[Music] now next please join me in welcoming our next round of speakers for our diversity and inclusion session where we'll talk about how we can be advocates and empower diverse individuals in the federal workforce a warm welcome to our moderator karen pavlick pavlin chief equity and inclusion officer at servicenow and our panel of progressive leaders including tracy d martini chief human capital officer at gsa javier inclon deputy office head office of equity and civil rights at nsf and zina adachi special assistant to the comptroller general for diversity equity inclusion at gao welcome great thank you [Music] awesome awesome thank you so much steve for that wonderful introduction and again i'm karen pavlin with servicenow and i'm so thrilled to be here with my amazing panelists today and i will tell you that it seems like the theme everyone is saying that this is the first time that they've been in a room with so many people and on stage in since 2020 uh since the pan pandemic began and honestly everyone i feel so great to be here and um i want to just kind of just tie into something that that nick said earlier that i thought was really funny i have met a lot of people over the last year or so and the first thing they say to me when they meet me in person is wow i didn't know how tall you are and how tall are you and i always say you know going back a long time ago i say i'm 5 12. and i say that because my mom said growing up as a woman don't say you're almost six feet so uh you know really in the spirit of just being who we are and owning who you are i'm now saying well you know i'm just a little bit shy of six feet so i am sure i could speak for all of us here but the last two years has certainly amplified the work and the passion that we've all been committed to for probably most of our careers um and in really building um d and i into our respective organization's dna who we are how our people are responding that will ignite a culture of making people feel seen heard connected and safe correct so i know for me it brought to light just the the fact that there's really no road map for this journey and we are all as they say we're building this plane while we're flying it in in the most agile way and it's also really uh important that these times remain a movement and not just a moment in time a little bit about me before we dive in and i have my amazing fellow fellow panelists introduced themselves my background did not follow your typical dni leader i grew up in the world of technology um i started my career over 20 years at xerox right after grad school and when i was at xerox i held several leadership roles in digital transformation and at the time when i was there i led several of our global diversity councils several of our employee resource groups and i also founded women in tech i then spent five years at an amazing company called the center firm amazing five years there as a managing director i was a client account leader in our financial services practice and coincidentally i worked with servicenow as my uh go-to ecosystem partner so i i sold the platform i was also the executive sponsor for the northeast inclusion and diversity marketing unit however the last years at a center last year i stepped into the role as north america ind leader which was profoundly emotional and purpose-driven calling for me and we talked about this the calling especially after a year of racial unrest um social unrest and the pandemic that really caused so many of us forced us apart both physically both mentally and at a time where it was more important than ever to remain connected so i just recently joined servicenow just six weeks ago it's amazing and i couldn't be more excited to be a part of this incredible leadership team who truly believes in an inclusive culture that is steeped in the respect for de ni and understands the linkage of the business impact and innovation so with that i am super proud to be here i'm super proud to be here alongside of my amazing panelists i will turn over and let you introduce yourself thank you so much i really appreciate it it's so exciting to be back out unmasked and circling around my name is tracy dimartini i'm the chief human capital officer for the general services administration and unlike karen no one looks at me and says my you're much taller than i thought but they do say you're just as loud on zoom as you are in person uh i'm really proud to be here and excited to talk about what we're doing at gsa and throughout the entire government along with my colleagues especially javier who i get to see a lot on this circuit all right javier thanks tracy my name is javier klein i'm the deputy office head for the office of equity and civil rights at the national science foundation um i did not land uh on in this position as part of my career journey uh it was and you know at the risk of sounding hokey it was almost a calling um i was at nsf for for three and a half years uh actually met tracy for the first time when i was the acting division director for the human resources division at nsf um i left during the pandemic in july of 2020 uh to uh to an opportunity at the u.s marshall service which i loved what a great mission of the marshall service and then in february of 21 a wonderful boss named rhonda davis called me and said hey i think i'm going to get approval to get a deputy in my office and i really want you to join us and i said rhonda that's great i i loved working with you when i was at nsf before and that's fabulous but i don't really have a background in dni or eeo or civil rights or anything like that so i don't want to be a burden and she said javier i'm not hiring you for your technical expertise in dni or eeo or civil rights it's more about organizational development and we're looking to reorganize our office and i really think you're the right person for the person for the job and i said okay well that sounds great but i'm not sure you have approval yet so when you do please give me a call and a week to the day she called me back and she said you know what javier