2019 Innovative Initiative Winner Profile: Vertex
In June, we held our inaugural Innovators' Breakfast to celebrate 100% Talent Compact signers advancing women in the workplace through innovative initiatives and effective practices. Following a competitive application process, we reviewed dozens of submissions by diverse employers in size and in industry.
Vertex’s initiative demonstrated high impact and management commitment. While driving a metrics focus with the board is not unique, tying these metrics to company performance is important. BWWC Marketing & Events Manager, Joana Ortiz, sat down with Erin Cowhig, Vice President of Human Resources to learn more.
Initiative: Increasing the diversity of critical board approved hires
Category: Increasing the Ratio of Women on Board and C-suite, via Hiring and Promotion
Industry: Professional / Scientific / Technology Services
Interviewed: Erin Cowhig, Vice President, Human Resources
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JO: This initiative came out of a vision of achieving gender equity to drive innovation, retain the best employees, and make the best decisions for patients. Why is representation to Vertex so critical?
EC: For Vertex it’s about making sure we have the right representation from a gender perspective at all levels of the organization. We believe gender diversity leads to better decision-making, allows us to challenge each other in different ways and drives the business forward. Our goal, overall, is to represent the gender diversity we see across the broader organization which is roughly 50/50. We want women to see women leaders at the top so they know it’s possible to get there.
JO: What research, data, or best practices influenced this value? What studies have stood out to you?
EC: We’ve partnered with a number of organizations, like Catalyst, Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA), and Simmons University. We also share resources amongst leadership from places like Harvard Business Review focused on diversity in general. However, the driver was truly internal. In 2017, we were hiring a lot of senior level positions and our executive team saw an opportunity to make a difference to our gender diversity.
“We’re debunking the perception that it’s difficult to recruit a female or diverse leader. We’ve certainly debunked from a gender perspective, even in specialized, high-level roles.”
JO: In implementing this goal, how did you set out to measure it?
EC: The overall goal was focused on tracking and understanding our data. We wanted to create accountability for ourselves through awareness. From a Diversity & Inclusion perspective, our goal is to make sure that at the upper-levels of the organization reflect our broader population. As an example, if we are thinking about gender, we want to have the population at VP and above levels to be 50/50, which is in line with our global employee population.
JO: What about women of color? Is that also based on representation?
EC: Yes, it is. We know the representation of women of color (percentage out of the U.S employee population) in our broader employee population is not as high as we would like it to be. Thus, this is a focus area of our current diversity and inclusion strategy. We also want to better understand intersectionality and what this means for prospective and current women employees.
JO: In a dream world, when you do reach parity, what happens next?
EC: The first step is parity and representation, but then it’s making sure that when people are in the door, they can thrive and do their best work. We want to ensure we are retaining and moving women and employees of color up and through the organization. This goes back to our vision of ensuring employees can bring their authentic selves to work and that they feel welcome.
JO: I imagine there are a lot of parallels between this new goal and existing retention and inclusion efforts. How do these initiatives intersect?
EC: We go about this in two ways: we are really focused on data and making sure we understand what our employee population looks like, and then we look at promotion, hiring, and retention rates. All of these are talent indicators that tell us how employees are experiencing the organization. This is built into our talent processes; for example, as we’re thinking about succession planning, we’re considering our percentage of females in critical roles and our percentage of employees of color.
As we think about the gaps we need to fill, we’re having proactive discussions with our Talent Acquisition team and top management team to say “if we have a lack of diversity within a succession pool for a particular function, what are we going to do for a long-term recruiting strategy to address it?” It’s about making sure everything talent related is interconnected.
JO: what does the line of communication from top down look like between leadership and female staff?
EC: We’ve recently announced our CEO Jeffrey Leiden will transition out of his role to Executive Chairman next year and will be succeeded by our current Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Reshma Kewalramani, a woman of color. This is a visible commitment to gender diversity and leadership.
