DE Talk | The Value of ERGs: Building a Trustworthy Environment for ID&E Conversations

Season 4 • Episode 8

In recognition of Ramadan and Arab American Heritage Month in April, we sat down with Raheef Alturkmani, Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist for Inclusion, Diversity & Equity (ID&E) at Dow, to discuss best practices for building employee resource groups (ERGs) that thrive. In addition, he shares details of the organization’s Middle East & North Africa (MENA) ERG and how having passionate leaders and planning activities and initiatives around employee interests are key to their success.

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About DE Talk

For DirectEmployers, it’s all about valuable connections and meaningful conversations. This monthly podcast features honest and open dialogue between powerhouse industry experts on a variety of HR topics ranging from OFCCP compliance advice to emerging recruitment marketing trends, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and insightful solutions that help infuse new life into your HR strategies.

Hosted by Candee Chambers, Executive Director of DirectEmployers Association.

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Episode Guest

Episode Transcript

Candee Chambers:

Get ready. The DE Talk Podcast starts now, insightful conversations and dialogue, helping you put the human factor back in HR.

Mikey Meagher:

For companies today, efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, belonging are often listed as top priorities. One initiative that continues to be particularly impactful in creating a sense of belonging is the formation of employee resource groups or ERGs. While ERGs have been around since the ’60s, many still grapple with encouraging participation, expanding efforts, and trying recommendations into future actions. Today’s conversation will cover one employee’s journey leading an ERG, his talent acquisition, and ID&E work, his journey as a practicing Muslim observing Ramadan, and his employer’s inclusive efforts to support and honor his culture in faith.

Hello, everyone. I am Mikey Meagher, DirectEmployer’s manager of diversity, equity and inclusion strategies. Fostering workplace belonging and inclusive practices is something I am incredibly passionate about. One initiative that is particularly impactful in creating a sense of belonging is the formation of employees resource groups. ERGs can truly uplift diverse voices and create community and collaborative growth internally, which leads to so many positive outcomes, not only on the talent retention side, but also in creating a thriving inclusive culture.

We find our employer members are always looking for insight and supporting these groups and providing flexible, safe, and accommodating spaces for employees. Today I am excited to welcome Raheef Alturkmani, a senior talent acquisition specialist for inclusion, diversity and equity at Dow, to share more on one of the ERGs he has revived at Dow, his experience as a Muslim employee, how the team at Dow supports his observation of the holy month of Ramadan, and how employers can be inclusive to their employees during the month of Ramadan and other religious holidays.

So Raheef, welcome. I’m very excited to get this conversation started. First and foremost, I do just want to say happy Ramadan to you and acknowledge that April is also National Arab American Heritage Month, celebrating the 3.7 million Arab Americans who reside in the US. Really excited to have this conversation, not only to hear your experience, but also call attention to how all other employers can best support celebrations and religious holidays and make that all inclusive. Let’s just get started by sharing a little bit about yourself, how long you’ve been in HR, and what drew you to Dow.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Thank you so much, Mikey, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you also for acknowledging the month of Ramadan and the Arab American Heritage Month. I’ve been in HR with Dow since 2000, late 2015. During these seven, almost eight years, I worked in multiple HR disciplines. Compensation, HR merger and acquisition, client facing, talent management and talent acquisition is my current role.

Now what drew me to Dow is when I finished my master’s in HR, I wanted to work for a company that has the same values that I have or values that resonate with me. When I learned about Dow and the great things that they do, when I learned about their values, which is integrity, respect for people, and protecting our planet, these values resonated very well with me right away. I also learned about the leading efforts that Dow is doing in the inclusion, diversity, and equity space, which is an area that I’m very passionate about. I decided this is the company that I want to work for and I applied for the HR development program and was accepted to start my HR journey with Dow. It has been eight years and I’m looking for many more years to come.

