Coda's Employee Resource Group Playbook

Starting an ERG

Create a Structure

Meetings and Communication

What's Next?

Explore

Meetings and Communication

Meetings

🗒 Types of meetings

People join ERGs for different reasons, so it’s often helpful to ask members what they hope to gain from the ERG. Here are some examples:

Social: develop a support network of people who share a common identity

Professional growth: gain access to resources and opportunities to advance your career

Company impact: create space to voice concerns to leadership and suggest changes to company policies and practices

Having a clear understanding of what members expect will be helpful in determining what types of meetings to hold for your ERG.

Type

Frequency

Description

Audience

Cadence meetings

Recurring weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly

Should be a check-in with your group, an opportunity to talk about what's top of mind, etc

How are we doing? What have we accomplished?

Bring up new ideas and decide on next projects

All hands

Do-something meetings

As needed.

Do-something meetings should have a clear question. At the beginning, you may find that your do-something meetings overlap with your standing meetings and that's fine.

Varies. May be the whole group if you're trying to make decisions and talk about mission statement; may be a few individuals on a specific task force.

Social meetings

Events (special speakers, conferences, etc)

Consider including allies

There are no rows in this table

⁠

If you're small, you'll probably only have one type of meeting when you first start kicking off your ERG, and things will formalize as you grow and become more structured. While meetings will likely become more formal and purposeful as your ERG matures, you may find at the beginning that you're doing a lot of brainstorming and democratizing decision-making. That's fine!

Make sure your meetings allow for diversity of thought, contribution, and conversation, and try to find the balance between allowing interpersonal introductions and networking and sticking to an agenda with goals so that you make the best use of everyone’s time.

As mentioned in

Create a Structure⁠

, we frequently use topic voting during our meetings while brainstorming and making decisions!

📝 Structure your meetings

For meetings that are not just social in nature, what will the audience and goals be for each? Feel free to draw from industry best practices, your company's existing meeting structure, or pre-existing guides that you can tweak to your needs. Or, you can start completely from scratch!

Early on, it's probably a good idea to have inclusive, democratic meetings. Our group, for example, used open meetings to define the need for an ERG and then workshop and vote on our mission statement.

Once you gain a little more traction, you then might want to break meetings down by function. Once Gender Equity at Coda had chosen a few key initiatives for our first year, we broke into working groups to tackle those initiatives.

You may also want to schedule time for guest speakers or meetings that are open to allies. Consider how you'd define those meetings as well.

📆 Scheduling your meetings

Keep in mind accessibility issues when determining how and when your group will meet. For example:

Are you all co-located, or do you have different locations and timezones to accommodate?

Do some members of your resource group have roles that make super frequent meetings or meetings at certain times impossible?

For Gender Equity at Coda, we chose to go with larger meetings for everyone to participate about once a month, as well as focus group meetings for which the team members chose a cadence.

👩 What meeting roles will your ERG have, and how will you determine them?

At Coda, we run our meetings with a facilitator (called "Meeting Molly”) and a note taker.

The Molly is responsible for keeping the meeting running and reminding folks to submit their updates, vote on topics, etc. When a decision needs to be made during the meeting, they act as the guide to help the group reach consensus or implore decision makers to reach a conclusion.

The Meeting Molly rotates with each meeting. If you were a Meeting Molly in the prior meeting, you typically take on a note-taking role for the next meeting.

This ensures that the same person isn't always volunteering for the administrative tasks of running a meeting.

📢 Publicizing meetings

As your company grows, you may find it helpful to send out a company-wide email the week and day of any ERG meeting. This serves as an open invitation to people who might want to participate even if they weren’t previously a part of the ERG.

🗒 Types of meetings

📝 Structure your meetings

📆 Scheduling your meetings

👩 What meeting roles will your ERG have, and how will you determine them?

📢 Publicizing meetings

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