Edward Adams With Bloomberg Media Studios And Michael Matthews With Synchrony

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by onpay, Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today, we’re going to talk about a recent report that’s come out the road map to diversity learning from Atlanta’s small businesses. This report was put together by the folks at Synchrony and at Bloomberg Media Studios. Today from Synchrony, we have Michael Matthews and from Bloomberg we have Edward Adams. Welcome, gentlemen.

Edward Adams: [00:00:50] Thank you, thank you, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:51] Now, before we get too far into things, Michael, tell us about Synchrony mission purpose so our listeners can get an idea of why this was so important for you to get behind.

Michael Matthews: [00:01:01] Yeah, so Synchrony. We are a financial services company. We’ve been around six years, but we’ve have over 80 years of existence. We used to be part of General Electric GE Capital, and we’re located in Stamford, Connecticut, and we are into financial solutions, from credit cards to private label to medicines, medical procedures. We do it all. But one of the things that we are most proud of is our diversity, diversity and inclusion strategy. It’s an integral part of who we are, and I am the chief diversity officer here. So my job is to make sure that one hundred percent of our employees can bring one hundred percent of themselves to work. One hundred percent of the top 100 percent of the time. And in an environment where they’re not only just accept it, but they’re appreciated. And so that’s something that’s one of our core values and it’s in everything that we do. So I’m happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:03] And Edward, can you talk a little bit about why Bloomberg decided to get behind this specific topic in the in the world of business and why specifically Atlanta?

Edward Adams: [00:02:14] Sure. Well, Bloomberg Media Studios is the branded content studio of Bloomberg Media and and our role is really to help our brand partners like Synchrony try and craft and disseminate the messages that are important to them. And secretly came to us and said, Look, we care about the small business diversity space. That’s a passion point of our company. It’s one of the principles that we’re founded on. We just need ways to sort of communicate that. And so we crafted this this roadmap to the diversity report and we focused in on Atlanta for a very specific reason, which is that Atlanta is been more successful at promoting small business diversity than any other city in the country. Among the nation’s 10 largest metro areas, Atlanta ranks first in terms of the percentage of black-owned employers, with about 6.6 percent that ranked second after Washington, D.C., in the percentage of female owned employers with 22 percent. And the vast majority of Atlanta’s women and minority owned businesses are small businesses, which we define as the as the U.S. government does as companies with 500 or fewer employees. So it seemed to us that Atlanta was the should be the focal point for us. And what we’ve tried to do in this report is craft something that all small businesses around the country can learn from from the lesson of Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:44] So now were there any surprises?

Edward Adams: [00:03:48] Well, there were some we actually did an exclusive poll of small businesses, both employees and owners in the Atlanta area. We surveyed 100 of them and what we found was 87 percent. Almost all of them believe that diversity and inclusion is an important part of a business’s financial success. That’s something you hear a lot about when you talk about big businesses, how diversity helps large corporations earn more revenue, but you don’t often hear it about small businesses and something that we found to be true again and again in the course of our reporting. We also found that about 60 percent of the people we polled believe their own companies should be doing more to promote diversity and inclusion in their workforces. And I think that’s evidence that Atlanta’s long time work on this area has has been improving the diversity and inclusion metrics in the city.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:45] Now, Michael as Chief Diversity Officer, How does kind of in your job, how do you kind of build in diversity as part of the culture, diversity and inclusion specifically? And also, how does it permeate into the kind of the working relationship you have with your clients? Because I’m sure your clients represent that same diversity that you’re trying to, you know, kind of work on within the culture of your company.

