Is D&I mainstream yet? 🥁

And more with Monique Pennings (NN Group).

What does diversity & inclusion (D&I) look like at a 177-year-old company?

NN Group is an international financial services company, providing retirement services, pensions, insurance, investments, and banking, to approximately 18 million customers across 19 countries.

With a background in sustainability, corporate philanthropy, and impact finance, Monique Pennings had been working in the financial industry for over a decade and at NN Group for six years, when the company announced a new function in D&I.

Ready to take on new responsibilities, and as a strong believer in the importance of the topic, Monique jumped at the chance to become the Diversity & Inclusion Specialist at NN, promoting D&I to the company’s 15,000 employees.

Thinking Different: What Does D&I Mean at NN Group?

“That’s a really relevant question and it was the first question I took on to answer for our organization,” Monique says.

At NN, it all starts with diversity of thought. Monique shares:

The underlying idea around diversity & inclusion is really diversity of thought. As human beings we are all alike, but not the same. And that is our greatest strength. Diversity is about recognizing the uniqueness of each person and appreciating the value we all bring. Bringing your whole self to work is not just accepted at NN – it’s valued.

Diversity of thought, or “cognitive diversity,” describes the differences in people’s knowledge, perspectives, opinions, and ultimately, way of thinking.

As you can imagine, teams with low cognitive diversity have a limited ability to see things differently and therefore struggle to come up with new, innovative solutions to difficult problems. In their research, Alison Reynolds and David Lewis explain that a lack of cognitive diversity has two impacts:

First, it reduces the opportunity to strengthen the proposition with input from people who think differently. Second, it fails to represent the cognitive diversity of the employee population, reducing the impact of the initiatives.

For Monique, it is not only important to acknowledge the diversity of experiences and ideas that each team member brings, but that it is, in fact, crucial for business.

We value the uniqueness in every individual because we need it. The only constant is change. In that sense, we’re better equipped for what the future brings if the people who work for you understand what’s going on in the world outside – and you cannot do that with people who look like each other and think like each other.

Making It Happen: D&I Initiatives at NN

Although the topic of D&I is not new to NN, the need for more structure and a global reach made me curious to hear how much “convincing” Monique had to do to bring people on board. It turns out: not much. Monique tells me:

People are generally convinced, but how to actually do things differently is a question we get a lot. They say, “I followed the training” or “I saw this presentation, and want to be part of the change, what can I do?” That’s the question I literally get every day and we’ve built a lot of initiatives around that. Building further on our inclusive culture is really something we do together.

Here are a few current D&I initiatives at NN:

✅ Tuesday Tip

Using the company’s internal social media channel, NN’s D&I team shares a weekly “Tuesday Tip,” sharing helpful, tangible actions that you can start doing right away. “We try to align the tip with events that are coming up or events that have happened,” Monique says. Examples of past Tuesday Tips include:

• Listen actively during your next meeting. Listen to understand, not to reply.

• In your next meeting, check if everyone has had the opportunity to contribute in their way.

• Be open to culturally relevant festive days. Ask a colleague how they celebrate and what they look forward to most.

• Be an active ally to the LGBTI+ community and add your pronouns to your email signature.

• As a challenge, sponsor someone who is very different from you. Chances are you will learn as much from them as they will from you – maybe even more.

📖 Glossary of D&I Terms

To help build people’s awareness and knowledge around D&I, NN has a handy glossary of helpful terms, like “cultural awareness” and “intersectionality.” The first step in bringing about meaningful change is awareness of the issue at hand, so making sure everyone is able to “speak the same language” helps.

🎧 Read / Watch / Listen

There’s plenty of content around D&I to go around (including this newsletter!), so the team regularly shares resources like books and podcasts. Continuously learning from others and learning how to see things from different viewpoints is essential for growth.

For Monique, “Watching and reading new materials is not only important when you’re just starting to look into D&I and trying to find out what you can do as a colleague or expert, but it remains important to keep learning. D&I is really about talking with people, hearing it from them directly instead of making assumptions and shortcuts.”

You’ll find Monique’s very own Read / Watch / Listen at the bottom of this newsletter!

🤝 Partnerships

Working on D&I means collaborating with others is not just a nice-to-have, but a must-have if we want to drive real change. Other viewpoints make a difference. In line with this, one way of advancing the D&I agenda is to initiate impactful partnerships. Iromy den Burger, Partnership Manager at NN, recalls:

When I work on the Rotterdam Pride partnership, it’s the days where I welcome the NN volunteers during the Pride Week that I look forward to. They feel proud of and engaged with the organization because they feel the support for something that’s really important to our colleagues and customers. It’s nice that you can be a part of it through the organization.

Iromy den Burger, Partnership Manager at NN

Iromy’s comment touches on the proven link between inclusion and engagement. I like the way this blog post on Dignii puts it:

Engagement is a state of emotional well-being that is a result of inclusion in action at the workplace.

