Driving transformative change is about more than implementing technology; it’s also about investing in people.
At SAP, fostering diversity and inclusion in the workplace is a priority — and according to Supriya Jha, SAP’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, it’s a responsibility shared by every employee.
Upon her arrival at SAP in the fall of 2021, Jha was impressed by the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion initiatives, including ones focused on LGBTQ+ and autistic communities, and knew SAP could go further. Introducing the company’s first annual Diversity and Inclusion report in 2022, Jha sought to enhance transparency and accountability across the organization.
“There's great value in transparency,” Jha tells ASUG. “It creates the impetus within the organization to keep moving ahead. It creates a level of commitment and dedication.”
Recently recognized among the top 15 Chief Diversity Officers by DiversityGlobal, a quarterly magazine for C-Suite executives and professionals responsible for driving change internally, Jha is especially dedicated to creating systemic inclusion at SAP. One way in which she and her team seek to foster inclusion across SAP is through setting and monitoring goals and metrics that track the company’s progress.
Earlier this year, SAP released its 2023 Diversity and Inclusion Report, announcing several forward-looking KPIs, including 25% women in executive ranks by 2027. SAP also introduced pronouns and preferred name functionalities in its products for SAP employees. Its long-running SAP Autism at Work initiative was recognized as a World Economic Forum Lighthouse Program for DEI.
ASUG recently connected with Jha to discuss the importance of DEI programs for SAP’s customers, partners, and employees.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
ASUG: Since being appointed Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at SAP, what programs and initiatives have you put in place to foster diversity and inclusion? How does this benefit not only SAP employees, but customers as well?
Jha: I've been fortunate to work in the diversity and inclusion space for over 17 years. By the time I landed at SAP, I had seen the cycles of diversity and inclusion rise up from the ground at places like Nasdaq. When I landed at SAP in November of 2021, I learned about the company’s great history of work around diversity and inclusion, from the LGBTQ inclusion movement to the focus on women, underrepresented minorities, autistic community, and so on.
This company has a very rich history of diversity and inclusion work from the grassroots. My job, initially, was to make sure that I built on that foundation and take it to the next level. I realized that, while the diversity and inclusion work was deeply rooted in the values and the commitments of the organization, it was not widely known.
There's great value in transparency because it creates the impetus within the organization to keep moving ahead. It creates a level of commitment and dedication. One of the first initiatives I took on was combining the story around diversity and inclusion for the company. We put out our first Diversity and Inclusion Report in June of 2022, which gave our organization a sense of strategy, commitment, and direction.
Our direction was very simple, separated into three pillars:
- Workforce diversity, including a broad spectrum of identities, visible and invisible differences, and topics that had not been touched on in the past, like the concept of interfaith, faith, and religion within the workplace. We started planting the seeds of neurodiversity awareness around that time.
- Workplace inclusion, referring to the experience that people have within the workplace, a sense of fairness, equity, and equality, and how to foster that.
- SAP's responsibility and commitment to the market on diversity and inclusion.
On these three pillars, I am most proud of the progress we’ve made around our 13 Employee Network Groups (ENGs). These are our safe places for communities and people with different identities to come together to find that sense of community belonging in the workplace, now formalized with an operating model and governance structure, no longer working in isolation, and receiving support from the organization, my office, the leadership team, and executive board members.
I am proud of the work we’ve done to build a focus on diversity- and inclusion-related features in our products. For example, we now have pronouns in SAP SuccessFactors for people to identify themselves. While SAP has always built accessibility features into our products, we are now taking a fresh look and continuing to build.
The third area I'm very proud of is the work we are doing around education on diversity and inclusion. This is done with the help of the ENGs, as well as directly with a lot of self-directed learning we make available.
ASUG: How does this work benefit your customers?
Jha: Simply put, it helps the customer move forward on their own diversity and inclusion journey. If the customer has a product that is clearly nudging them on diversity and inclusion, it helps them move forward. The pronoun example is the best one. If SAP SuccessFactors gives you the ability to ask your employees how they identify, it helps you as an organization move forward. It provides an aspect of systemic inclusion that most organizations aim for — or should be aiming for.
With the help of our ENGs, the largest one being the Business Women's Network (BWN), we help our customers walk with us on this journey. In certain programs, BWN has brought together partners and customers to talk about the topic of gender advancement and progression of women in the workplace. We share best practices. We talk about what we are doing within the company, and how they can leverage it.
This is non-product related. This is more about taking a storytelling approach. We experienced this at SAP Sapphire, where the Business Women's Network, the Autism Inclusion Network, and the Veterans Network all discussed the story we have within the company. We also brought together customers and partners to share their stories.
Through the Autism Inclusion pledge, 100-plus companies have signed up to learn about our autism inclusion journey. Keep in mind that SAP has done work on autism inclusion for 10-plus years now. We were one of the pioneers in this space.
We started the concept—with its roots in India—at a global level. Today, we have over 200-plus employees who are on the spectrum. We want to share that journey. We want to talk about the best practices. We started that pledge and invited companies to join.
It's been a great experience for us in not only improving our own internal processes, but also telling folks what we do best and how they can do it.
ASUG: In recent years, other tech companies have de-emphasized the importance of these topics. We've seen DEI commitments falter in the last couple of years. DEI is expensive; it takes a lot of resources. What challenges did you face in initiating these programs, and how were you able to overcome those challenges?
Jha: One notion I'd like to correct is that this is expensive work. What we are is a very lean organization when it comes to the Diversity and Inclusion Office. In general, the work around DEI doesn't require as much resourcing as is portrayed. It requires the firepower of your employee base. If that is missing, this work cannot be done.
