Nicole Starks, vice president, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) for Voya Financial, developed the company’s diversity action-planning process, providing senior leaders with employee demographics and creating transparency around opportunities to enhance diversity within the organization. DEI works with leaders and HR partners to create action plans to drive progress around representation, talent development, employee engagement and recruiting.

Nicole recently launched a leadership development program focused on increasing the cross-cultural competence of senior leaders. She also supports Voya’s 11 Employee-Led Councils in bringing programming to colleagues, clients, and communities and encourages giving back through Voya’s National Days of Service and the Employee Giving Campaign.

Nicole creates innovation in DEI by bringing people together. She was instrumental in the establishment of Voya’s DEI Task Force, composed of more than 80 business leaders who have developed and launched initiatives to improve the financial outcomes for underrepresented communities. As of today, Voya has assembled task forces that focused on both the African American/Black and Latino and Hispanic communities. A successful initiative from this effort was providing demographic reporting and analysis to some of Voya’s retirement plan clients to develop deeper insights into how employees from different demographic groups save for retirement.

Favorite Quote: Be the change you wish to see in the world. —Mahatma Gandhi