adidas Group

This has been an exciting past couple of months for the LGBT resource group of the adidas head office in Portland. What started in July 2013 as a meeting with my HR colleagues at our favorite Thai place around the corner has resulted in some truly amazing accomplishments for the brands, the company and its employees. Our latest achievement: being named to the top of the list of apparel retailers in the Human Rights Campaign buyers’ guide this year.

When the Human Rights Campaign published its 2015 Corporate Equality Index and ranked us 80/100 our first reaction was: why not 100? What do we need to improve right away? After carefully gathering feedback from the HRC group and also looking at the details of the survey, we realized that we actually did really well! It is apparently extremely rare to have a company entering the survey and score so high for the first year!

The Corporate Equality index is published by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)

We now have a list of issues to tackle to reach a perfect score in 2016:

We are kicking off the new year with an official participation in the HRC “Time to thrive” conference, that will be held in our home city of Portland/Oregon, USA. adidas is an official sponsor of the event and will also provide employee volunteers to the event – about 30 to 35 employees will donate their time to the event on Valentine’s Day. We are extremely excited to be part of this great conference and will keep our readers updated. Look for an update at the end of February! To access the HRC Corporate Equality index (see page 55 for adidas reference), click HERE

We are also planning to once more be part of events we already successfully participated in in 2014 like the Portland NW Pride, the second adidas US diversity day and the Reaching Out MBA conference.

United by passion – the adidas Group goes all in

There are many other actions that we are currently working on either locally with the community (local LGBT youth and transgender non-profits), nationally (unlocking our athletes’ potential), or internationally (with our Herzo counterparts, developing other regions’ LGBT groups and providing support to employees in offices in difficult parts of the world where being an LGBT employee can lead to imprisonment or the death penalty – Asia, Arab region, Russia).

We have been blessed so far to have received awesome and unconditional support from the business within the Portland office but also Board level support with the nomination of Robin Stalker as the patron for the LGBT group.

The group has reached a level of its evolution that cannot be ignored and it continues to grow and promote diversity and inclusion values internally and externally.

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