CultMembers of the Bankers Trust DEI Team pose with CultureALL Ambassador Dr. Jackie Thompson

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Members of the Clive Chamber of Commerce recently gathered to discuss the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in their businesses.

Jill Crosser, VP Consumer Services Manager for Bankers Trust, shared how CultureALL helped the bank become more welcoming to everyone.  

Below are a few excerpts from Jill’s comments to the members of the Clive Chamber. 

“I’ve worked at Bankers Trust for 7 years, and I’ve had the honor to be on the internal employee DEI committee. 

We have lots of committees. But DEI was one that when I started at the bank, I thought, ‘you know, I really want to see what they're up to.’ And I liked it. It was great. But we just went to meetings. We talked as a group of maybe seven or eight of us, and nothing really changed.  I didn't see a ton of inclusivity around the bank. 

Bankers Trust has a great culture. Employees stay 30+ years. We're in the community. We're doing the right things. But after a little while, the group came together and just said, ‘Hey, I think we need to do a little bit more.’

We interviewed or had meetings with 10 companies to do some kind of bank wide DEI training. We felt that we needed to infuse DEI somewhere other than just this group of seven or eight people on this committee. I worked at a branch 35 miles away in Ames at the time, and I felt like I was on an island and not really included with Bankers Trust. Our branches felt like they weren't connected to the hub, where the other 400 employees went to work every day. I'm sure Phoenix, where we have branches, felt it as well.

We were trying to figure out, how can we infuse DEI wider, deeper? How can we learn more? How can we get more people involved?

So we chose CultureALL because we did what is called an IDI. It’s the Intercultural Development Inventory. 

We sent out this inventory, which is a questionnaire, to all 575 employees in all regions. 446 employees took it. All of the confidential data was pulled into one spot and we were able to see where we sat as a bank on the continuum. 

We fell right smack dab in the middle, which means we’re “Iowa Nice.” We’re nice people. I see that you're different, but I don’t want to talk about that. I might want to learn about you if you’re a little different from me, but I don’t want to offend you. I don’t know what questions to ask you. 

After this data, we decided, Okay, we have to figure out how to move beyond nice and do something actionable to become more inclusive. 

Each employee was also given an opportunity to do a one-on-one consultation with a CultureALL Advisor to dig into their own personal results. Personally, I was in the middle, too. So after my consultation, we decided that I need to learn more about inclusive language and more about the LGBTQ community. I needed to learn more about other people and how they want to be spoken to.

We decided to meet with CultureALL again to talk about what we wanted to do. So they gave us some ideas about what they thought we could do as a company to move beyond nice and get a little bit farther along this continuum. They developed a three-year roadmap for us. 

We decided we needed more people for our committee, so we recruited more people. Right now, we have 21 people and members from all markets. We came together, and CultureALL helped us immensely. I can’t tell you how many conversations we had with them. We broke down the roadmap within our subcommittees, which are called “Live,” “Listen,” and “Learn.” Each focused on a part of the roadmap.

Those 21 minds came together in the last two years in ways I had no idea we could do. 

To share a few of the things we have done:

• We collaborate with other committees to put on events.
• We have done a multicultural day two years in a row now, where we had 10 multicultural stations with activities and snacks from 20 countries with facts about those countries. We invited team members from all over to participate and sent branch kits to the offices that couldn’t make it to Des Moines. One of the activities was a map where people pinned where they were from. I had no idea I had coworkers from Germany. It opened up new conversations. That simple thing taught us so much about each other. It changes the way that we work together now. 
• We’ve been celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, which has been a longer standing tradition. This year, we included a lunch and learn with CultureALL Ambassador Cucho Madero. 
• We celebrated our fourth annual Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, which started out just in the IT department where they had employees from India. We have traditional Indian cuisine. Some of our employees from India bring clothing and they let others try it on. We did mehndi as well. 
• We now have floating holidays. One of our employees from India said, “I don’t celebrate that holiday. I celebrate this holiday. I’m forced to not work because the bank is closed, but then I have to take PTO on my holiday.” Those conversations led to us realizing the need for a floating holiday for some folks that maybe do want to celebrate for a full day with their family and not come to work and not have to take PTO. 
• We’ve done LGBTQ 101 and 201 classes with OneIowa. It was a lunch and learn, one hour training where they send staff to teach everyone how to speak inclusively. 

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That’s just a few examples of the things that we’ve infused in our bank. We’ve seen more participation with events. Our executives are showing up. People are coming to us with questions. People are using us as a resource. Inclusivity is so important. 

CultureALL is coming back in this quarter and doing new IDI surveys to see how we’ve developed. Our goal was to have 80% of employees engaged in some way in DEI, whether that’s an event or a lunch and learn, and we hit it. I give huge kudos to my entire DEI team, and to CultureALL for helping us. We just knew we needed to do more. We just needed a push, and we just needed someone to guide us.” 

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