How to ensure ERGs are seen as essential to your organization

No one understands the value of employee resource groups (ERGs) quite like Maceo Owens.

She’s benefitted from them as an employee. She’s advocated for them as a lead and HR professional. And she’s helped build them as the founder and CEO of her consultancy, the ERG Movement. Each of these experiences have informed how she sees, and helps organizations to see, ERGs.

“I really like to lean into them as internal marketing engines that just leverage community to help people to love a company more or to want to stay,” she said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast. “And executives,” she later added, “they typically understand that concept.”

Owens sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, to discuss how HR can best champion ERGs within their organizations.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How can HR support ERGs so that they feel integral and not optional?

I believe that ERG programs should run like businesses…a lot of my frameworks come from the business world. This is one of them. It’s called the three Ps framework in the business space. It’s known as, “people, process, product.” In the ERG space, I like to say, “purpose, process, programming”…having clarity on your purpose is super important. And also as part of that, that means having a strategy for your program, how it develops over time, processes…also, even then, how do we have this centralized in one place so everyone can easily just identify what needs to be done, what goes, where are the templates?...And then finally, when it comes to programming…with that, it’s assumed that ERGs and ERG leaders are inherently experts at their community just because they care about or maybe even identify with the community. That’s a huge mistake…That’s a skill and that’s something that needs to be taught. Some people do inherently have it, but in general it’s something that needs to be taught…But doing those things put together, that leads to proper positioning for an ERG program. And when you have that, that means that you have executive buy-in because you’ve clarified it with the process. You’ve made it super easy for the leads to show up in terms of the process…and then you’ve also trained them on how they can do programming that engages their members.

In your opinion, should they be led by HR or the employees?

ERGs are an HR-led initiative—actually, just a company initiative…if you were to look up the definition of ERGs, it’s going to tell you that it’s an employee-led group. I think that that may have been accurate for what they were for those first 55 years when they were informal…once ERGs started getting budget, once they started getting support from executives, once they started even getting processes, and for some companies, even program managers, this became a company initiative.

What advice would you give to an HR person who does not have the finances to support ERG programming?

Right now, budgets for ERGs typically range somewhere between $2,000 to $7,000…even for the ones with far less, there’s still such a huge opportunity there. And that’s why I really like that CGG framework because it just helps us to come up with, what are some creative pieces of programming that we can do that actually don’t require any budget? And there’s a lot of those that could take place when it comes to connection. You can hop on a call and do a speed networking, or even, for instance, I’ll give a low budget example of something that I saw that was really cool from a veteran’s ERG where they did an MRE tasting. That had to cost maybe like, I don’t know, $300 and maybe that could have been the big initiative for the year if that’s all ERG had.

How would you advise an HR leader starting an ERG from scratch?

I would do a listening tour with employees from all different parts of the business just to hear about the appetite for this program…But also what’s super important is having a conversation with your executives…this is an, again, internal marketing initiative, it’s just like employee engagement. If employee engagement is getting way more budget, way more buy-in than ERGs, these are the same exact things, except this is actually more potent because we’re leveraging communities versus just general employee engagement. Whenever I talk to executives like that, they get it…they also understand the value here, and things just become so much easier once you kick off with clear purpose.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.