Diversity In Action

At Freescale, diversity is a global strategy with local implementation

The company thinks it takes great talent to create innovation, so it focuses on finding and keeping talent. Some 80 percent of employees are engineers

Jignasha Amin Patel is Freescale’s director of global diversity.

Freescale is a world leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors, with 24,000 employees spread across thirty countries. Clearly, its diversity strategy must be global rather than U.S.-based.

It is, in fact, a global strategy with local implementation, says Jignasha Amin Patel, Freescale’s director of global diversity and inclusion and director of global talent acquisition. “Our diversity strategy is very focused,” she says. “We want to tie it to our corporate objectives of great talent and innovation.”

And since it takes great talent to create innovation, Patel explains, the strategy focuses on finding and keeping talent.

A first step in recruiting is “branding” the company name. The idea is to make the Freescale name more recognizable to potential candidates. “In order to attract great people, we have to make sure those great people know about us!” Patel declares with a smile. This is especially important, she notes, because the technology Freescale creates is embedded in other companies’ products, and also because, until 2004, Freescale was part of Motorola.

Branding is accomplished through involvement with groups like SWE and NSBE, helped out by the company’s regular appearance in “best places to work” surveys.

“We employ aggressive sourcing goals to recruit diverse candidates,” Patel says. Freescale recruiters form a number of teams, and each team member locates diverse candidates from BS to PhD, and presents them to the team. Both recent grads and experienced candidates are welcome, as are employee referrals. “We have a robust employee reward program,” Patel adds.

Most employee attrition occurs at the entry level. Stats show that once a company has kept people for five years it’s easier to keep them longer. So clearly, it’s in the company’s interest to help new hires find their niche.

One way to do this is Freescale’s engineering rotation program. New grads work four different rotations in their first year. The rotation program is currently U.S.-based, but Patel hopes to expand it globally. She’d like to start with a pilot program in Romania.

Freescale’s six employee resource groups also help with recruiting, retention and development. They are the Asian cultural team, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender team, the Hispanic education awareness team, the black achievement leadership team, the Native American team and the women’s leadership team. Each group has a board that includes top execs and high-level managers.

In addition to their career development work, the groups get involved in corporate projects in the communities where Freescale employees live and work. They also function as an informal mentoring system and a forum for networking among employees from different parts of the company. That, Patel says, “is phenomenal in driving our inclusion strategy broader and deeper.”

The inclusion goal is integrated throughout the business. All the company’s business leaders are given a quarterly inclusion index showing how their groups are doing in recruiting, retaining and developing their people from individual contributors to management and on to executive level.

Numbers for men, women, African Americans and Hispanics are broken out in the U.S., and the company also uses census data to see how its numbers compare with the market. Outside the U.S. the numbers are broken down by gender, but census data isn’t always available.

Because Freescale is a global company, its inclusion efforts include more than traditional diversity elements. Global distance learning, global time management and effective cross-cultural team communication are important. Patel’s team recently launched a mandatory Web-based global inclusion course in which Freescale managers, speaking in their native languages, give examples of how inclusion has affected their bottom lines. Some 18,000 employees have already taken the course.

The team launched another cross-cultural tool: a brief assessment that maps employees’ personal communication styles and gives them tips on how to communicate effectively in other cultures they’ll be working with. They learn how to present a business card in Japan, for instance, or how to shake hands in India. “As a company we believe that collaboration is key and cross-cultural understanding is the pillar,” Patel says. “Little things make a difference.”

All this work is paying off. In addition to receiving awards for its diversity efforts in the U.S., Freescale is recognized around the world. It was voted one of the top ten best places to work in India; the best employer for females in Tianjin, China, and the most caring employer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It also received a silver level award for inclusion and gender initiatives from the U.K. Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology.

Freescale, Patel says, has found a way to “operationalize” inclusion. “Our goal is to hire the best talent. Now we’re talking a language business leaders can understand and put metrics around.”

D/C