Mikey Meagher:

Very cool. Eight years, that is great. That’s commitment. I’m just curious how other people looking for jobs or looking for the same thing that you are in an employer, how did you hear of the values and the DE&I efforts at Dow? I’m just curious.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Yeah, great question. Usually the company websites are a great location to look for this information. Also, if you have connections with either mentors or people who work for the company or have them on LinkedIn, you can check them out and see what they are talking about in their postings and stuff. I think the website and personal connections or knowing someone, not necessarily knowing them as a friend or as a mentor, but just knowing that they work that company can get you a sense and a feeling of what the company really values.

Mikey Meagher:

Very cool. That’s good advice and really good plug into the LinkedIn, too. I think sometimes that’s a resource that you’re looking for jobs, but you can also see what’s being posted out there, like you said, what that company’s doing from a cultural standpoint and DE&I efforts and all of that, so it’s very helpful. Tell us about your role as a senior talent acquisition specialist, specifically with DE&I. What all do you oversee in supporting this role?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Sure. I think it’s a little bit tough to cover all aspects of my role. I can give an overview and some examples. I support inclusion, diversity, and equity within the North America Talent Acquisition Team and I manage partnerships between the North America Talent Acquisition Team and our 10 employee resource groups. I also lead the Talent Connection Committee, which is a talent acquisition sub-team that has senior recruiters, North America talent marketing specialists, and the talent sourcing team lead. This committee focuses on coming up and implementing initiatives and collaborations with our 10 employee resource groups in North America. I also lead People with Disabilities Hiring Task Force, which is a cross-functional task force of disability inclusion experts, and we aim to create and share educational material and propose and implement enhancements related to disability inclusion. We also have recruiting efforts for people with disability, such as including the Disability:IN conference.

In addition to that, we have great partnerships and collaborations with disability inclusion organizations as well as students with disability offices in several university. I also support several diversity programs and external partnerships. Good example would be our partnership with OneTen organization, which aims to upscale and hire 1 million Black talents in the next 10 years, hence the name OneTen, so I’m the talent acquisition focal point, or SME, in that partnership between Dow and OneTen and the list will go on. I know you’d like to talk about other topics, but this is an overview and some examples of what I do at Dow in my current role.

Mikey Meagher:

Wow. Yeah. It’d probably be shorter to list what you don’t do, which you could get all 24 hours of the day.

Raheef Alturkmani:

And luckily I work with great teams, get great support, and I don’t recall any time that we come up with an idea or an enhancement or something to make our processes or our efforts more inclusive, I never recall a time where anyone said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” It’s always, “Yeah, let’s go for it.”

Mikey Meagher:

That’s great. It really is. I love to hear that. You mentioned Disability:IN conference. We participate that in each year as well and that’s a great conference. If you’re going to be there this year, I look forward to seeing you.

Raheef Alturkmani:

I will and we will have three more individual or team members from the task force, so let’s make sure we connect in person there.

Mikey Meagher:

Yeah. All right. That sounds like a good plan to me.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Perfect.

Mikey Meagher:

Going off of that, what work has your team done to support attracting the diverse talent to Dow? Are there any success stories that you can share for listeners, just regarding your process behind that?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Absolutely. I’ll start with partnerships. We have great partnerships with many organizations. We talked about Disability:IN. We also have strong partnerships with SASE, with the SWE, with HBCUs, and the list goes on here. We are in constant contact with these organizations and actually some of my Dow colleagues serve in committees at these organizations. For example, I serve in the Disability:IN talent acquisition committee and I have been learning a lot and sharing a lot and bringing back a lot of the learnings to the North America Talent Acquisition Team as well as the people with disability hiring taskforce team members.

In addition to having these collaborations with these organizations, we attend career fairs and conferences that this organization host and we hire great talents from these conferences. Dow also hosts the Diamond Symposium annually and this Diamond Symposium is intended for top US ethnic minority undergrads for universities across the United States. We usually host about 40 to 50 students and we extend 25, approximately 25 internship and full-time offers with usually good acceptance rate. We also host the BEST Symposium, which is primarily intended to introduce Black, Hispanic and Native American US doctoral and post-doctoral scientists to the wide range of rewarding careers in industrial research and many opportunities at Dow. We also get pretty good acceptance rate from this symposium. I would refer our listeners actually to the Dow ESG report, which is available online, and has a lot of similar collaborations and stories and attracting diverse talents efforts that Dow does, but these were only few examples to mention here.

