DEI STRATEGY
The Competitive Advantage: Development and Inclusivity
At Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, which boasts nearly 140,000 employees, Amy Tu, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary of Global Governance and Corporate Affairs (GGCA), has made a personal commitment to increasing diversity and ensuring that all members of the GGCA team have every opportunity to pursue their career as far as their ambitions will take them. By Joyce Jones
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IVERSITY OF OUR WORKFORCE AND INCLUSIVENESS our workplace are absolute priorities, especially given the variety of rich experiences, skills and talents we have globally,” Tu explains. “We know that these priorities provide a competitive advantage to our business, but more important, they are fundamental to our company’s core values. To make meaningful progress, we must be committed personally to a healthy and open environment for diversity to thrive.” Under Tu’s leadership, the GGCA team recently launched a 360-degree strategy and council for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), which focuses on six pathways to drive positive outcomes. In partnership with internal teams and firms that Tyson works with externally, the initiative is establish-
ing policies that will “aggressively and relentlessly” drive DEI in Tyson’s workplaces. The DEI Council is led by members of the GGCA team and company senior executives to help engage employees and advance its goals. According to Tu, the strategy includes creating an ecosystem that integrates the company’s spend data with DEI data to gain better insight into how its investments are being made and whether those investments help achieve DEI goals. Tu’s department has also redesigned its preferred provider network to include DEI priorities and monitors diversity data to ensure that outside firms are giving diverse attorneys opportunities to work on Tyson projects, going so far as to develop scorecards to measure performance.
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