Michael Matthews: [00:05:13] We’ll start with the second question first to your point, many of our clients are smaller businesses themselves, so we work with them not only in offering financial solutions, but also in a range of topics and supporting them in the range of areas to help change what’s possible for their businesses. We know that diversity isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s also a key economic driver, so there’s mutual interest on both sides. And so by partnering with organizations like Bloomberg, we can help provide some of these positive success stories and address some of the pain points they have. And because it is, to your point, woven into the fabric of what we do at Synchrony, a lot of the stuff is easily transferable. I’m an easy to partner with them on. So it at Synchrony, for example, we have a program which we call ADT, which is advancing diverse talent, which we look at. We do data analytics methodology to look at representation and the opportunities for our company on an annual basis, and that helps us create and execute strategies related to diversity. And so those are the types of methodologies and tactics that we share with some of our small business partners.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:39] Now you mentioned that diversity isn’t. Just the right thing to do, but it can also be an economic driver. Can you talk about specifically like, are there stats that back that up like everybody feels good and it sounds good and everybody, you know, has that mission statement on the wall? But is there a kind of data to support that fact that diversity is kind of a quality of those fast growing or growing companies?

Edward Adams: [00:07:09] I think there certainly is. We spoke to dozens and dozens of small businesses in the Atlanta area for this report. I’ll give you just a couple examples of ones where diversity paid off in terms of the bottom line. The High Museum of Art Back in 2005, their CFO established a fund to acquire works of art by black artists and really has made a name for that museum in the arena of art by black artists. And that brought in almost $2 million in donations to the museum over the subsequent years. Or there’s the Choke Construction Company, a small construction company in the Atlanta area. The training manager there launched an online course to teach managers Spanish so they could communicate with Spanish speaking crew members. Not only has that improved construction site safety, as you would expect it would, but it’s also reduced injury costs, and it’s certainly bolstered morale at the company. Those are just a couple of examples where I think we’ve seen that diversity isn’t just good for people and communities, but it’s also good for business.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:15] So now in the report, there’s the information is there kind of maybe some actionable next steps that companies can take?

Edward Adams: [00:08:26] There are a variety in each one of our articles. We always have some actionable steps that that readers can take to try and duplicate the successes of the small businesses that we speak to. I think that one of the things that we hear a lot from small business owners is that it’s hard to find qualified, diverse employees. A good example of that is we spoke to the founder of something called the Patrick Law Group, which is a seven attorney corporate transactions law firm in the Atlanta area. And the recommendations that we heard for her to try and overcome that challenge was to make her business more a part of the diverse community in Atlanta. In her case, it meant participating in events at the Majority Black Bar Association in Atlanta so that as as the advisor to her put it, so that you can show up where members of the diverse community are showing up. There was also a recommendation that she reach out to recruiters who specialize in placing candidates of color as another means to try and reach her goal. And those are things that any small business could do to try and find more qualified, diverse candidates.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:35] Now is there anything that companies can do to attract more diverse customers?

Edward Adams: [00:09:42] Sure. Absolutely. In fact, we spoke to a company called Classic Vision Care, it’s an optometry practice up in Marietta and Kennesaw, Georgia. And we had the diversity expert, Damon Williams, who’s the founder of the National Inclusive Excellence Leadership Academy in Atlanta. Give them some advice about how to reach a broader customer base, and he suggested connecting to diverse consumers in ways that make them feel valued in the case of the optometrist. He suggested doing free vision screenings in economically vulnerable schools, and he thought that could build brand equity as a company that’s concerned about diverse consumers.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:25] Now, Michael, can you give some advice to other maybe chief diversity officers out there? What are some things that folks can be doing to maybe open their eyes to some unconscious or subconscious biases that they might have as an organization?