Mikey Meagher:

Okay. Does that Diamond Symposium take place once-

Raheef Alturkmani:

Once a year, yep. I wish it’s once a month, but it is once a year during the summertime, usually. If our listeners are interested, they can just go to our careers website and they will find the information about the Diamond Symposium as well as the BEST symposium. Usually both of them take place during the summertime, June, July timeframe.

Mikey Meagher:

Okay, awesome. We could also list that as a resource with the podcast episode.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Absolutely, yes. Great idea.

Mikey Meagher:

What recommendations do you have for how fellow people and team leaders can be inclusive to their employees?

Raheef Alturkmani:

That’s a very good question. My main recommendation, and it’s based on my personal experience, is to be a trustworthy colleague and trustworthy leader. If your team trust you, they will feel psychologically safe to bring any topic in their mind to a conversation with you. As you know, and I’m sure our listeners know, it is hard, if not impossible to address an inclusion related issue or challenge if you don’t at least have the conversation about it, so trust, to me, is a key word and then the actions and the commitments comes after that.

Mikey Meagher:

Yes, trust definitely is huge because a lot of these topics, they can be difficult to talk about or to know how to talk about and are you saying the right thing, asking appropriate questions? Having that trust already built in makes those situations as easy as they can be or easier. You’re not always so simplified that way.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Yep, I agree, but you at least need to start the conversation.

Mikey Meagher:

Yes, exactly. Speaking about conversations, employee resource groups are a great way to help mediate those rough conversations or tough conversations. You serve as the global chair, correct, for Dow’s MENA ERG?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Correct, as well as the North America chair.

Mikey Meagher:

Okay. Can you just go over what the acronym MENA means and just give us an overview and just walk us through that?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Absolutely. MENA stands for Middle East and North Africa and the MENA ERG at Dow is a group of Dow employees who share a MENA background and or have interest in the MENA region. You don’t have to be a MENA descent to join the ERG. It’s a global ERG. We have over 2,000 participants globally and almost half of them are here in the United States, which is great, because it gives the opportunity to those almost 1,000 individuals to get to know MENA more. This ERG was formed around, I would say 11 years ago under a different name, different logo, different strategy, and this happened when we had many Dow employees move to the Middle East or came from the Middle East or worked with people from the Middle East to support a major project that we had. It’s called Sadara, which right now, Sadara is a joint venture between Dow and Saudi Aramco, the famous oil group in Saudi.

The MENA group activities slowed down significantly between 2014 and 2018. When I joined in 2015, we didn’t have any active chapters, we didn’t have leadership teams, but when I revived the MENA ERG with few leaders and colleagues in 2018 with a new name, new logo, new strategy, I personally had two main goals in mind. I wanted to bring awareness and break stereotypes about MENA region and its people through cultural events, through bringing MENA external speakers, highlighting MENA success stories, showcasing MENA as a diverse region. All of that goes under the bringing awareness and breaking stereotypes. The second goal, which is equally important, if not even more important, is to make people like myself, who are of MENA descent, feel included at Dow and give them the opportunity to grow and develop as well as give them the opportunity to bring their authentic self to work and celebrate their culture without having to hide any aspect. I am a MENA descent person outside Dow and I am a MENA descent employee inside Dow. I don’t have to separate or be two persons, one outside and one inside Dow.

Mikey Meagher:

Wow. And do you recall, so before you revived this ERG, do you know what the partition participation rate was like?

Raheef Alturkmani:

I think it was around 400, but I’m not 100% sure, but I know we significantly grew in the last three, four years. And also, the ERGs in general at Dow have evolved over the last three, four, or five years, so we cannot associate this only to the MENA efforts or the MENA leadership efforts how much the ERG grew, but it’s also Dow ERGs in general and the focus on inclusion. The fact that we have a chief inclusion officer back, I think 2017 or 2018, we announced that we have a chief inclusion officer. Many other companies have inclusion under HR or aligned to a team, but having a chief inclusion officer gave more support to inclusion efforts, including the value of ERGs in the company.