not only do i have approval but i talked to the director and said that you might be interested and he said when does javier start um so a little bit of pressure there it was one of the few times in my career where i was 1 000 sure of what to do it wasn't about leaving the marshall service i love that agency i love the mission love the people i worked with but this calling this going back to nsf which is my family and doing something new and something exciting under an administration quite frankly that that has put such a focus on equity i just jumped at the opportunity and came back to nsf so uh i've been there almost a year now uh back to my second stint uh they still kept me so that's probably a good sign um and you know really looking forward to the great work that we're gonna do across the federal enterprise on deia great thank you so much javier and xena thank you my name is xena merritt and i am very privileged today to be in great company of such a diverse group of panelists here as well as the diversity i see in the office all of us have a very diverse journey my journey in particular i have been with the government accountability office gao now for over three decades and so i guess it it stands up to its reputation of being a great place to work because i have definitely stayed there but i started out too in a very different aspect and when i started at gao i was one of the new hires that was brought in to help to meet a diversity quota at that time don't get me wrong i was well qualified but the opportunities were very limited for people of color and so i had an opportunity to begin to make a difference when i started my career at gao in the late 80s and from that point onward i discovered that it took everyone it took all individuals in the organization to make a change and there came my passion to make sure that i was not one among a hundred that came in at any point in time but we began to grow we began to learn from each other and so from there i have continued i was appointed in my position in november 2017 and it's a great place to be and again i hope that whatever we impart today you will learn a lot from it like my other colleagues i'm on the other end of the spectrum i'm i'm height challenge so anyway we we all have things we all have challenges but we one key thing about all of us we know how to overcome them and i hope today whatever we get to share with you will also help you to overcome challenges that you may have faced in your career because that's what it's about thank you so much xena and i will tell you you're not height challenged if you look at diversity there's only one percent of the world that women that are over 5 11. so i'm talk about diversity i get a lot of buckets but what i heard about our themes i mean it's it's about calling the calling lived experiences working on purpose but our journeys have all been quite different but it's just amazing that we've all kind of landed in and in this amazing world of dni supporting culture for for our organizations i'm going to jump in and just throw a question out to to all of us so it's been nine months since president biden released the diversity equity inclusion and accessibility executive order it was in june of 2021 and this eo holds all of us accountable to really look in the mirror and examine who we are and our own diversity practices and policies can you tell us and share the steps that your agency has taken to make sure that we are there we are implementing these goals that are outlined in the eo so tracy do you want to start sure um i was when you mentioned it was only nine months i was thinking to myself no wonder we're so tired at gsa we've done so much work in a short amount of time that it feels like we have been working on this for far longer and i think that is a testament to our leadership both our political leadership and our career leadership at gsa because we recognize we have to stay competitive not just as a federal agency but as an employer of choice across all sectors and the only way we're going to do that is by embracing diversity equity inclusion and accessibility some of the things we have done specifically within gsa is we've stood up a diversity council which has a diversity of experiences on it it's not just the leaders sitting around the table it's our entry level staff that have been with us for fewer than three years it's mid-career staff it's senior level staff and we have them from all parts of the country different regions we have 11 of them at gsa plus our headquarters in dc because in order to have a conversation about deina you have to make sure the people sitting at the table are also diverse and inclusive so you have representation of many ideas we've also taken a look at our special emphasis programs and made sure they had a seat at the table and they felt welcome and safe so one thing that we've done in the past few months is have a lot of our executive core actually stand up and say i'm going to sponsor this group and they're all fabulous people but one of my favorites is my colleague tom that is sponsoring the lgbtq and a group and he is just a force to be reckoned with because not only is he helping them put on events such as when we celebrate pride month in june but he goes above and beyond to help mentor staff and talk about what it means to be identify as lgbt or q in the workplace and he's just really been a beacon i think of inspiration for staff that often felt excluded or that someone didn't quite understand how it was for them in the workplace another thing we have done is really collaborate very closely with our partners in civil rights and anyone that here that works in an agency knows hr and civil rights are usually charged with compliance right people don't want to come talk to us because it usually means they're in trouble so i'm not used to having a lot of people that look as nice as you you know sitting before me and one of the things we've been able to do is talk about what we can do on the front end to help gsa really meet its diversity equity and inclusion goals