Saran Johnson started her career as an HR professional in the public accounting industry over 20 years ago and has more than 15 years of human resource management experience.
Saran has extensive knowledge in the areas of recruiting and retention, employee relations, organizational development and strategic planning as well as resource management.
Saran is a diversity, equity and inclusion champion who focuses on identifying and analyzing organizational issues and subsequently developing programming and policy recommendations.
Saran is a graduate of Hofstra University where she earned her BA in Psychology and Molloy College where she earned her MBA in Management. Saran is professionally certified in human resource management and regularly speaks on industry topics.
More from Saran…
When it comes to diversity in the workplace, Saran Johnson knows what it takes to create programs that encourage and promote equity and inclusion. She shares with us ways to develop and better these programs.
“To be quite honest, initially, when I kind of took the steps to roll out this program at Marcum, we ran into very similar issues. It was just that people want to throw money at the problem… the initial thought is to, alright, so we’ll do a scholarship for $10,000, or whatever else to someone that’s disadvantaged. It really is a matter of looking at process and procedure. Things that would encourage people, so there’s diversity, and then there’s inclusion. So, you go out and you recruit, and you try to attract people, but then what’s going to make them stay.
Really what makes people stay is seeing others or the ability to be mentored by people that are similar to them in some way. It would be silly to go out and recruit and then say, “alright, you’re part of the organization, you’ll be fine” without giving them opportunity, giving minorities, people of different ethnic backgrounds, an opportunities to thrive and excel….
I’ll tell you how things kind of developed for me when I started with Marcum. They did have a women’s initiative that I didn’t start. It focused really just on advancing women throughout, not only public accounting, but within our organization. I want to say maybe 10 years into me being at Marcum and I had been promoted to manager level and didn’t necessarily see a lot of people that looked like me in these leadership positions and said, “let’s dig a little bit deeper and start digging into other groups.” So, we opened it up to every group. I mean, we have affinity groups at Marcum that include veterans, young professionals, working parents. So really, it came naturally. It was a natural progression from the women’s stuff that we were doing.
Then from there, it was really getting buy in from our executive team. So, going and making a pitch for the benefits of having diversity in thought and having people from different backgrounds. Then, it started to hit us from a monetary standpoint, as you start getting government contracts with that type of work, they ask and require diversity. It really became at some point we needed to in our proposals present diversity within our firm and diversity within teams that might work on certain engagements. We’ve been able to develop from there.”