Mikey Meagher:

Wow, that’s incredible. I’m still getting over the number of 2,000 employees in your MENA ERG. That’s amazing.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Thank you. By the way, MENA is considered one of the smaller ERGs at Dow because we are still young, it’s growing. We have ERGs that have 5,000 and 7,000 and 8,000 participants globally.

Mikey Meagher:

Do you find that, because it’s a global company, do you find that different ERGs based on geographic location maybe don’t operate in the same way or how do we work through that if there’s maybe some difference in beliefs or culture?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Yeah, very good question. I think having a global ERG and then local chapters or regional chapters and then local chapters helps with bridging these differences. The focus will be different for each regional chapter or site. For example, in North America, our main focus is on bringing awareness about the MENA region, while the MENA chapter in MENA region, they don’t necessarily need that. They need to focus more on developing their MENA talents and be inclusive to those who are not of MENA descent, so it’s almost the opposite. Here in the United States, MENA is one of the minority groups, while in the MENA region, those who are not MENA descent are the minority, so how can you be more inclusive to those individuals? How you can introduce the culture to those individuals? That’s one example. Global versus regional, this is something we acknowledge and we act based on the needs for each region, but we do have a global steering team. We do have a global strategy that drives our efforts and actions.

Mikey Meagher:

Very cool. I want to circle back to the ERG in just a minute, but I think having some background on going into some of these questions … When we connected one of the topics that you were incredibly passionate about is the sense of belonging and support that you feel from your team and Dow as a whole, especially as you observe Ramadan. Would you mind sharing a bit about Ramadan for our listeners, just a general overview right now, you know what it is and why Muslims fast?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Sure. I’ll be happy to give that. What it is, Ramadan is a month. It is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. And during that month, Ramadan, it’s called Ramadan everywhere. That’s the name for it. It’s not translated or anything. It’s called Ramadan everywhere. During that month, Muslims fast from dawn to sunset every day and while they are fasting, Muslims don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t have intimate relationships throughout that time. Although these rules can be very challenging for many people, to me, the spiritual uplift that Muslims receive from observing Ramadan helps minimize any inconveniences. Now, why do Muslims fast? It’s similar to many other religions. Fasting reminds people to appreciate the blessings that they have and it helps instill discipline within individuals or helping them control their desires.

Finally, Ramadan is a great time to reflect, to practice charity, to avoid or discontinue bad deeds such as cheating or back biting, stealing or any bad deed that someone has. Ramadan is a great opportunity to get rid of those bad habits. I was thinking maybe you are wondering, do all Muslim fast? What about younger kids? Do they have to also fast dawn to sunset, which is going to be very tough? Fasting is obligatory for all Muslims when they reach the age of puberty. Younger kids are not required to fast, but when they start to recognize, understand what the month is, maybe around age 5, 6, 7, you introduce Ramadan to them. You tell them about it. You show them how you are fasting and you’re not eating and you’re not doing bad things during the month of Ramadan. It’s not really required until the kids reach the age of puberty. Now, there are some exceptions, even for the adults. Sick people, traveling people and pregnant or breastfeeding individual or females, they are exempt from fasting. They can fast later and there are a lot of details on this, but there are, again, some exceptions. If it hurts you to fast, then you should not be fasting.

Mikey Meagher:

Okay. Yeah, going back to the children, I was going to get into that a little bit. I just wanted to get more. Your experience when you first started practicing Ramadan yourself, have you found that you appreciated, as the years have gone on? What was it a little hard for you during those first few years that you started fasting during the month of Ramadan?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Very good question. Honestly, since the time I remember fasting, I have always appreciated it. The victory that I had when the sun is down and I can eat my, we call it breakfast because it is truly breaking the fast, I felt very satisfied and I felt this great sense of achievement that I went through the whole day without fasting. I started to fast even at a younger age than is required because I would get some treat or some rewards from my father and my mother if I do so. It’s a huge commitment in the Islamic religion to fast the month of Ramadan, so that’s why the parents, they tell the kids about it at an early age.