so we are undertaking a barrier analysis to see where we may have opportunities to improve because the last thing i really want to say before i pass it to my colleagues is we have to learn to not be afraid to talk about these issues it's not about what we're not doing it's what we need to do to get better and i think once everyone understands that's the direction we're going in um you'll continue to see more passion generate around the ideals people will feel less threatened there's only one thing that i'm particularly passionate about can we all stop talking about the need to hire more people under 40 in government that's cutting way too close to home and i always i used to be the chico at the eeoc and i remind everyone that our employees over 40 can file based on age discrimination so we just need to be careful and you can laugh it's a joke [Laughter] because the other thing i say is it'll be generation x that saves the civil service because we're already disgruntled and angry we just need to get in there and fix it all yeah i love that tracy i absolutely love that and you know just the story that you told about your colleague i mean i'm a strong believer in people telling them their stories and transparency and i feel that when you are transparent as a leader that it's contagious absolutely so thanks happy here thank you um yeah so last year was a whirlwind for me going back to nsf and working on deia activities and equity and and june executive order came out uh so one of the first things we did was uh as i mentioned before in august we actually had our reorganization approved and that reorganization uh ultimately doubles the size of our office uh from 12 to 24 which is a big deal because historically uh deia was really handled by one person full-time and a smattering of other people as part of eeo or civil rights or hr um so that's exciting for us that we're able to you know establish a structure where eeo and the disability program is in one branch and our external civil rights program is in another branch and then deia and data analytics and other functions of the office or in another branch the other thing we did was we established a deia implementation team which is certainly a promising practice similar to gsa not just of senior leaders but really employees from across nsf whether they're members of our employee resource groups or human resources our union partners and others that really just have a passion for deia then the last thing i want to say about that is and this is one of the things that we really feel passionate about especially in an office where dni or deia and eeo are co-located is the executive order says and it's not verbatim but pretty close to it you know seek opportunity agencies should seek opportunities to create the position of a chief diversity officer or chief diversity and inclusion officer distinct from eeo and that's important and the way we explain it um and people laugh because it's kind of simplistic but it really hits to the point and tracy mentioned the word compliance before so in the eeo world we go in and if somebody files a complaint against a supervisor our office and let's just say javier goes in and talks to the supervisor and says hey you have a complaint against you we're going to do this then the other thing here's a settlement agreement at the end of the day and the supervisor says am i compliant absolutely supervisor you are compliant and then javier leaves the office goes to the revolving door and comes back and says hey supervisor let me talk to you about the things that you really should be doing to be better at your job and the supervisor looks at me and says javier but you just said i was compliant i said exactly i said you were compliant you were compliant deia is about being above compliance right trying to do proactive compliance making sure that we talk to folks ahead of time right one of my favorite sayings um that people laugh at me because it makes a lot of sense is if you're gonna invite me to the crash invite me to take off right and i am so proud and i mentioned before that that i used to be in hr for a few months um quick side story i was i started in december uh on december 9th of 2018 and if those of you that are involved 11 days later we have something called the beginning of a 35-day shutdown um the guy that maybe wrote a pd or two in his life is now heading hr um so somebody played a pretty cruel trick on me but um besides all of the good things that happened and the great staff i had the opportunity to build relationships some of those folks i think are sitting over there um you know but that really has helped me and i believe it's maybe one of the reasons why rhonda davis asked me to come back is that relationship with hr doing deia work is so crucial right tracy right um and you know we have been lockstep in trying to develop um a a plan right we started with an assessment of what we're trying to do um you know for the plan and then lockstep with hr of developing the plan but to my point before creating a chief diversity officer outside of eeo nsf is thinking about um seeking that opportunity to create that position and that is really something that we really need to do not only at nsf but for those agencies that don't have it you know do it across the federal enterprise so that it could elevate the position to a certain point that you're inculcating the the culture of deia into the culture of the agency so then you know it is administration agnostic it is leadership agnostic we have chief human capital officers we have chief financial officers we have chief information officers yes we should have chief diversity or chief diversity and inclusion officers that regardless of where it is year after year decade after decade that is part of the senior leadership of an agency to make sure that everything is looked at through a deia lens going forward no amazing javier and what you said really just reminds me of the saying diversity is is a fact but inclusion equity and accessibility is the act of what you're doing and you're being proactive