Pizza Pizza Ltd. is constantly evolving its diversity, equity and inclusion and culture strategies to ensure they align with employees’ evolving needs as well as the company’s corporate strategies, says Amy Silverstein, senior director of people.
“Over the last few years, we’ve really focused on evolving our DEI committee. We’ve leaned on our employee engagement and DEI surveys to listen to our employees and decide what actions we’re going to take and what our strategy will be. This past year . . . we realized we needed to focus more on mental-health awareness and resilience in the workplace.”
As a part of its leadership development program, Pizza Pizza introduced a program called ‘fierce conversations, resilient conversations’ which talks about how to be resilient as a leader and how to build resiliency among team members.
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The company also had a speaker from Homewood Health to teach employees about unconscious bias and, during its annual diversity and inclusion festival last month, all the activities were centred around mental health and wellness.
“Employers need to ensure their focus on culture is actually relevant,” notes Silverstein. “It’s always going to change and as leaders we need to recognize that, but we’re also running a business and we need to make sure our corporate strategies are able to tie back to our culture initiatives. [This can involve] fostering a culture of principles related to engagement and innovation. It’s being able to take pieces that, from a cultural perspective, seem like a long-term play and tie them back to a tangible business objective.”
From an engagement perspective, Pizza Pizza is committed to approaching this in a way that helps leadership understand the direct impact on the business and helps everyone in the company feel included in the results that the company is achieving.
Looking to the future, Silverstein recognizes people’s personal lives and priorities are constantly changing, so their culture and DEI strategies will have to change along with them. “We recognize life after [the coronavirus pandemic is different] and we need to be able to support this change. One way is with the strong mental-health focus we have right now. But it’s also understanding [that] people’s lives outside of work are changing. When we think of DEI, we don’t necessarily always go directly to that, but I think it’s something important to recognize. . . . We need to make sure we’re providing the right tools to the right people as our workforce changes.”
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