The challenge primarily comes from a sociocultural standpoint. If a particular culture is inherently not predisposed to the topic of including minorities, or including different perspectives, then you are faced with a barricade. But if you've got an internal employee workforce that is inherently attuned to the concept of a growth mindset, where they're inherently attuned to opening their minds to learn new perspectives, the work becomes easier.
People at SAP have a very high sense of integrity, a very deep desire to make an impact on the world, to help the world—truly, like we say— run better. With that, the force of the employees comes into play. We don't have to spend many millions of dollars on diversity and inclusion. We get a lot of work done with the firepower of our people today.
I'll give you an example. We've got 900-plus employees who serve as ENG leaders in various capacities around the world. In previous Diversity and Inclusion reports, you would see around 30,000 people in the ENGs at SAP. The people here are the driving force. I might be the face, but it's a group of people that are working towards it.
At these moments, we find the greatest impetus coming from the ground up, as well with our leaders, our executive board, and our supervisory board standing behind us as we say, “This is essential. It needs to be done.”
We will not create divisive forces here. We can't change the external world, but we will stay united within the company. We will keep doing the right thing for the company, for our people, for our partners, and for our ecosystem. You don't see us backing down on LGBTQ inclusion globally. You don't see us backing down on the support for various minority groups around the world. We stand tall because our people are standing tall. There’s a growth mindset. We realize we have to keep changing with the times.
ASUG: To ask more specifically about the Business Women’s Network and the specific goals for women in leadership positions at SAP. Please expand on these programs and the specific KPIs that have been outlined to measure progress.
Jha: Let me start with our direction on women's development. We had two KPIs that we had been tracking for the last several years: Women in the workforce and women in management positions. ‘Management positions’ refers to people-management positions. We observed that we moved fast and well on building up the strength of women in our organization; 35% women in the workforce was achieved in 2022. Women in management is one that we are working towards as well. We want to be at 30%, and that number today is very close to being realized.
What we observed is, if you don't see people like yourselves sitting at the helm, you don't think you can aspire to it. That's the general view of many minority groups, that you must see yourselves at the top. We have put in place a new KPI, with the help of our Supervisory Board, around women in executive ranks.
We aspire to have at least 25% women in the executive ranks, which is the top of the house, reporting directly into our executive board, by 2027. What will we do to achieve that? We will achieve an increase in number of women in the workforce, and therefore an increase in number of women in management ranks, and therefore more women at the executive ranks.
We’re trying to create that momentum from the ground up with leadership development programs aimed very specifically at addressing the needs of women who are at the cusp of becoming people managers. For instance, there's a program called Women to Watch that expanded into a global program last year. It had already been running in our large business units, and in the Customer Success board area for several years before that. We have scaled it up into a global program in the last two years. We take about 250-plus women into a specialized journey, helping them build up their visibility as well as access to senior leaders and decision-makers.
With pipeline efforts, our internal and external recruitment is sharpened. We are not just looking at a wider pool of talent; we are looking at more innovative ways to bring in talent. We’ve got returnship programs, where people who have taken a career break, due to all kinds of reasons, have an opportunity to apply and get selected for SAP.
The third, most fundamental change we are working on right now is systemic change that is necessary within our talent strategy. With the arrival of Gina Vargiu-Breuer, Chief People Officer at SAP and our new executive board member, we are trying to assess the whole people agenda itself and see where we need to make improvements along the employee lifecycle, so that they get appropriate, equitable, and equal opportunities to rise up the ranks: To be seen, to be visible, and to be considered for some of the company’s most senior positions. We’re doing all this while keeping the hygiene around pay equity and around equal, thoughtful benefits in the workplace. That approach will make more long-term, lasting, sustainable change happen at SAP.
ASUG: Those, of course, are very specific metrics and goals for women in leadership and for the workforce. In what other ways are you measuring success?
Jha: Success metrics come from various directions. In the diversity-inclusion space, we can't just measure through numbers. The qualitative and the efforts around assessments are also essential. A lot of work is done with our employee network groups, surveying them, and through our business-as-usual #unfiltered survey, which is our engagement survey.
We measure the perception of our employees on various topics, including diversity and inclusion. For quite some time now, we've seen scores around the 90% mark on the perception of equality and equal opportunities in the workplace. So, besides the KPIs, which are monitored by country, by business unit, by region, and so on, at every level of the organization, we also look at some of these qualitative ways to keep assessing the sentiment of our people.
ASUG: As we look through the rest of 2024 and into 2025, what are the priority goals and specific areas that you're focused on?
Jha: The work of DEI takes sustained efforts and commitment. Over the next three years, I want our company to build up our muscle around diversity and inclusion through allyship. The efforts around building up awareness, education, and understanding are underway right now. I'd love to see improvements in the adoption of those education paths that we are taking our company on, all those experiential paths as well.
Besides the KPIs that are publicly reported, what is most important is the adoption or embracing of the idea of DEI. As the world changes around us all the time, if we are a resilient population of people that understand the value of diversity and inclusion, we'll keep moving forward.
Allyship is one of the critical areas we are trying to build on, through our ENGs, and through sustained activities in different parts of the organization. Our work in the marketplace pertains to building up diversity and inclusion. We will not go very far if we go alone on this topic. We want to bring in our industry partners and peers on this topic, and we are actively convening sessions with many of our peers on neurodiversity and on accessibility.
Our programs are often very public. International Women’s Day, for instance, for the last three years, has been a public program for SAP, because we want to talk about the challenges and the opportunities of women in the workplace very openly. In terms of our big bets, we need to live up to our words, along with our peers and industry partners, and keep building up that strength.