so thank you for that xena sure thank you i have a little bit a different story about um the relationship between my organization and the executive order because unlike my colleagues who are part of the executive branch i'm a part of the legislative branch so that executive orders are not applicable to us but we pride ourselves as being a leading public service organization to the american people so whenever there are opportunities for us to refine and to adopt good leading practices such as those that are espoused in the executive order we take that privilege to do a strategic pause to look at where we've been and where we're going and we baseline ourselves against those requirements as well so for us not being obliged to follow the requirements i did myself personally as our equivalent of our chief diversity officer i took a look at the executive order and all of the requirements i looked at where we were on the spectrum and one of the things that the office of personnel management put out was what they called a maturity model so that all agencies can kind of baseline themselves to see where they are on that maturity model moving towards diversity equity inclusion and accessibility the other good news about this is i think for once i've been with the government like i said for a long time this is one space i think that have brought all of us closer together it's provided that necessary bridge that i think around a common effort in which we actually sit down and talk to each other on a level playing field and we really have been trying to help each other and guide each other when i self-reflect and look at what my agency has done and as well as what a number of other agencies have done this is nothing new what we're being asked to do is kind of civility in the workplace in a way it's recognizing that each individual that we employ are different they have different talents they have different skills they have different abilities but it's where are we going in the future and how are we going to galvanize those talents and move forward so for us i pride myself in looking at that our journey started very early we actually were one of the first agencies to actually have an eeo program like haria said so you can't disconnect the eeo efforts from the de i efforts but what you can do is there needs to be some separation so that the work that has to be done in the dei space can be done so without worrying about as harvey or said some type of if you're the arbitrator of a grievance then you don't necessarily want to put your self in that space of having to arbitrate as well as to lead the programming of the dei efforts so for me i report directly to the head of my agency which is the comptroller general and we've had that structure actually since 2009 my position is not a new one my agency recognized very early before eo came out the necessity of having diversity equity inclusion we also had instituted training going far back which is more than just compliance training and so i think we really have to have a different mindset about what is effective de i training it's not what some have projected it to be actually it's making us be better people creating greater awareness about acceptability of individuals in the workplace and so we want to make sure that we continue that journey of great training efforts in this space we've continued to do that i've also created a multi-year strategic plan so when i looked at that strategic plan and i looked at the strategic framework that the office of personnel has put out we're very much aligned with that we also added equity as well as accessibility as key pillars in our efforts to guide our efforts and we're finding that agencies are in a different place but i think everyone now is catching up so it's been a great opportunity and i am so happy that this forum is happening today with this particular topic for us to embrace it and to encourage others and really because there's always skeptic there's always skepticism about what de ni is and what those efforts are but i hope that after today's session if you were skeptic of it after we talked about some of the results that we've had i hope that we can continue to get buy-in as why it is important to all and as studies have shown it really does contribute to high performing institutions corey thank you so much xena and and all of everybody for just blazing the trails um i'm going to ask uh just a quick if we can just keep our our answers to about a minute because we're just so tracy i want to start with you you know we have you have had a lot of experience in government and non-profit hr efforts you know a big factor is knowing which areas in deni to focus on how are you using your background knowledge data analytics to effectively target opportunities to excel at gsa including talent acquisition etc great question so it starts at the beginning before you even have a job on the street giving everyone the understanding of what you are you're available what the agency does to get them interested in and then it's about recruiting the most talented and diverse group of applicants so we have choice and at gsa we really are trying to do that through our capabilities on linkedin obviously everyone here is familiar with usajobs that is the mechanism to get your application in but that doesn't mean we stop there we should be making contacts with our hbcu partners with all the professional organizations across the country for any discipline to make sure we're getting our word out about our opportunities and then once folks are in the in the seats and they're part of the federal family making sure that not everyone gets the same um everyone has the same cookie cutter approach meaning not everyone is going to get a promotion what we are responsible for is making sure everyone has the opportunity to fairly compete for those promotions and that training and the things that will help people advance their careers are given those opportunities are given to everyone because equity again it's not about making sure everyone gets the same exact