February 28, 2025
From Commitment to Action: How Northland Built a More Inclusive Culture Across 16 States
In 2020, Northland set out to build an intentional, strong foundation of diversity, equity, and inclusion across their organization. With a motivated and committed senior leadership team and an engaged, diverse workforce—the challenge was where to start and how to make sure their efforts were reaching their 650-strong employees across 16 states.
Who
Northland is a privately-held real estate private equity firm with core competencies in the acquisition, development, management, and long-term ownership of multifamily and mixed-use real estate throughout the United States. They “seek to provide properties and services that allow residents to truly make a home and a community for themselves.” Northland employs approximately 650 people across 16 states with an earned revenue of $600M.
The Opportunity
Northland wanted to establish a strong foundation of diversity and inclusion across their entire organization. Their core question was: “How do we ensure our efforts reach staff throughout our corporate headquarters and properties spread across 16 states?” With a highly committed senior leadership team and an engaged, diverse workforce, Northland was well positioned to leverage existing strengths to move their inclusion work forward.
“As the average team size at each location is around eight, team members have to work very closely together day in and day out to be successful. It helps that our teams already celebrate both professional achievements as well as personal milestones including various cultural events.”
–Jay Babbitt, Vice President of Human Resources, Northland
Our Work Together
We launched our partnership with Northland with discovery conversations structured to elicit understandings of Northland’s culture, priorities, and expectations for our work together. Through those conversations, we identified that there was a need and interest in foundational learning across the organization. Our expert facilitators led Understanding Social Identities workshops open to all team members, and an Organizational Change for Equity workshop, which was designed for leadership, including regional managers. From there, we led a core group of 20 Northland leaders across the organization through a dialogue and action planning process, then provided support for the implementation of their plan.
Pivotal Learning Moment 1
During the five-session dialogue series, during which we engaged leaders from across Northland, it became clear that an intentional focus on communications would strengthen the impact of their strategy. Specifically, developing a plan to socialize changes in policy, messaging, and corporate goals across diverse employee groups in different geographic locations, and developing a concise call to action not just with employees, but with residents and investors as well.
Pivotal Learning Moment 2
To successfully implement a robust action plan, Northland realized they would need to clearly map roles and responsibilities. They stood up working groups to drive progress on each of the three goals they identified.
Action Plan
At the conclusion of our 14-month partnership, Northland had developed a clear action plan comprised of three goals and related outcomes:
| Goal | Outcome |
| 1. Synergize intergroup/office/corporate-community communications and DEI coordination | Increased overall communications and DEI reinforced through existing corporate values and policy |
| 2. Enhance professional development and DEI awareness for staff | Trainings delivered with consistent message/goal over a prolonged period time to support DEI awareness through greater understanding and knowledge of diverse populations |
| 3. Develop strategic recruiting and retention policies and practices aimed to attract and source a diverse set of candidates to Northland, while providing equitable professional development and advancement opportunities to current Northland team members. | Improved diversity throughout Northland and increased retention for BIPOC and women. |
Implementation: The Northland team got to work, with YW Boston staff supporting them throughout. We held meetings at three-month intervals to review progress on goals, roadblocks, and to identify resource and support needs. Since then, Northland has embedded DEI into their culture and their employee experience beginning at onboarding through to employee communications and DEI related events. They have created a DEI events team that helps Northland host events that are increasingly engaging, meaningful, and accessible, and have also turned their standard DEI new hire slideshow into a short video introducing their DEI committee members to all new employees.
Moving Ahead: “We recognize that our DEI journey continues and will evolve as we introduce new team members to Northland along with other changes within, as well as, outside our control. We continue to engage with YW Boston whether that is formally through their learning and development programs, such as LeadBoston, to their Community of Practice where you can connect virtually each month with leaders from other organizations to discuss challenges and opportunities, current events, and how they may impact employees and organizations. Informally, we now have formed strong connections with the team at YW Boston if we ever need to get some feedback.” – Jay Babbitt, Vice President of Human Resources, Northland
To learn more about Northland, visit https://northland.com
