Laura Kohler leads environmental sustainability and social impact efforts at Kohler Co. as the company’s first chief sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion officer. Her appointment earlier this year to the newly created role builds upon a 30-year tenure at her family’s company, serving most recently as senior vice president of human resources, stewardship and sustainability. As a global manufacturer of kitchen and bath products with more than 40,000 employees across six continents, Kohler has diversity and environmental sustainability in its blood, Laura explained in a recent interview with BizTimes Milwaukee associate editor Maredithe Meyer. She discussed how those commitments are now being strengthened “from the top.”
BizTimes: What led to the creation of the chief sustainability and DEI role and how were you primed to take charge?
Laura Kohler: “I have my master's in fine arts and really came into the company – actually adjacency to the company – as the director of the Kohler Foundation, which is an arts and education foundation. I had worked in the Chicago Public Schools. I had worked in Outward Bound. I had done other things in my 20s but really formally came into Kohler as the executive director of the arts and education arm. That's important because it did inform my work later on. Within two years, I was pulled into director of public affairs and then vice president of communications, and that was really learning about the brand and the global footprint and really understanding the diversity of the markets and the locations that we were in around the world. That was in the late '90s and, honestly, we've grown significantly, from about 16,000 people in the late '90s to 40,000 people today. We’ve established our footprint in China, Mexico and India in a significant way. From VP of communications, I came into the HR space, which was people leadership, so taking all my knowledge about brand and global markets and bringing that into then building teams around the world.
“When you're a global company, you are inherently diverse because you are in countries that are not your headquartered country, and that really does require your executives and managers to stretch and learn. It requires you to figure out how to hire in-country. So, the inherent nature of Kohler's growth around the world as a global brand brought diversity to us before we named it that. In the 2000s, we started to recognize that we needed a focus on intentionally recognizing diverse representation and inclusion, and what did that look like? Back in the 2000s, it was really gender. In the early days, that was the common denominator around the world, whether you're in India, China, or the U S. or Europe, it was gender. So in my role as HR for about 20 years, diversity continued to grow in different forms with managers, but we were able in 2022 to establish a senior director of DEI reporting to the head of HR. We brought in A.J. Hubbard, who is the most experienced head of DEI we've ever had. We then we expanded the diversity strategy to include supply chain as well as talent diversity and a culture of inclusion, but also new markets. And with that, when I took on my new role, we brought diversity, equity and inclusion with sustainability. WasteLAB, Innovation for Good, stewardship (social impact efforts), and DEI was right there because we believed that it was more than just talent and culture, that it really needed to inform supply chain, it needed to inform how we address new markets, how we address our product development, so integrating DEI into everything that we do.
“We decided to go big with this new role at the C-level, with a chief title, to really say, yes, Kohler has been doing environmental sustainability. We've had an inherent focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. We've been doing WasteLAB for 10 years. All these different examples of the work have been integrated in the business, but we wanted to really come out and say we are serious. We are leading from the top. We are committing to the title and to the teams underneath to, in a significant way, embed it into everything we do."
What does that mean for you and your team?
Kohler: “It's exciting because I get to be much more involved with the aspects of the business that I'm passionate about. So in just the DEI space, to me, the diversity of our workforce and how we include people is directly related to innovation. With this role, I have the time and energy to do much more community connection. We've got now at least $500,000 committed to Milwaukee partnerships, whether it's United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County, Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, M³, there's a number of partnerships that we have now. I have much more time to do business integration with innovation and our diverse teams and much more focus on diverse talent and spending time with the business resource groups. We have 11 of them and they're started organically by passionate associates who want to innovate, ideate and connect with each other. We have all these groups, so how do we take their energy and passion and talent and bring them closer inside the business so when we're opening a new market – let's just say we're opening more focus on LatinX communities – where do the businesses go? They go and they connect with the LatinX BRG, Viva Kohler. When we're innovating a product for aging in place, which is a diverse, more inclusive approach to design, they go to the caregiver group to really understand (the needs of the community). There's over 300 Kohler associates in the caregiver group who see aging in place real time. It’s this opportunity for us to really think deeply about all these areas that are really important to us for the future and push them into the business and connect the business to that work. We can really spend time building it in instead of having it be in parallel to the business, and that's what makes us different."
What’s been the process of building out your team dedicated to this work?
Kohler: “We're a team of about 40 people, which is a small department at the C-level for Kohler, but it's small by design because what we want to do is be a center of excellence for the work that we're doing and really connect with the business so that the business adopts and integrates it into their business.
"The goal is to hire the best people for the DEI space. A.J. Hubbard comes with amazing credentials, and he's got a couple of people underneath him, and then they work every day with the businesses, and the businesses ignite the work in our plant locations with our leaders. Sustainability might have a team of 15, and they're working with all the operations teams and innovation teams in the business. We have some new roles that we were allocated, carbon engineer, for example. Carbon accounting is super important and we were able to establish a new role in carbon accounting. We're working on internal carbon accounting so that we can make decisions, use information on how much carbon we're using with a new product or a plant expansion. We have a water engineer because we work with water and we have an initiative called Safe Water For All. It's really important that we understand water regulation, water infrastructure and the impact of our plant locations on the watershed. We have a manager- level person inside the DEI team who's very much focused on the BRG's, just managing and helping the BRG's stay connected to the business as a resource, and we have a project leader for Safe Water For All, which is a global headline campaign and program to bring accessible water solutions to the communities where we work and live. We have an Innovation for Good program manager, which is a unique position, and they're managing these new products that are meant for under-supported communities around the world. There's unique positions on my team that have been invested in to create that center of excellence and keep the work going and work closely at the business. We're really honored and pleased at the company's commitment to those roles. And honestly, we’ve seen a lot of existing employees apply for those roles. It's a mixture of people coming from the outside and being connected on the inside."