Now, back to your question, did I appreciate more? Absolutely. When you grow up and when you process things differently, you truly appreciate the value of fasting. For me, it helps with the self-discipline. If I’m able to prevent myself from eating or drinking, which is permissible only because God wanted me to not eat and drink during that time, then it should be easier for me to avoid things that are not permissible for me like cheating or by back biting, et cetera, because I have that self-control and I was able to do it for the things that are allowed, so it should be easier to do it for the things that are not allowed. I hope it makes sense. It’s clear in my mind. I don’t know if I expressed it in a way that you can understand what I’m trying to deliver here.

Mikey Meagher:

Oh, no, I definitely understand and I think it’s absolutely incredible to have that outlook on it too, and I think it takes practicing the faith and everything to help get you through that. I appreciate you sharing that with us.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Sure.

Mikey Meagher:

I said I want to circle back real quick and just to get a background on the month of Ramadan, can you tell us, is there more participation in the MENA ERG during this month that you’ve noticed during Ramadan or is it pretty much the same, do you get, from other ERGs?

Raheef Alturkmani:

What we notice usually, when we have an event for the MENA ERG, we get more participants after that event because we get the opportunity to talk to people and people invite others to join the call and then those individuals decide to join, et cetera. I do see, usually, in the last three, four years, I do see an increase in participation every time that we do a celebration event for the month of Ramadan. This year we are planning to do similar events, so I’m hoping that we will get more participation. Last year we did a very successful event that we are very, very proud of, where we hosted a Ramadan celebration. It was a collaboration between MENA and the Asian Diversity Network and it was a global event and we had hundreds of colleagues calling in from all over the world to that virtual event. During that event, I had the pleasure to chat with one of our vice presidents about his personal experience about Ramadan, although he does not observe Ramadan, he’s not a Muslim, but he did grow up with some Muslim friends and it was a great conversation and we are hoping to do something similar this year on a North America level. We’re not doing a global Ramadan celebration this year, but we are preparing some good stuff to share with our Dow colleagues.

Mikey Meagher:

Nice. I like that. What recommendations can you provide to encourage employees to participate?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Another excellent question. For MENA, our leadership team or teams around the globe, we try to make the events relevant and as informative and as engaging as possible. We look at what occasions or holidays are coming up, we hear from our participants what they want to learn, and we keep the Dow priorities in mind when we plan and deliver or implement events. For example, we had a great event at MENA about the decarbonization and sustainability, as these are big priorities for Dow. We had very large number of employees tuning in from all over the world. We celebrated, as I mentioned, the month of Ramadan globally. We offered Arabic language sessions, we hosted guest speakers who lived in the MENA region and we asked them to talk about their experience and their career growth, again, make it relevant to employees and attractive for participants to come and attend the session.

We started a MENA history series and we talked about the MENA history and we went all the way back to the early 1900s or even be a little bit before that. That’s another interesting topic for our MENA participants. We presented about multiple MENA countries in our passport series, which is a series that we started last year and we are continuing. The last country we covered was Qatar, where the soccer World Cup took place in November, December of 2022. To get more engagement, to get more participation, you need to ask yourself what the participants are interested in and then plan accordingly.

Mikey Meagher:

All right. What attributes have you seen that led to the successful ERG participation and growth? Would you contribute that to what you just said with digging deep and finding out what it is the employees want versus-

Raheef Alturkmani:

Yes.

Mikey Meagher:

… Yeah, more so than what you think they need?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Yeah, exactly, and that’s one very important aspect of it or one important factor. The other factor would be having passionate ERG leaders because this plays a huge role. These ERG leaders, they do the ERG work on top of their day-to-day job and I know that this does not go unnoticed by the Dow leadership. We hear the recognition and the appreciation throughout our journey of starting, planning an event all the way. After we deliver the event you will receive this encouraging feedback about how great the team did or getting positive feedback about we learned something new that we had no idea about, et cetera, so having the passionate team is very important.

