Brian Doubles

"You said, Chief Diversity Officer Michael Matthews is ours. He's here. He's fantastic. He is absolutely a truth teller. He never sugarcoats it for me. He's brutally honest in some cases. And as I think about our journey, I'll go all the way back to when we took the company public 2014. Margaret, who you know very well, and I had a goal to create the most inclusive culture on the planet. And we wanted to do that because we thought if we did that, we would increase diverse representation at all levels in the company. Fast forward five years, late 2018, early 2019. We thought we had achieved a big chunk of that. We had a great inclusive culture."

"Michael came in and we said we weren't measuring diversity metrics. We weren't measuring it. He came in and he showed us what had changed over the last five years, and we hadn't made anywhere near enough progress. I walked out of that meeting devastated. I told Michael, he's like, to your point, he's a truth teller. We hadn't made the progress. And that's when we changed everything. We changed everything. We said, we have to measure it, we have to hold people to it, we have to embed it in the fabric of the company, we have to set expectations, we have to tie it to compensation."

"Back in the early part of 2020 we elevated De and I to a strategic imperative. And that was a huge message to the organization because one of the things that we do around those eight to ten imperatives is we measure the heck out of them. They get my attention on a weekly, monthly basis. We talk to our board about them. We demonstrate progress to the board and that was I think a big message that hey, this isn't just we're going to do this for a year or two and then it's going to go away. This is a lasting commitment that we're going to make. And then as part of that we tied it to the annual incentive plan."

"We have a great event that Michael and team put on called our Diversity Symposium. It's two full days of really honest, real, raw conversations about De and I. Historically it was attended in person by about 500 of our employees. One of the benefits coming out of the pandemic is now we open that up to all employees and we have over 2000 employees who participate in that and it's part of the fabric of the company."

"We try and create this safe space to have the conversations, and we do that through our diversity networks. We do that through individuals getting up on stage and sharing their stories, which oftentimes are incredible, and they're inspiring, and they give you a real sense of, okay, I can understand now what this person's dealt with. Empathy is so important. The other thing I'll just mention, our diversity networks. The other thing we did is we added a plus to each of the networks, and we asked, any employee can join any network. So if you're part of our Black experiences network, and you're a white male living in Atlanta, you're part of that network and opening it up."