work in clinical environments where we have to make decisions in under two minutes. And then when we suddenly switch hats and we are now in a administrative or non-clinical role, it takes forever. So what is a reasonable time that we actually want to implement? What is time to implementation? Do we want to stagger the approach? Do we want to, before we get to position F, should we think about A, B, and C and getting there? Do we want this to be in a week, in a month, six months? What's our two year look like? So think about implementation strategy. Be intended about thinking about what are we trying to accomplish here? How do we get there? In what timeframe? And communication, communication challenges. Like in everything, are we, are the correct stakeholders involved and intended in our communication strategy? Are we getting this out to the right people in the right way? Optics, I like to, you know, the people I work with know that optics is a part of the conversation. With me, we talk about strategies, implementation, the last thing I say is optics. How is this going to look like to our recipients? How is it going to look like to the folks that are not being included here? Let's talk about it. Who should not be? Who should be? What are the downstream effects of how this is going to look like? So being intentional about the communication of how we are sending this out, who we're sending it to, and what are the optics, and, you know, this allows there to be a little nuanced refinement of the intended communication piece, and thereby also helps the implementation piece. You know, and, you know, in closing, the ultimate goal is really to enhance the multiple, the multi-professional collaborative experience. I'll stop there. Thank you.

building team diversity

types of diversity

benefits of diversity

promoting diversity

considerations about diversity