Subway Case Study: How Employee Resource Groups are Transforming Company Culture and DEI Outcomes

So as Luis said, I'm going to talk about how ERGs or employee resource groups can really transform company cultures and diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes. You're really investing in your people. Hi, Carrie Fisher. As Luis said, I'm the Globalization Services Manager at Subway. And I think this is the first time that I'm at a localization event where I'm not talking about localization. So I decided to kind of brand myself. Subway just sent me this awesome t-shirt this week, and so I decided to wear it. Very loyal to the company. And I think the ERGs and the company culture have a lot to do with that. So that's what I want to talk about today. I have a few roles at Subway. I've been with Subway for six years. I am a remote employee. I live in Boise, Idaho, and work out of my home. Hopefully you don't hear my snoring dog. I am a centralized function within Subway, which is kind of a fancy way of saying I'm in charge of getting all of our content translated or globalized because sometimes we still have trouble with those internationalization issues. Those hard-coded strings keep popping up. I report up through the operations department. And I've been in a lot of departments because I think there's a lot of us in this bucket, you know, where they don't really know where to put us. So I started in the technology team. I've been in the international team, which no longer exists. The global transformation office of strategy management. But right now I sit in operations and I think it's a good place to be. It's where all the magic happens, you know, when we are teaching people how to open their Subway restaurants. We're starting from the beginning. And that's where I like to insert myself in the beginning of the process. The other role I've got is I am the co-chair of Empower, which is the Women in Leadership ERG or Employee Resource Group. Let me set the stage. When I started six years ago, I was constantly flying to Milford, Connecticut, which is where Subway is headquartered, or the South Hub in Miami.