treatment it's about making sure everyone has the opportunity to take advantage of everything that is before them and there's something important that both xena and javier said that i really want to just emphasize before they get to speak is this is not going away one of the great things about the federal government those of you that are in the civil service understand that we are used to implementing executive orders deia never went away under the prior administration may have gone underground never went away but now we have an opportunity to really continue to bake it into our practices to make sure it outlasts any administration it's here because it means something and it's for the benefit of the civil service to make sure that we represent the entire united states of america and the people we serve great thank you so much yes it is absolutely about just providing that equivalent experience for everyone so javiar let's uh move on to you you've had several roles um and now you are deputy head of diversity and civil rights what differences have you seen in your organization last year and how are you engaging the workforce as they move forward with their uh with your dni work efforts yeah thanks karen um you know i mentioned the reorganization before which is really a step forward um you know to try to elevate the deia program two things specific come to mind one of them is that we recently detailed into our office five colleagues from across nsf two of which are from from hrm to serve as special emphasis portfolio strategists this is the first time that we're actually having individuals looking at different populations to analyze barrier analysis truly and deeply working with our employee resource groups uh to make sure that our workforce that is what it should be what conflicts uh there may exist uh what barriers are either perceived or real based on people's experiences so i think that's really a step forward in the right direction and a change that i've seen uh over the last several years another thing i wanted to mention is also the i mentioned before the unbelievable relationship that our office has uh with our chief human capital officer juani gardner uh our division director for h.r bill moleska and nate wells who's his deputy uh earl andrews a branch chief of staffing classification all the folks across hrm we all have a passion for deia regardless of what our titles are what office we work in and i think that has permeated across the workforce we actually in preparation for our strategic plan had design thinking sessions facilitated discussions with stakeholders from across nsf focus groups in-depth interviews really listening to nsf personnel getting what their concerns may be again their perception is their reality and we have to take that into consideration and we've already seen a lot of fruits of that discussion for example and i want to give earl and the folks in hr a lot of credit just a couple of weeks ago they announced that we are no longer requiring supervisor approval for employees to apply for a detail now that sounds like a no-brainer but that was not the past practice at nsf now we only require a supervisor to get into the you know the approval for uh when somebody gets accepted and that is just in and of itself is the elimination of a barrier some folks just don't have that relationship with their supervisor to ask to go on detail they feel that they're uh they're being held back they don't want to be retaliated against i'm not saying that that's uh that that permeates across the agency but we have heard uh from employees that that has been their experience and i think that is one absolute step forward in listening to our workforce and taking action on some of those things that their workforce really wants to see in order to help them in their careers and their professional development thank you so much javier and and xena i know first of all we could go on talking for hours here but if you could just maybe in the last minute just share you're setting the tone how are you continuing to set the tone um and then we'll just thanks thank you um so most of you are probably most familiar with um gao it's being the congressional watchdog many of you hate to see someone from gao show up in your presence but there's a different side and if we are going to hold others accountable for and be for the stewardship of government resources we also have to be a model organization when it comes to those things that we are assessing for example we have mandates and requests from congress currently to examine the implementation of executive order 1435 and what federal agencies are doing in relationship to recruitment retention efforts as well as how agencies are structured to implement executive order 14035 as well as identifying leading practices that can be leveraged across government but before we can shine a light on what others are doing we are very inward focused so i'm proud to say that my agency has a stellar reputation when it's come to deni as a matter of fact we have for nine consecutive years um been ranked by the partnership for public service as number one agency amongst mid-sized agencies for our support for diversity equity inclusion so i just want to say to you that really in my role i have been a partner with our other federal state and local institutions to talk about the challenges and issues and i continue to be in that role and want to continue to serve and that's one way that i serve the american public in my position as being a leader in this space and trying to help others as you overcome challenges and i'm frequently interacting with agencies at the federal state and local levels and so if i have an opportunity reach out to me i am not that gao that most are afraid of uh and dare to actually be a helping hand in this journey on d e and i hey thank you so much and as i said we could go on for another couple of hours but i do want to take the opportunity to thank you all for the work that you do for the passion that you bring and for being here with us today so thank you [Music]