In addition to this, the topics, as I mentioned, they need to be relevant and they need to align with what Dow is talking about, what are the priorities of Dow, and also what are the key things that the employees and our colleagues are talking about and try to help them to provide something that helps them grow personally and professionally, expand their knowledge about specific topic or specific country or specific region and also provide some employee development opportunities. That’s how we can get even more participation. Participants talk to others who are not participants. They not convince them, but they show them the value of participating in an ERG and then those individuals decide to join and become active participants.

Mikey Meagher:

I want to touch on too, you know mentioned a good point in saying a lot of ERG leaders are doing this. It’s not just their job to solely dedicate towards the ERG and you have to have a group of passionate individuals. DirectEmployers recently just started our own ERG. There was a team of us that got together about a year ago. It took a whole year to put in place and we were finally able to launch it in January. There’s much to be learned from you, so we would love to have you come join and talk to us if you can at some point, because your experience is just second to none.

Raheef Alturkmani:

I will be more than happy. I don’t know if you can tell or not yet, but I am truly passionate about this topic, so I can talk about this at any time, just let me know. I’m only an email away from you.

Mikey Meagher:

All right, perfect. Thank you. Okay. Do you have just any additional recommendations you can share for employers who are looking to maybe create an ERG, maybe they don’t have this yet, and what kind of atmosphere it can contribute towards their employee experience?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Absolutely. The first thing I would suggest is to truly realize the value of ERGs and the value of inclusion, diversity, and equity in general from an employee experience and customer experience perspective, from a business perspective, branding perspective, supplier perspective. It helps even with government requirement perspective. All of these perspectives, if you realize as a company, and there’s a lot of research in this area, if you realize the value that you get through your commitment, through your focus on inclusion, diversity, and equity, I believe that company leadership and employees will be willing to commit and dedicate time and efforts for ERGs as well as for inclusion, diversity, and equity in general. The second thing, which is equally important is the leadership commitment, it is a key. I’m talking about all leaders at all levels, starting from the CEO all the way to the frontline managers. Finally, try to find ways to get the ERG more engaged and more impactful even, not only from a social and networking perspective, but turn them into a true resource for the employees and for the company.

A perfect example for this is the support for the Crown Act in, I believe, in June of 2021. Multiple ERGs GAAN, the Global African Affinity Network, WIN, which is the Women’s Inclusion Network, collaborated with the Consumer Solutions Business at Dow and the Dow Government Affairs. These four groups, four teams partnered to support legislative actions to pass the Crown Act. If you don’t know what or recall what Crown Act is, it stands for Creating Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair and it prohibits race based hair discrimination in employment and educational opportunities. The impact, the advocacy that these ERGs did helped to support this Crown Act and I wish I have more time in this, but again, I will refer our listeners to review or read our ESG report for many stories like this that the impact that our ERGs have in the advocacy space.

Mikey Meagher:

Yes. I was just going to ask if you could also list that as a resource, too. I’d be interested to learn more about that myself.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Absolutely.

Mikey Meagher:

I know we don’t have a ton of time left, but I do really, really just one last thing I want to touch on is, I know when we talked last time, you had mentioned the Human Library Project and Jamie and I had no idea what it was, so cool, so I was just wondering if you could give a brief overview real quick before we go on what that is and how that experience is beneficial bringing into the workplace.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Absolutely. The Human Library is what it is. It’s a library. Just like you go to a library and grab a book to read, you come to the human library event and you can read the human book by asking them any question in a safe and inclusive setting. The Human Library is a global organization and they held hundreds of Human Library events across the globe every year. I participated a couple of times, actually, as a human book here in Midland, Michigan at a high school and I will participate again early April in another high school Human Library event. In these events that I participated in, the students stopped by my table to read my book, which is me, I’m the book, and they asked me great questions about MENA, about Islam, about my personal story.