Has the company found the adoption of the hybrid format has opened up additional opportunities to hire diverse candidates, whether it’s at the corporate office in Kohler or elsewhere?
Kohler: “COVID really forced us to move from a traditional on-site company. Pre-pandemic, I would say 80% of our positions were on-site around the world. Certainly, sales teams around the world have always kind of worked out of their home and handled their branches, but Kohler was very on-site up until March of 2020. We then, like the rest of the world, pushed our teams remotely, except for manufacturing and our hotels. We've come out of that really realizing the value of flexibility and giving our associates the ability to manage their life and work more seamlessly. We’ve moved to three different work modes – on-site, hybrid and remote with travel – and giving more flexibility to the work modes has allowed us to hire more diverse talent. My team is almost 60% diverse, either gender or people of color, and that is because we're more flexible in how we work. I'm also a big proponent of culture and I do love the energy of people being on-site, and I think people learn faster and achieve more when they can ideate, so I bring my teams together as much as I can.”
When you do bring employees together, whether that’s in the office or at other company functions, how do you promote a culture where people can feel comfortable ‘bringing their whole selves to work’?
Kohler: “Our benefits plan needs to reflect and does reflect the diversity of needs of the whole workforce. We have really worked hard to continue to support working parents and maternity leaves, paternity leaves, transition surgeries and reproductive health, and domestic partners. The other thing that we've just done is created a system where self-ID is possible, which means you can identify yourself as LGBTQ+, which actually helps us make sure that when we know the population, we then can tailor the needs of our programs to meet the needs of the population. The equality index will come out this fall and we're really hoping, with the self-ID and improved benefit programs, we'll get the score of a hundred that we've been striving for.
"And then we walk the talk. The BRGs support the passion and energy of associates that want to network and gather and incubate together with the identification that they're interested in. That helps you embed inclusion and representation in a company and has helped us attract talent because the talent on the outside can see we’re doing it. They're letting these organizations thrive inside the company, and they're weaving them into the business. And then we do fun celebrations, such as an on-site Pride event and Juneteenth events. We were in the Milwaukee Pride parade. We did a Pride event in New York City that was sold out. So, I think when your associates start to see that you're building it into the way we work, then it starts to really take off in the culture and then drive a culture of inclusion, which is welcoming difference. Whether you're in the hotel business, whether you're in the engineering design business for kitchen and bath, whether you're in operations for power."
What are some of the challenges or obstacles you’ve faced in pushing to make DEI a top priority for Kohler Co.? Were you ever met with any opposition or skepticism? How did you work through that?
Kohler: “For as many people as we're engaging and inspiring in this work, we have to bring along others who are struggling with it. We are 150 years old, think about that, so, we have managers and leaders in place who have been at Kohler a long time and we have to continue to help upskill them. Right now, we're in the middle of going through something called inclusive leader training, globally, for 3,600 leaders around the world. They're all going through inclusive leader training, which is helping them learn new skills, because it could be that in the past, their team all looked like them. And now, the candidate pools are changing, the ages are changing, and all these candidates are coming from different walks of life, different ethnicities and our leaders need to keep upskilling. Our goal is to upskill all of the leaders around the world and then upskill all of the associates because if you worked at Kohler and you were a diverse associate, it's not just your manager experience, it's also your experience with peers, people around you. In some places, in areas of Wisconsin, it's not as diverse as we would like, so we have to work harder at training and development and creating support mechanisms for people to welcome and be comfortable with more diverse populations.”
What about from the customer or client side of things? Any pushback or resistance to change on that front?
Kohler: “It goes back to us. It's more about how our sales teams who are in the field interact with diverse customers, how do we show up for a diverse-owned architecture and design firm, for example. How do we show up for a housing development company that serves a diverse community? It’s continuing to work with our associates so that we are comfortable working in diverse markets, and we are skilled to do that and then making sure our marketing, communication, our collateral, our digital footprint is representing that we are open and inclusive of not only our associates, but also the customer. And then our design teams, making sure those reflect the customer. It's really 360 degrees: how does the consumer see us and how do we show up for them? And it varies by location. U.S. diversity is not what works in India. So just learning as a global company, learning that and trusting local teams. For instance, all of our businesses in India work together and we qualified for the second year in a row for great places to work, but it's not because the U.S. teams imprinted on them. It's because they owned it, and they did the right work that qualified for that certification because it resonated in that culture, in that market. Diversity, equity and inclusion is flexible because it has to be, it has to be culturally appropriate.”
As a C-suite leader, what do you practice in your day-to-day work and interactions to set the tone of inclusivity and belonging at Kohler?
Kohler: “There’s a couple of things I feel strongly about. I really focus on seeing people, and I mean that genuinely. When I meet people, I try to connect with them and look at them and listen. And when you’re a leader and you’re moving around with a lot of groups, it’s easy to blow through it and not really take a moment and connect and see people. I think people at the end of the day want to be seen and recognized and that’s important. Taking moments to see people and creating a meeting environment where people are seen and heard. The second thing is really including ideas from everyone, even the quietest person in the room, even the newest person in the room. You may ultimately make a decision that is different, but you have included people. Hosting roundtables is the third thing that I try to do. The fourth thing is looking at feedback. We get feedback through engagement surveys, we get very specific, verbatim feedback and then scores, and we always try to listen to what we do well in their eyes and what we need to improve. There’s feedback on inclusion and whether people feel heard and seen and included. Fifth, hiring diverse slates – making sure that I walk the talk – with every open position, as hard as it is because I might have a candidate in mind, I need to have a diverse slate.”
