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Nearshore Americas Feature Story & VXI’s Commitment to Workplace Equality

3 minute read, posted on 06/20/2020, by VXI Marketing

Workplace Equality

As one of the largest private women-owned, minority-certified businesses in the United States, we push every day to ensure workplace equality. Diversity and inclusion is a core part of our business culture.

Several years ago, we helped ignite the inclusion movement in the BPO sector in the Philippines with our famous “Passion for People” video.

The emotionally powerful video, viewed +4 million times, changed an industry’s culture.

It led VXI to adopt “Passion for People” as our corporate slogan.

We think about this power. And this responsibility. All the time.

Like all companies (Ahem, I wish), today VXI is looking closer than ever at ways to expand our inclusion efforts.

I’m a middle-age white guy. I’m as Protected as they come. I don’t need to do my good deeds helping old ladies cross the street. I need to use my role to create pathways for others.

We deeply believe in the power of cognitive diversity to solve problems fast and better.

If you’re not yet on board with this, get educated.

When you put 10 people at a table who share the same common business priorities but possess different viewpoints, backgrounds and ideas, you are unleashing the power of human creativity at its best. Helping expand diversity and inclusion helps others, helps me, helps our business. Helps the world.

We’re proud at VXI that four of our six U.S. sites are managed by people of color. Our U.S. workforce is about one-third African-American. That ratio holds true in the leadership ranks at some of our sites. On our global executive team, seven of our 11 members are minorities. But we can do better.

This isn’t a beauty contest where VXI get points for checking boxes. We have a structure and a plan to keep expanding our diversity initiatives to widen those pathways for individual success.

That’s why articles celebrating VXI’s inclusion, like the one in today’s Nearshore Americas, is so important to us a company.

Here’s what we say in this headline story, “Tackling Workplace Inequality.”

Country Leaders Chris Boucher (Jamaica) and Jean-Pierre Wheelock (Guatemala) shared:

  • Of VXI’s 532 employees in Guatemala, just one percent are of Afro-descent. Just four percent are Indigenous. Sounds low, but that’s inline with country averages. Wheelock stressed that most Indigenous people live outside of Guatemala City, so there is not a large population to draw local employees. And most don’t speak English. But we still pursue them. How? We work closely with the Finishing School, a nonprofit that has provided English-language training to thousands of residents. Then we try to bring them to us: “VXI’s outreach to these groups includes free shuttle transport that extends to the outer reaches of the city,” said Wheelock. “Diversity is a superpower, and takes active steps to diversify our workplace.”
  • In Jamaica, +90 percent of our 800 employees are of Jamaicans of Afro-descent. It’s not a diverse country. Until recently, VXI imported experienced and highly successful foreign leaders to Jamaica to manage the site. They were great leaders. They hit their numbers. But guess what? Our new country leader, Boucher, is a fellow Jamaican. He is such an incredible role model that our young workforce instantly upped their game. In this new leader, they saw their future selves. We widened the pathway. In less than 3 months, agent attrition dropped more than 300%.

We have a lot to do. We always will.

We’ll have victories and we’ll make mistakes.

We’ll keep moving forward.

How about you? What are you doing to widen the pathway?

 

Legendary starts here. Ask us anything.



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