Empowering Inclusive Workplaces Starts with You
Join the SHRM Foundation’s President and an internationally recognized CEO and DEI workplace equity expert as they address changing the workplace one employee at a time through the practice of sustained workplace equity, transparency, truth, and vulnerability.
How can employers truly embed workplace equity into their core business? For the past two years, organizations leaned on HR to lead the charge in addressing complex challenges, including DEI. This conversation will focus on employers doing more than simply saying that employees are their most valuable assets. Discover how HR can use its toolbelt (technology, data, expertise, empathy) to empower, inform, inspire, and help employers and employees build better, more inclusive workplaces, the kind that welcomes older workers, those with disabilities and formerly incarcerated employees.
Subha Barry
Subha Barry is a C-suite leader and an Advisor who brings a unique perspective on the alignment of corporate culture to talent strategy and business results. As a transformational change agent, she has a proven record of identifying and accelerating new business creation, driving sales, and increasing profitability.
She is president of Seramount, now part of EAB. Seramount is a strategic professional services firm dedicated to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Here, she drives the firm’s vision, strategy, and business development.
Prior to Seramount, Subha was SVP and Chief Diversity Officer at Freddie Mac, where she served on the firm’s management committee and led their Foundation. During her 20+ years at Merrill Lynch, Subha was a Managing Director and the company’s first Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, driving strategy, infrastructure and execution with a lens on both global and local community.
She has taught Gender Policy at Columbia University and speaks passionately about the ability to drive innovation by embracing diversity and creating a culture of inclusion. She serves on a number of boards aligned with her passions—education, cancer research, and women’s advancement.
A native of India, Subha holds a BA from Bombay University and an MBA and MS in Accounting from Rice University. She enjoys golfing, reading poetry and rallying for social change. She has two grown children and lives in Naples, Florida and New Hope, PA with her husband.
Wendi Safstrom
Wendi Safstrom is a senior non-profit leader committed to serving the public through philanthropic program management, cultivating strategic partnerships and managing and developing high performing teams. She has both association and nonprofit management experience including; national program development and administration, membership strategy, marketing and product development, grant management, development and donor stewardship, and leading cross functional teams. Safstrom currently serves as President for the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation (SHRM Foundation), where she leads the development and implementation of SHRM Foundation's programmatic, development, and marketing and communication strategies in support of SHRM Foundation's new mission and vision, creating growth plans and ensuring alignment with SHRM goals.
Prior to assuming the role at SHRM Foundation, Safstrom served as Vice President at the National Restaurant Association and National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, where she led the development and implementation of their Foundation's most recent five-year strategic plan, and was responsible for all Foundation programming, including workforce development initiatives, scholarship and event management, community relations and engagement initiatives. The NRAEF's philanthropic programming supported a number of audiences including high school youth, veterans transitioning from service to civilian work and life, opportunity youth and incumbent workers. Of particular note, she led the implementation of the restaurant industry's premier high school career and technical education program, growing the program to over 2,000 public high schools, engaging over 150,000 students annually, nationwide. In 2016, she served as lead project director for the development of a $10 million contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor to develop the hospitality industry's first apprenticeship program, and was instrumental in the Foundation's reorganization and relocation of operations from Chicago, Illinois to Washington, D.C., transforming the staff and culture.
Safstrom has also held human resource management roles with the Leo Burnett Company and Hyatt Hotels Corporation in Chicago, Illinois. She has a BS in Business Administration from the Eli Broad School of Business at Michigan State University and was recognized as a member of the 2014 "Power 20" by Restaurant Business Magazine as a leader in philanthropy within the restaurant industry.