Building a Swiss-Wide Network to Advance Women’s Leadership and Inclusion | Best Practice by Johnson & Johnson Switzerland
Have you wondered how you leverage the diversity and scale of Switzerland to engage your organization around Women’s Leadership? How can you use the power of virtual meetings to continue the conversation, even during Covid-19?
This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.
In Switzerland, Johnson & Johnson has a broad footprint across 11 office and manufacturing sites, with 4,300 people – our greatest asset. Each employee brings a unique set of experiences, cultural background and thinking styles that create a richness to our companies and better serves our diverse customers around the globe. Our employees are empowered and encouraged to take advantage of the opportunities throughout our diverse family of companies, and that includes our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).
Our enterprise-wide ERGs connect and engage employees across the company to provide key insights and ultimately driving better outcomes on behalf of our people, our marketplace and our communities. By working together to tap into the knowledge, experience and passion of our employees we can solve some of healthcare’s toughest problems.
Our Employee Resource Groups form a key part of the Diversity & Inclusion network. One of the main ERGs in Switzerland is the Women’s Leadership and Inclusion (WLI) group. The WLI in Switzerland works actively with all employees to empower women to reach their potential because we know that in an environment where women can thrive, everybody thrives.
We have 5 WLI chapters across Switzerland: Zug, Zuchwil, Allschwil, Bern and Schaffhausen; each chapter supports a campus with different initiatives and programs. One of the main challenges we see is how to bring all these chapters together to elevate the collective voice of women in the J&J family across Switzerland?
Strategic Customer Marketing Lead Services & Solutions Medical Devices EMEA and Women’s Leadership and Inclusion (WLI) Lead at Johnson & Johnson Switzerland
Manager Strategic Initiatives and Diversity & Inclusion Lead at Johnson & Johnson Switzerland
Multiple activities and events were planned for 2020 on a per site basis. However, Covid-19 meant these turned into virtual webinars and networking sessions, which then opened the possibility for us to start to host cross-Switzerland events, just by virtue of moving to virtual formats. These virtual sessions broke down physical barriers between sites and fueled the idea that we should bring all 5 WLI chapters together to enable better communication and management of resources for programs like Mentoring, Inclusion Training, and networking events. It also allowed us to think about how to better engage with the wider Swiss community and elevate our voice and use our scale for making a bigger impact.
In March, right at the beginning of the pandemic and lockdown, we had the chance to pilot this approach for International Women’s Day. We were given the ‘Work from Home’ order and soon realized we could use the virtual approach to keep up employee morale and engagement during these difficult times.
Thanks to the IWD events we were able to quickly re-format another WLI Networking event in April led by our WLI Zug team and welcomed participants from Zug, Bern, and Schaffhausen. Adina-Bogdana Moraru, Senior Director End-to-End Product Planning, commented “Great initiative! Excellent attendance rate; virtual works sometimes better than F2F! Something to take away for our future events!!”
We do not want the sites to lose their individuality, since the ERGs should serve the local employees but through virtual events, we can create connections, not only between sites but also to other ERGs. We now believe we can leverage ideas, best practices and communication across the board to have a bigger impact and have established ERG Switzerland Leads over and above the site leads as well as a D&I Country Council.
Covid-19 helped fuel Swiss-wide collaboration. We realized a different preparation is needed to run virtual sessions but we were able to do so with success and nearly tripled the participation list for some events. We are reaching more employees. No matter where you are based in Switzerland, this approach allows us to be more inclusive across the board, which is ultimately the goal of driving the equality discussion!
This opportunity for virtual meetings has fueled other initiatives, not only across WLI Switzerland but also in collaboration with other ERGs. In August, Open & Out and WLI will team up with the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association of Switzerland to run a joint virtual session on “What it means to be an ally to the LGBTQI community.”
We will also use this format in October to celebrate 25 years of WLI in Johnson & Johnson during our company-wide Inclusion Week, where we celebrate many themes around Inclusion. We believe that in the future, the new normal will be a blend of face-to-face interactions as well as virtual connections to keep the conversation of Women’s Inclusion and Leadership ongoing. We have shown that this type of connection works, and we want to keep up the momentum!
For more information on WLI or ERGs at J&J Switzerland, please do not hesitate to contact Sheena Patel (spatel01@its.jnj.com) or Lucy Moreira (lmoreir4@its.jnj.com)
This Best Practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2021.
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