Nia Tatsis, Vertex Senior Vice President, Global Regulatory Affairs accepts award on June 2019
Each year we have numerous fireside chats, panels, and opportunities for our senior women to talk to the broader organization about their career paths, experiences, and why they think diversity is important. We dedicate a week every year, called “Diversity & Inclusion Week," to having these conversations, but events also take place throughout the year. There is also a Senior Women’s Advisory Group (SWAG), made up of our 5 top senior women leaders in the organization. They hold regular Senior Women Leadership Forums where we pull together all of the VP+ women leaders to learn from each other on what it means to be a female leader in the workplace.
JO: In your community collaborations, how do you share your practices in the community and those within the industry? What influence do you hope to make in the Boston area?
EC: This is one of our desired outcomes. As we think about our vision for the future, one of our goals is to be a leader in the biotech industry on diversity and inclusion. In fall 2018, we hosted a Diversity Symposium and opened our doors to different companies in the area. The purpose was two-fold: to share our best practices, share our learnings with smaller biotechs who are starting in this work and then to also bring in similar sized or larger biopharma businesses to continue to learn from them.
Additionally, our Employee Resource Networks often work with other employers in our industry, like the Biodiversity forum, the Women in Biotech forum, and OutBio. This is another way for us to learn and share best practices with our companies in Boston and within our industry.
Mayor Walsh (left), Stacia MacNaught (right) at Meet-and-Greet event with winners, August 2019
JO: Since implementing this initiative, how has it impacted your hiring and promotion practices?
EC: From a recruiting perspective, it’s allowed us to be more thoughtful especially as we look at gaps that exist at different levels in the organization. Here’s one example: We looked at the leadership team for our Chief Commercial Officer. Although his team overall is about 60-65% female, the bulk of the female employees are at lower levels and are not progressing into senior level roles at equal rates. We were able to have an open discussion about hiring and being more intentional about developing and promoting female leaders.
JO: Along that vein, for those who are wanting to approach a similar growth area, what advice, tools or best practices would you point them to?
EC: Data. Looking at current trends, providing company-wide and functional visibility and using this to encourage leaders to make decisions that are right for their functions has been important to us. We still have a lot of work to do, but understanding our data has had a big impact on our talent management; looking at diversity within hiring, of interview teams, tracking the diversity of candidate pools, and making sure we’re looking at it during succession planning. Visibility to data as we have talent management conversations has ultimately led to action.
JO: What’s next with this initiative for the year ahead?
EC: Maintaining the progress we’ve made, continuing to track the most critical hires and track what diversity looks like for those roles. What’s next is driving it down into the lower levels of the organization. We’ve done a lot of work to identify critical roles across the company, and the next step is to apply the same rigor and visibility to diversity for those roles.
About the Initiative:
In 2017, CEO Jeffrey Leiden, the Executive Committee, and the Board of Directors made the decision to identify and track diversity in Vertex’s most critical leadership positions across the global business. This decision was formalized by the inclusion of this goal in Vertex’s annual board-tracked and approved corporate goals. The commitment and attention paid to the diversity of these roles has led to Vertex significantly moving the needle the gender diversity of our most senior leadership positions.
As of May 2019, they have 3 women in C-suite positions – Chief Medical Officer, our Chief Human Resources Officer and our Chief Corporate Communications Officer. They have also demonstrated commitment to gender diversity and female leadership on the board. Their current Vertex Board of Directors is 33% female, notable in the pharma/biotech industry. Lastly, 51% of their global employee population is female and 39.8% of their Vice Presidents and above are female as a result of the initiative to track and report on the diversity of their critical hires and top two layers of leadership to the board (Executive Committee members and their direct reports). As of January 2018, the biotech industry benchmark for females at VP levels and above among our peer companies (according to a Radford/Aon Hewitt custom survey was 25%. To learn more about Vertex and their initiative, please click here.
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