Case Study: Best Buy Moves to the Head of the Class with its Affirmative Action and Diversity Program

Best Buy at a Glance

INDUSTRY: Consumer retail

HEADQUARTERS: Minneapolis, Minn

EMPLOYEES: 140,000

GOAL: To launch a new affirmative action and diversity program to incorporate over 900 AA plans and training about the corporate benefits of the program for the entire organization.

THE SOLUTION: Peopleclick AA Outsourcing

Peopleclick Outsourcing Services Help Keep the Company's Business Goals in Focus

After becoming a federal contractor so that they could define a new business offering with the government, Best Buy, a global retailer of technology and entertainment products and services headquartered in Minneapolis, Minn., was excited at the opportunities this new status enabled.

"Meeting the compliance requirements for affirmative action plans was simply one piece to a much larger and more strategic initiative for Best Buy," explained Mark Nagel, director of government employment practices. "We viewed these new requirements as an additional way to help the company focus on further enabling diversity."

In order to be able to focus on more strategic components of the new affirmative action program, the company needed to find a partner to help with the data mining, plan creation, monitoring and training for the company's almost 900 U.S. stores.

The Challenge

Nagel's team began the search for a vendor who could help Best Buy. They specifically wanted to identify a partner with experience working with large, global organizations. It was especially important for the company selected to have a solution powerful enough to manage the large amount of plans that Best Buy needed to prepare as well as expertise in training hundreds of new users to help them fully understand their responsibilities in the affirmative action process and how best to implement and utilize the plans.

In addition, the corporate team wanted to make certain that the end result was that each store had a designated plan owner. Nagel continued, "By making each store responsible for their own affirmative action and diversity program it enables a company to run better stores and a better overall business. HR should be a subject matter expert in the process and serve as a coach. This is part of doing business and we needed to own this as a company."

After a lengthy search, the Best Buy team selected Peopleclick and its Outsourcing services to manage the creation and dissemination of the company's affirmative action plans. Having an extensive background working with large retail organizations, Peopleclick offered solid experience handling the volume of plans and the logistics necessary to help Best Buy train all of its stores.

Finally, Peopleclick offered Best Buy the opportunity to focus on the strategic aspects of their affirmative action plans – not the administrative side of producing and managing over 900 plans.

The Solution

After selecting a partner to help with their affirmative action plans, the team went full-swing into action to begin preparing for the first round of plans.

"We wanted to make certain that our plan owners were fully trained so they were ready to use them once completed," explained Nagel. "In order to facilitate this training and make the program relevant to the many stakeholders involved throughout the organization, our own HR team needed help to fully understand the process and the impact to the business so we could ensure that each part of the company understood the value to this initiative."

Peopleclick and Best Buy worked together to help Nagel's team prepare for the company-wide roll-out through a series of educational trainings. Once the HR sponsors were trained, the team created materials for the extended compliance teams as well as the rest of the employee base. Because of the many different audiences, these materials took on many forms tailored to the audience.

The team created e-learning modules that helped to explain the federal regulations that now needed to be adhered to as well as how these regulations helped strengthen the business. In addition, the team developed videos and featuring the company's executives to further reinforce the message that this initiative was much larger than simply ensuring compliance but was designed to be a strategic driver for the business and an enabler for diversity. As one of the key components of the program to help every employee of Best Buy understand affirmative action, this corporate video was honored by the Northern Lights Media Festival as the Gold Award winner for creativity and production in the "Diversity in Action" category.

Once everyone within Best Buy had been properly educated on the business implications of the affirmative action and diversity program, the team was ready to release the first plans.

While Nagel's team had been creating the educational materials for the organization, the Peopleclick team worked with Best Buy to help create the job groups and to gather the year's worth of data necessary for its 140,000 person pool to complete the plans. Traditionally, organizations like Best Buy would need to stagger the plan preparation and spend all year creating the affirmative action plans. Peopleclick was able to automatically feed this data into its CAAMS® software and easily create all 900 plans.

Nagel described the process as a bi-lateral learning and sharing experience. "We worked very closely with the Peopleclick team to make certain that we created our job groups and prepared the necessary data correctly and in full compliance. We use Peopleclick as an expert source to help not only build our plans, but to help build our teams and keep the process moving. As we hired new people within our organizations to help manage our affirmative action process, Peopleclick helped with in-depth trainings to help us understand what our responsibilities were."

The Results

After the final roll out of the educational components and then the final AA plans to the organizations, Nagel and his team saw the new process successfully become a standard piece of the business rhythms at Best Buy. Every quarter, the location goes through and reviews its own progress against the overall plan making the plans an actionable component to day-to-day work at Best Buy. Every six months Nagel's team also works with Peopleclick to prepare progress reports to submit back to the teams so everyone can fully understand how the company is doing with their placement goals. And, more importantly, identify ways their teams can identify areas for improvement.

Now approaching their third year, and third round of plan preparations, Nagel's team is encouraged by the responsiveness and excitement of the entire organization. Based on the progress reports received by Peopleclick, the heads of each AA and diversity team are now submitting their action plans outlining how they plan to best take advantage of opportunities available to meet AA goals.

The team has also created additional training materials to help bring the program to life for those in the organization who may not fully understand the purpose of the affirmative action program. In it, the employee uses a little town, and its resources, to help illustrate compliance. This module also recommends other create ways to help attract an even more diverse candidate pool.

Nagel likens the entire process to class picture day. "Peopleclick has been like the photographer for our class picture. They have helped us to look at our "class" through the affirmative action lens, showed us ways to create an even more diverse and all inclusive group to bring our corporate culture into focus for everyone and have created a snapshot of our organization for us all to use a benchmark moving forward."

For more information on Peopleclick and its market-leading total workforce acquisition technology, visit www.peopleclick.com.