Our 2024 Workforce Diversity Report

Our 2024 Workforce Diversity Report Published on Oct 23, 2024

LinkedIn Corporate Communications

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As the world of work evolves, we have ambitious goals guided by our company vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Nothing is more important to achieving these goals than having a world class team. Our annual workforce diversity report gives us an opportunity to share more about our continued commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and why it's so important to our team's success. Our work begins with the foundation of creating belonging for all employees, which is critical in unlocking the value of a diverse workforce. Upon this foundation, we invest in inclusive recruiting and retention practices and community-strengthening initiatives that have helped us build a more diverse and effective company.

In FY24, we adapted and evolved our strategy to increase impact. We've grown the number of employees engaged in inclusion and belonging work through increased manager engagement, initiatives focused on mid-career employees, and a revamped Employee Resource Group (ERG) Leadership Program. We've refined our approach to hiring by adapting the way we monitor talent pipelines and by partnering with external organizations to engage a diverse range of communities. While we are constantly seeking to improve the way we operate through the lens of talent, we remain grounded in our company vision and our belief that a diverse and inclusive global team is critical to pursuing that vision successfully.

Leading with belonging

To put it simply, our work in diversity, inclusion, and belonging seeks to empower every employee at LinkedIn to thrive, regardless of background or identity. In 2016 we introduced the concept of belonging as a key part of our culture, which has evolved to become the foundation of our work. Inclusion and belonging are often viewed as one, but we find it important to give space for each and their unique meanings.

We think of inclusion as a reflection of who has influence and power within an organization. Inclusive organizations are ones where the voices of influence reflect the diversity of the organization as a whole. They do this through company culture, systems, and the makeup of their leadership teams.

Belonging is much broader in scope. An environment of belonging is one where every employee can show up at work as their authentic selves. The research, published in Harvard Business Review and elsewhere, along with our own experience tells us that creating belonging for all employee groups is critical in unlocking the value of diverse teams, because it empowers people to contribute their authentic experiences and talents toward the broader goals of our company. The power and challenge of belonging is that it isn't something anyone can create on their own. It takes everyone working together to build a supportive environment, both within teams and across the broader company.

Our belonging work begins with people managers, who play an outsized role in employee experience. We continue to invest in foundational inclusive leadership training, attended by over 80% of our people managers and 89% of our leaders at the Director level or above. We've worked to extend manager impact by broadening their opportunities to engage. For example, we've expanded the ways in which we engage managers of program participants across growth and development opportunities and community-focused initiatives. By offering managers more insights into the experiences of employees from marginalized groups, we help them to become more effective and inclusive leaders not just to team members from those groups, but to their entire teams. We're also supporting managers in navigating challenging workplace discussions as the world around us becomes ever more complex, with a focus on fostering belonging and supporting employee well-being. This includes offering leadership guidance and providing employee support resources.

We've undertaken new bodies of work focused specifically on belonging. Most of these efforts intersect across employee identity groups. For example, our work on socioeconomic inclusion has led us to insights into the experiences of employees who are among the first in their networks to work in corporate jobs. We use these insights to enhance our inclusive leadership and allyship initiatives, impacting employees across all racial, gender, and other identity lines. Other efforts focus on the unique experiences of specific demographic groups, like our LGBTQ+ allyship guides, which originated in India and have since scaled globally.

Equitable career growth and supportive community

In our efforts to empower all employees to thrive, we aim to retain our teammates across identity groups and ensure that employees of all backgrounds have the opportunity to grow into leadership positions. We hear again and again from our employees about the importance of connection and community, especially for those who may not have others with a common background on their teams. Our InspireHer initiative, for example, connects women of color across functions to build community. Our Catalyst program, now entering its sixth year, brings together employees from underrepresented racial groups across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Every employee at LinkedIn can benefit from connection and community, and we're consistently inspired by the work our twelve ERGs do to support their communities and allies. Sometimes this takes the form of building connections across groups, as in the Cafecito networking series co-hosted by Habibi (our ERG for employees who identify as Middle Eastern, Arab, and North African and their allies) and HOLA (our Latino and allies ERG). Other even

LINK:	https://news.linkedin.com/2024/October/our-2024-workforce-diversity-re...
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