I tell the readers at the beginning of the event, I tell them I’m an book for you, you can ask me any question, and I will not be offended. Honestly, if a question I don’t want to answer, which never happened, but if there was a question that I didn’t want to answer, I would just say, this is a chapter that is not ready to be published yet. I personally had a great experience and I know the students, from the feedback that the school staff shared with us, students really enjoyed reading the human books and I cannot wait to participate in the upcoming Human Library event.

Mikey Meagher:

Is it just the one that you participated in?

Raheef Alturkmani:

I participated twice, but it was on the same school for different students. Last year and the year before the last year it was for the senior students, so we had new group when we did it the second time. In the near future, I will participate in a different school, so totally new audience and I’m really looking forward to it.

Mikey Meagher:

Very cool. I want to try one myself sometime.

Raheef Alturkmani:

I would highly encourage you to do so. It’s very eye-opening.

Mikey Meagher:

Yeah. I just feel like that’s such a unique experience and like I said, not one I’ve heard of before, so it’s very intriguing.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Sure.

Mikey Meagher:

All right. To close, we’re going to go through with our rapid fire question round and I just want you to say the first thing that comes to your mind, no pressure at all. Going off of the Human Library, if you were a book, what would it be about?

Raheef Alturkmani:

If I were a book, it would probably be about the value of ID&E and how it maximizes the return on investment in the human asset because in my opinion, the most important asset that a company has is the human asset. I think I will be a book about that, the impact of ID&E on ROI in human assets. That’s a longer title, but it’ll be about this, probably.

Mikey Meagher:

I hope you write a book someday. I would read that. Favorite season, winter, spring, summer, or fall?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Summer by far. I grew up in the Middle East, but not in the Gulf countries. The Gulf countries are very usually hot and most of them are hot and humid. In Syria, in the Middle East, the weather is much mild, so you get to experience the four seasons and it doesn’t go extreme on any of these seasons. When it’s cold, it’s cold, but it’s not extremely cold like it is here in Michigan or when it’s hot, it’s not as hot as it is in Houston. It’s very mild. In Michigan, summer is definitely my favorite season.

Mikey Meagher:

I would have to agree with you. I like any season that has nothing to do with anything below 60 degrees.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Yeah. We are almost always below 60 degrees for about seven, eight months, probably, in Michigan.

Mikey Meagher:

Oh my goodness. Oh, that takes a special person. What is the last book you read or podcast you’ve listened to?

Raheef Alturkmani:

With reading books, I used to read much more, but with two younger kids, it’s becoming harder to find time to read books. If we’re not counting the kids books that I read recently, the last book that I remember reading is called Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Great book if you have time to read it, but I should dedicate more time for reading, hopefully when the kids grow up just a little bit so they can read by themselves.

Mikey Meagher:

Yeah. All right. And to round it out, last one, best career advice you’ve ever received?

Raheef Alturkmani:

Best career advice, I will share a great advice that I did not personally receive, but it was an advice that our Chief Inclusion Officer Alveda Williams gave in an interview that she had and she said, “Bloom where you are planted.” My interpretation to this is when I do so, my deliverables will be my best advocates. I’ve seen this working for myself, for others, and I think it’s a great advice, so bloom where you are planted.

Mikey Meagher:

Wow, that is great advice. I’m writing that down right now. Want to keep a sticky note on that.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Good. Yeah, very, very powerful.

Mikey Meagher:

It really is. Well, Raheef, thank you so much for joining us today. I truly applaud your efforts and work to support diversity education and understanding it’s part of not only your work, but in your community as well.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Thank you.

Mikey Meagher:

Yeah. How can our Members who are listeners connect with you? We can get them connected with you just because I think beyond this podcast there’s a wealth of knowledge that you still have to give out there. All right. We’ll be in touch and we’ll be sharing the resources as well in the link of the episode.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Mikey Meagher:

Thank you. You, too, and happy Ramadan.

Raheef Alturkmani:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Candee Chambers:

Thank you for tuning in for another episode of the DE Talk Podcast. Stay connected with DirectEmployers on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and subscribe to our emails by visiting DirectEmployers.org/subscribe to receive notifications of new episodes, webinars, events, and more.