Michael Matthews: [00:10:44] Of course, probably one of the main tools that we have in our toolbox is our we call them diversity networks or their employee resource groups, as they’re more commonly known. We have eight at Synchrony and they’re really the foundation of our culture with more of our more than 60 percent of our employees are engaged because that synchrony this we have the plus sign. So you don’t have to necessarily demographically fit into a box, but you can be have passion or want to be affiliated or support a group or be an ally of such. And so that allows you to participate. And us having strong partnerships with our diversity networks really helps us maintain that appropriate perspective and maintain relationships. They help drive and inform our diversity strategies in terms of what markets to touch base on and to plan and what kind of relationships we need to establish or maintain. So that’s probably one of the main pieces of advice that if they don’t have employee resource groups, establish them and if they do to invest in them

Lee Kantor: [00:11:58] Now, is there anything Synchrony does for their clients in terms of diversity when it comes to spotlighting some of their work or sharing best practices or even creating a community among themselves?

Michael Matthews: [00:12:10] Yeah, we’ve seen incredible examples of programs that are established by small businesses in the Pillars project. And so it’s an annual synchrony celebration of community leaders where they have the opportunity to come and highlight and spotlight some of the things that they’ve done. So like mattress retailers donating beds for families experiencing hardship or music repair shops, donating supplies to school to school music programs. And this not only provides the opportunity for some of our partners or these companies to do what’s right and to contribute to the community, but to also highlight some of their diverse focus and and show their commitment to these communities.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:57] So now large organizations like yours have a lot of resources. Is there any kind of low hanging fruit that the small business can can be doing in order to attract and maybe advance some diverse talent?

Michael Matthews: [00:13:13] Yeah, that’s a great question. When I think of small businesses, I think the one thing that they can focus on is making sure that they are hiring from the neighborhoods and the communities for which they serve, you know, and making sure that the employee population looks like the customer. They’re the customers in that population. So people naturally want to shop and want to do business with people who feel comfortable with them and who they feel comfortable with and who they feel represent them. So by making those types of investments that will help customers engage. This can also bring in new opportunities and address concerns of small businesses. A small business owner may not have seen otherwise from diverse, from diverse perspectives. Having that diversity in your employee base in forms like like I keep saying your diversity strategy and your overall company perspective

Lee Kantor: [00:14:08] Now, is there any advice of how your how our listeners or how the people who get their hands on this report, how to best use this report? Like how would you recommend they use the report once they get their hands on it?

Edward Adams: [00:14:25] I would recommend that they take a look through the reporting we have about, I think, about 20 pieces of content ranging from videos to audio reports to written reports, and take a look and look for the kinds of companies that represent them. We have a wide selection of small businesses in the Atlanta area represented in this report. I think if they see some of the kinds of small businesses that they are, they may also see some of the challenges that they face. Really, the the challenges that we’re faced by these Atlanta companies we talked to are not that different than the challenges faced by similar small businesses in in Iowa or Montana or California or New York. They’re really all the same, and I think that they’ll see some of themselves in this reporting.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:12] Now is this report a one off or is this something that’s going to be an annual affair?

Michael Matthews: [00:15:18] Michael? We’ll see. Right now, it looks like this has been such a successful endeavor and the partnership with Bloomberg that we’re definitely investigating future opportunities to have this occur again in the future.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:35] Well, if somebody wants to get their hands on the report, what’s the best way to do that?

Edward Adams: [00:15:39] Real simple, Lee, just go to Bloomberg.com. Roadmap to diversity. That’s Bloomberg.com roadmap roadmap to diversity.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:49] And Michael, if somebody wants to connect with Synchrony and learn more about their offerings, or I’m sure you’re always hiring, you know, if their talent and wants to get involved with Synchrony as there a website for Synchrony?

Michael Matthews: [00:16:04] Yeah, you can just go to Synchrony. It’s easy and you’ll see links to anything and everything that we’re involved in. So I just encourage and you are right. We’re always hiring and looking for good talent, especially good, diverse talent. So I encourage people to go to Synchrony Jobs dot com,

Lee Kantor: [00:16:22] And that’s S.Y. and R-N.Y.

Michael Matthews: [00:16:26] That’s correct.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:27] Good stuff. Well, Michael and Edward, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you. Thank you for having us. All right, this Lee Kantor will sail next time on Atlanta Business Radio.