Alicia Petross is the Chief Diversity Officer of The Hershey Company. Nomblé Coleman is a Manager of Omnichannel Marketing at The Hershey Company. The Hershey Company ranked No. 6 on Fair360, formerly DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity list in 2022.
Two members of The Hershey Company were honored at the Georgetown Focus on Diversity event, a day-long event hosted by the Georgetown MBA admissions team. The program is “designed to engage top-performing women, underrepresented students and LGBTQ+ students within the full-time and Flex MBA community,” according to Georgetown University.
Alicia Petross, Chief Diversity Officer of The Hershey Company and Nomblé Coleman (MBA‘18), Manager of Omnichannel Marketing at The Hershey Company, engaged in a discussion titled “Co-Creation Across Generations: How an Emerging Workforce is Transforming Hershey.”
The Focus on Diversity event is designed to help prospective MBA students learn more about life as a student at Georgetown McDonough and to shed light on how the institution focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) through courses and programs.
Coleman, an alumna of Georgetown, shared the DEI commitments she has seen both at Georgetown and Hershey.
“Georgetown prepared me to be a business leader at The Hershey Company and this event was the beginning of the transformation process for the prospective students to find their place in the world as well. Both Georgetown and The Hershey Company are on a journey to continually elevate DEI practices as a standard of doing business throughout their organizations and I am excited to be an active participant in their evolution,” Coleman said.
During the discussion, Petross also shared ways the company is making a difference in DEI, as well as the importance of transparency when it comes to growth.
“At least six times a year we are checking in with our workforce,” she said. “We are asking them questions about their daily experience, about the performance of the company and about more resources that they need. That’s one type of listening. But, there’s another type of listening that we’ve been doing throughout the pandemic, and that’s plain old face-to-face conversation, or now, Teams conversation. These conversations have gotten really deep and really meaningful.”
