Emily Pitts, principal of Inclusion and Diversity at Edward Jones, was the first African American woman to be appointed general partner there back in 2004. She says that, although the diversity initiatives she runs there are fairly new, their roots date back to the founding of the company.
“I like to equate our diversity initiatives to our founding partner who had the idea of making investing with Edward Jones available to the farmers when we first started,” Pitts explained. At the time, making investment available to farmers was very unusual.
“They were going after an untapped market, which was the farmers,” said Pitts. “No one had actually gone out there. So they helped the farmers, and they were making money, but no one really saw them as a market for investors. People had to go to wall street to invest, or downtown, and so our founding partner basically said, you know, let’s go out and help the farmers.”
She believes that in reaching out to more people from diverse backgrounds, Edward Jones is continuing that legacy of finding untapped markets.
“I think it’s a direct correlation to inclusion and diversity,” Pitts said. “I see the diverse market as similar to the farmers, being an untapped market, and an opportunity to educate and to serve more people, and to help more people reach their financial goals.”
Edward Jones has various programs they currently use to encourage diversity in their workforce. Their mentorship program, for example, is now nine years old.
“The mentoring program is one of the very deliberate focuses that we have on ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to learn from the more veteran associates at our firm,” Pitts said.
“Because sometimes people tend to only mentor people like themselves, not, you know, in an intentional way, but because it’s just convenient. Or maybe you’re mentoring somebody that you know already, because you’re close to them.”
Edward Jones’ Home Office Inclusion Mentoring, however, encourages cross-cultural mentorship, so that people deliberately mentor those who are from a different cultural group than themselves.
In the seven years that the mentoring program has existed, it has gone from 100 participants to 700 – all volunteering to mentor or be mentored.
“It’s totally voluntary, which really makes it cool because our senior associates and our partners actually volunteer to be selected by someone to be their mentor,” said Pitts.
Aside from the mentoring program, another way that Edward Jones works towards a more inclusive environment is through its yearly Diversity Career Event, held during the firm’s Inclusion & Diversity week. The event, which will happen during the week of October 2 this year, is a career event created specifically for minority candidates. Every Edward Jones department will have a hiring representative at the fair to talk to candidates about job opportunities.
Those attending the fair, Pitts said, can expect to “meet face to face with actual hiring leaders. They have booths set up for every division, from HR, to operations, to legal compliance, to information systems, to finance…everything. The people who actually do the hiring for that division will be there to meet and greet people, and take resumés. So it’s a great opportunity to have a face to face moment with the people you might actually be working for.”
Pitts believes that Edward Jones’ commitment to being a diverse organization goes deeper than person-by-person hiring efforts and mentorship programs.
“Inclusion and diversity has always been a part of our overarching initiative, but we created this new 5-year plan, where it became core strategy #5, which is to enhance the diversity and the capability of our workforce,” Pitts said.
In Edward Jones’ most recent 5-year plan, the business necessity of increased diversity is “called out very explicitly,” Pitts said. “It’s a very important objective for our organization. So it’s not beneath anything.”
The company also recently signed onto the Fortune 500 Diversity Action Plan, which recognizes that including people from diverse groups is often an issue within Fortune 500 companies. The 175 CEOs who have signed on so far are pledging to do something about that.
“I’m very pleased to say that our managing partner, Jim Weddle, signed that pledge,” Pitts said.
“What we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re maximizing everyone’s potential, and creating an environment where everyone can thrive and be successful. Inclusion comes first, and inclusion is really just creating that environment where everyone is valued and respected.”
Pitts sees creating a more diverse workforce not only as the right thing to do, but as a way to strengthen Edward Jones as a company.
“Diverse perspectives create more innovation, which helps the firm to be more productive and effective in serving all of our diverse market share,” she said.
At the end of the day, diversity, for Edward Jones, is a way to do business better: “Our goal at Edward Jones is to help the individual investor reach their financial goals, and we need to make sure that we’re reaching all the markets in order to do that.”
For more details on the upcoming Diversity Career Event, and on inclusion and diversity initiatives at Edward Jones, visit http://careers.edwardjones.com/explore-opportunities/hq/inclusion.html.
