Our Ongoing Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

HealthEdge’s culture values a deep sense of community, understanding, and most importantly, belonging. We want our employees to know that HealthEdge strives for an inclusive environment that welcomes people of all backgrounds, ideas, and voices. That’s why HealthEdge created iBelong, an internal group that has regular, open conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion and discuss ideas on how we, as a company, can do better.

In October 2020, HealthEdge took our commitment to diversity and inclusion a step further and joined MassTLC Compact for Social Justice. As part of this initiative, we promised to introduce and expand educational programming related to diversity, inclusion, racial inequality, managing diverse teams, and creating a judgment-free culture.

It was important from the beginning that our employees had a voice and drove the educational content by helping us identify the most impactful topics. A few members of our iBelong group worked together to define what we wanted to accomplish with the programming. They also volunteered to take the training before we launched company-wide to provide feedback on what resonated and what was missing.

We realized quickly that the training needed more than just definitions of diversity and inclusion. The number one question we received was, “what can I do to make a difference?” To make an impact, the sessions required actionable information with steps employees can take to create a more inclusive workplace. For example, certain sessions took deeper dives into recognizing unconscious bias and steps to overcome your own biases, as well as the LARA/I method of active listening that opens the door for meaningful conversations and connections. We encouraged all employees to complete the courses and begin to take actions that will help us progress toward expanding our diversity and inclusiveness.

We understand that we cannot create a diverse, inclusive, or equitable workplace through just emails or handouts; we need to build trust and strong relationships. We want our employees to feel comfortable talking to each other about difficult topics, sharing their points of view, and make these discussions part of our culture.

The next step is to build on what we’ve learned through a speaker series. The series will take the concepts we already introduced and take a deeper dive into what does it mean and how as a culture, we can get better, be more diverse, make sure everyone feels included.