A research conducted by the World Economic Forum indicates that companies that champion diversity and inclusion (D&I) are more profitable and can outperform their peers. A diverse environment results in rising organizations' productivity levels, which directly correlate with increased profitability. As such, the need to prioritize D&I is undeniably gaining more traction today. Businesses are now driving toward enfolding a diverse workforce led by an inclusive leadership that can help enhance their innovation and performance, stay competitive, and improve their bottom line. Unfortunately, organizations often fail to embrace D&I primarily due to their ineptitude to undergo a complete cultural and behavioral transformation. And they need the assistance of a reliable partner who can handhold them through their D&I endeavor — especially in today’s highly dynamic post-pandemic world where businesses require a complete organizational restructuring to survive and succeed.

One such company that is at the forefront of helping businesses successfully embrace D&I and undergo a structural transformation in a way that enhances their bottom-line is Innovations International. This Utah-based leading human resource consulting firm specializes in empowering businesses to transform by providing them with learning, assessments, and guidance, both in-person and online.

While conversing with the Manage HR's editorial team, Bill Guillory, the President and CEO of Innovations International, shares his insights on how the company leverages its expertise and experience to provide unrivaled D&I consulting services to clients.

Could you give us a brief overview of Innovations International?

Established in 1983, Innovations International was the result of my passion for helping businesses transform in the ideal way that enhances their performance. While most HR consultants rely only on behavioral changes, we focus on the cognitive aspect that has a vital role in controlling people's behavior and exercising transformation. Later on, realizing that the differences between people prevent them from working effectively and hamper their performance, Innovations International made a strategic turn toward D&I in 1985. In the years that followed, we had established strong footprints in the industry by leveraging our exceptional service portfolio and a dedicated team of senior facilitators.

What are some of the key challenges that clients face when it comes to implementing D&I strategies, especially in today’s post-pandemic world?

No organization was immune to the impacts created by the pandemic. Worldwide lockdowns, travel restrictions, and work-from-home edicts have completely disrupted their day-to-day operations. Subsequently, most businesses have put their foot forward to redefine their business model and completely overhaul their organizational structure. However, their efforts to undergo this transformation are impeded by several challenges. Primarily, they often fail to define how diversity and inclusion look like in their organization — which is important when it comes to crafting D&I initiatives —preventing them from creating an ideal roadmap to help navigate this unprecedented situation. This is precisely where our exceptional D&I training programs come into play.

Could you elaborate on the services that Innovations International offers?

I’d say the common theme that distinguishes us is our sole focus on personal and organizational transformation, which translates well into our operations and services we offer. We believe that non-superficial, authentic human interaction is the most powerful means to create personal transformation. Adhering to this belief, Innovations International adopts a holistic approach that encompasses both cognitive and behavioral aspects when it comes to D&I. The whole process begins with an effective intervention program, where we deal with stereotypes, beliefs, and attitudes people have about each other to expose what they are in the organization, using a powerful facilitation approach. It helps us draw a clear picture of clients’ ecosystems and gather accurate information rather than making wild assumptions, which can adversely affect their internal stability.
This is followed by a discussion session, where our team interacts with people to make them understand that most of what they've been describing is about their organization. They will also get to choose what they personally find hard to deal with in their organizations in the most realistic way. We then provide them with guidelines to help design takeaway behaviors, which would reinforce the changes that have occurred during the whole process and put them into practice in the workplace. More importantly, as opposed to our competitors who eliminate issues from the surface level and leave the roots untouched, our training programs are designed to wipe out hindrances and design behavioral approaches that make irreversible transformation within our clients’ environment.

We are also recognized for our ability to perform cultural assessments. To do this, Innovations International conducts performance-oriented surveys, where we evaluate clients’ overall performance and inclusiveness. Rather than blindly relying on basic evolution methods, we adopt a unique ‘demographic breakdown’ approach that helps us identify disparities between different groups—be it communities, races, generations, and genders. For example, our evaluation to find whether women are considered equally competent as men has turned out to be shocking as the disparity in their answers was more than 50 percent. If this underlying aspect is left untouched, it can adversely affect a group’s career and organizations’ recruitment processes, development efforts, and overall performance. As such, Innovations International considers demographic disparities as a vital part of the process and makes recommendations based on these measures to help clients address the issues pertaining to inclusion. This way, we help organizations ensure a diverse and inclusive workplace for their employees, augmenting their agility, innovation, performance, and, more importantly, their bottom line.

What are some of the key factors that differentiate Innovations International?

Innovations International’s decades-worth experience, customer-first approach, sophisticated learning materials, and unrivaled service excellence help us serve as a partner of choice for most clients when it comes to personal and organizational transformation. Another aspect that sets us apart is our flexible service delivery model. Since the pandemic was declared, we have completely switched to a virtual environment to seamlessly interact with our clients and conduct training sessions. I think digital technologies are now gaining traction and dominance over conventional one-on-one methods, which is gradually becoming the new normal. In fact, this shift toward the digital environment was a blessing for us as we are now able to deliver service more cost-effectively without compromising in quality.

Furthermore, creativity and innovation are always in our corporate DNA, allowing us to provide clients with best-in-class services according to their varying needs. One such example is the introduction of single-user online programs in 2015. Today, we are extensively enhancing our single-user and group programs by leveraging the advancements in IT and AI. With such a powerful value proposition, we cater to a wide customer base that encompasses several Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies, and healthcare organizations.


What plans does Innovations International have in its roadmap?

Innovations International primarily wants to emerge as a premium service provider that helps create high-performance organizations through personal and organizational transformation. We are now facilitating an integrated approach that encompasses diversity, inclusion, and engagement to help businesses achieve exceptional performance. Dedicated to sharing our knowledge and expertise in organizations' transformation to the global community, we are producing and distributing several whitepapers on D&I and high-performance free of charge. Ultimately, our objective is to facilitate the transformation of human consciousness from the current survival base mechanism to compatibility, caring, and support for each other.