For Monica Sylvain, chief diversity officer at Louisiana-based IberiaBank, a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (or DE&I, as it’s increasingly widely known) starts with building community. “It’s important to lead with the ‘I,’ or ‘inclusion,’” she says on the latest ABA Banking Journal Podcast, “having a sense of fairness, and [having]your employees feeling like they have a sense of belonging.”

On the podcast, Sylvain discusses IberiaBank’s approach to DE&I, including:

• Having a DE&I council comprising a broad cross-section of employees at all levels of the organization. “That group is really helping us to think through the things that are top of mind for our associates when they think about inclusion, when they think about equity, when they think about diversity.”
• Educating the bank’s leadership team—and its employees—on recognizing and understanding unconscious bias. “All of us as human beings have unconscious or implicit bias. [We] make snap judgement decisions,” she explains. “If you look at the neuroscience, we do it in nanoseconds.”
• The importance of including supplier diversity, as well as employee diversity, in the bank’s DE&I framework.