Lenovo is the world’s biggest PC maker and a truly global IT company. A very interesting hybrid between east and west. Uniquely, their official headquarters are in both Raleigh N.C. and Beijing/Peking. In Europe, their biggest offices are in Slovakia and Hungary.
- What was the motivation to join Workplace Pride?
The Lenovo Foundation (Lenovo’s charity arm) created a program to empower Employee resource groups to grow with the support of affinity partners, which lead us to look for partners in the market and lead us to Workplace pride. I see Workplace Pride as a truly global partner with experience in challenging markets to help scale up LGBTIQ+ Inclusion across the organization.
- Which of the programs and services are you most excited about?
First, I believe the Global Benchmark can helps us operationalize and track progress year over year and focus on the areas in need of attention.
Second, the learning & Development program can help us to raise awareness and structure the way we community with the rest of the employees.
- Where do you stand on your LGBTIQ+ journey?
Globally we are in the early stages of our LGBTIQ+ inclusion, If we look at it from the country level there have already made great advances, for example in the US Lenovo scores 100 points in the human right equality campaign, or the Slovakia Pride ERG won the ERG of the Year in the 2017 European Diversity awards. We celebrate Pride every year and we have a very strong allyship community.
- What are your key areas of focus in the coming period?
The biggest challenge is to harmonize processes across the organization and standardize the way we improve conditions for LGBTIQ+ employees in the company. We also want to improve the communications and engagement of the LGBTIQ+ community and allies across the entire organization, specifically in challenging countries.