By partnering with organizations that live and breathe their mission – for example by sponsoring events like Rotterdam Pride – large companies like NN Group are better equipped to offer their employees different ways to engage with the issues they care about, thereby increasing motivation, satisfaction, and performance.

Monique also points out the bigger picture: Engaging employees in D&I initiatives at work is great – but you know you’re really making a difference when it seeps into their own work and even their personal lives. When it comes to making D&I happen at NN (and beyond), Monique says:

As a D&I Specialist I try to spark the conversation, train, build employee resource groups, and partner up. I find that the real results in these efforts are when colleagues translate D&I into what they can do differently in their work – in their processes, for example, and in their contact with customers and their own team. This is when attention on D&I within the organization really changes behavior and starts to scale.

Globally Consistent, Locally Relevant

With every great workplace initiative comes a great slogan – and NN is no exception. “I always say that initiatives need to be globally consistent, but locally relevant,” Monique shares. “Our D&I Roadmap, including various KPIs, take care of the global consistency, and the local relevance is executed by appointed D&I ambassadors throughout the whole organization.”

Monique tells me NN has around 40 D&I ambassadors, who dedicate time to work on D&I next to their regular responsibilities. At the head of the ambassador program, leading its global vision on D&I, is Monique. She then works with the local ambassadors across the organization’s international offices, to apply NN’s D&I vision to each local context.

“We talk with them every six weeks to make sure that everybody knows the latest developments, what’s coming up, what we’re planning to do, and how we can all interconnect,” Monique explains.

One of the main challenges for large, global organizations like NN Group is building one core strategy and adapting it to multiple countries and cultures.

Our D&I ambassadors are doing an impressive job. We had an initiative in Spain where the Head of Communications set up a campaign in which emails were sent out to all colleagues about pronouns to let them decide what kind of pronouns they want to use – just to get awareness on why pronouns can be important to people; it’s really something our local colleagues do. So, I think that ambassador structure helps a lot.

Another reason that the D&I ambassador structure and the NN employee resource groups are so vital is also because, frankly, Monique is only one person. As a straight white woman, she is open about her own “blind spots.” “If I have to talk about things around LGBTQ+, for example, I appreciate getting feedback from the NN Pride network because we look at things differently,” she says. “I couldn’t do that all by myself. The open discussions mean a lot to me. I work with all the employee resource groups very closely. Together we prioritize the annual planning and stay up to date on topics that matter to the D&I agenda.”

Let’s Get Structural: The Similarities Between D&I & Sustainability

“Woke washing” and performative DEI is a problem in this field, something Monique is highly conscious of in her work at NN.

Even though it will take time, Monique is committed to making real, long-lasting progress in DEI. This requires structural change, not reactive bandaid solutions, as she tells me:

Last year, while we were working with partnerships and volunteering during Rotterdam Pride, at the same time we were changing parental leave for families because we noticed that in the Netherlands, if you are in a same-sex marriage or couple and you have a baby, there is a different leave structure.

But, I’m not an HR benefits person, so I either need to know the HR benefits person or that person needs to read about what we’re doing and see that they can add value here. They need to look at their own work through the lens of D&I. As soon as you do that, that’s when things are more structural. If people don’t put on those glasses and see what they can structurally change, then what can they do to really add to the long-term of this field? You can sponsor Rotterdam Pride, but if you don’t change anything for your workforce or for your customers, what is it that you’re actually doing?

As the former Head of Community Investment International at NN Group, Monique reflects on the field of sustainability in the same way:

Sustainability and community investment were topics that had been around for a while, but we just had to make them mainstream. They had to mature a bit. We need to make sure that D&I matures, that it’s structural, that it’s not going anywhere. That’s the challenge.

It’s Not Enough to Mean Well

To make a topic like D&I mainstream, you need to take it seriously. If you’re a D&I novice, it might be helpful to approach it the same way you’d approach any other function. Build a strategy, set your KPIs…

“Treat it like a ‘normal’ business initiative and take it as seriously as that,” Monique advises. “Take the effort to start with the topic and you will be surprised about how many colleagues and experts want to be part of the change.”

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The Takeaways 📌

• Cognitive diversity (a.k.a. diversity of thought) is a must-have if businesses want to survive – and thrive.

• The most effective D&I strategies (especially for larger organizations) are “globally consistent, but locally relevant,” meaning one core strategy leads the way while local teams adapt.

• D&I needs some time to mature and enter the mainstream – and structural change is the only way to make it last. This includes the idea that:

• Everyone in an organization needs to learn how to view their work through a DEI lens in order to truly build a culture that values diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• Be serious about making D&I happen, no matter how small the step is. Every action counts.

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Further Reading / Watching / Listening: Recommendations from Monique

• “Don’t Touch My Hair” by Emma Dabiri

• Love on the Spectrum (Netflix)

• All Things Inclusive (podcast by Hanan Challouki)

• Monique’s pro-tip: Follow people on social media who don’t look like you. Her personal favorites are:

  • Humans of New York on Instagram

  • Smarter in Seconds with Blair Imani