As the vice president of diversity & inclusion for Hackensack Meridian Health, Wayne Boatwright is responsible for making sure the network remains committed to diversity and inlcusion. In other words, that Hackensack Meridian is creating an environment that embraces differences other than race and gender. “It’s critical that all of our team members, patients and families feel included,” Boatwright said.

He points out that many organizations boast of having diversity but it is not an inclusive environment. For example in many instances organizations report that they have certain percentages of people of color, women, disabled individuals and members of the LGBTQ community, however those individuals are not listed in their company directory when it comes to representation in leadership, governance and other decision making roles.

“That is not inclusion,” Boatwright said. “And in the industry we call that the ‘illusion of inclusion.’”

Sharper focus

Women of color are represented in the network in greater numbers than in the past. In recent years the network has implemented several initiatives that help increase this number.

Boatwright said when HMH reports employment information to leadership and the boards, “we are now making sure that we include crucial areas like women in leadership positions, the movement of our millennial team members and the upward movement of our underrepresented team members.”

He said the Oct. 8 Women of Color Leadership and Empowerment Conference – sponsored by Color Magazine, NJBIZ and Hackensack Meridian – is important because “it represents another avenue in addressing the challenges that still exist for women of color in our organization, New Jersey and throughout the country.”

Boatwright said he is “encouraged by some of our initiatives that have highlighted and intentionally focused on our women of color.”

For example, his organizations support five team member resources groups (TMRGs), which in the past may have been identified as affinity or diversity groups. The groups are Veterans, Young Professionals, Multicultural, LGBTQ (PRIDE) and Women in Leadership (WIL). All of these groups have women in color as a part of the membership, but the WIL group has had the most impact on the female population.

One of the successful WIL initiatives is a mentoring program that started out for other women leaders but has now grown to provide mentoring opportunities throughout the network. The WIL group has about 93 members to date.

The group has also “spawned” another resource women’s group titled “Aspiring Leaders.” The primary focus of this group is to provide those successful and important resources to those women that are not identified as leaders.

“Like many organizations we are encouraged by the growth of our women, but many reports give the perception that all women are moving forward and being recognized,” Boatwright said. “This is one of the many reasons that we wanted to assume the role of the host/sponsor of the event. We want to be able to address and call out the plight of women of color, especially those in New Jersey and begin to develop tangible action plans to immediately address some of these real life inconsistences.”

Over 70 percent of the 34,000 team members in the HMH network are women and that number is reflected throughout our leadership positions. Women make up 70 percent of supervisory positions, 75 percent of our mid-level positions are women and women make up 47 percent of C-suite positions.

“Over the last three years since the merger of Meridian, Hackensack, JFK and Carrier Clinic , I have really felt that our leadership is serious about diversity and inclusion and we are ‘walking the talk,’” Boartwright said. “Although our efforts in the past were important, a lot of our focus was community involvement. Our community continues to be an important focus but creating efforts for growth and recognitions for all level team members is incredible.”

Boatwright was recently appointed to the HMH Board Development committee along with Dr. David Kountz of the Hackensack Seton Hall Medical School to focus specifically on increasing the ethnic diversity on the board and other governance structures throughout the network.

“I was impressed that the community did not have to come to our board and discuss diversity, the board leadership created a mandate that they would not only increase diversity, but also move from a board of representation to a competency board,” he said. “This will allow the nominating committee to strategically determine the needs of the board and fill positions based on this criteria.”

Boatwright asserted that for diversity and inclusion to be successful it is critical to have support and commitment from the highest levels of the organization. But he cautions, that although leadership can mandate diversity training and policies and procedures, they cannot mandate engagement. Therefore it is as critical for the diversity and inclusion efforts to be embraced and believed by all levels of the network.