How to Bond With Your Workers Through Social Impact

BY Alexis Hauk | March 31, 2022

Long before the creation of the office, PowerPoint slides and whiteboards, humans have sought to express the meaning of their pursuits and surroundings. Those cave paintings created thousands of years ago, after all, celebrated scenes from the business of hunting and gathering. Now, in modern times, the workplace remains a place where people want to feel purpose and express truth in their lives.

As ever, employees want to do more than show up and earn a paycheck. They’re looking for a way to contribute meaningfully. This fact came fully into focus during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation. And it touches on something that researcher and author Brené Brown calls “operationalizing your values.”

Rick Kearney, the chief operating officer at Rise Against Hunger, knows a thing or two about that kind of purpose-driven work. His nonprofit carries out its mission to provide nourishment and support to communities facing food crises worldwide. The group helps about 2.8 million people every year through international relief efforts in areas like Mali and Zimbabwe, and more recently with Ukrainian refugees.

Kearney, who spoke on a panel of experts on “Recruiting and Retaining Workers Through Social Impact” at From Day One’s recent Atlanta conference, has seen the positive results of plugging staff and volunteers into the soul-satiating work of helping others–but high morale doesn’t just come from impressive stats. Rather, what drives the people who work at Rise Against Hunger, Kearney said, is “something that they can take from their heart to their head, from passion to purpose, to feel that their efforts resulted in something significant.” In other words: Tangible results from tangible actions that an individual can track and connect with.

Of course, you don’t need to work at a nonprofit to feel good about what you do. Whether you’re leading a Fortune 500 company, launching a foundation, or simply looking for ways to do more than merely clock in and out, social impact in the working world takes many forms. The panel discussion, which I moderated, produced some rules of thumb to keep in mind.

Matching Why You Care with What You Do

Julia Levy, the head of global talent acquisition at CommScope, joined the communications-technology company in 2019, right as the company was rolling out its refreshed mission and values statements. Those took on a new urgency during the pandemic, she said, as the company ramped up its mission to “connect the unconnected,” when everything, from schools to meetings, had gone virtual.

Cummings said her company sought to address food insecurity and homelessness

Likewise, when Ayanna Cummings, Ph.D., joined Compass Group in 2020 as director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, she immediately spearheaded an effort to identify, through polls and discussions with employees, which social-impact partners they most wanted to focus on.

Food and housing seemed like a good fit, given that Compass is one of the largest hospitality and food-service companies in the world, Cummings said. “We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that we have the capacity to do something with respect to food insecurity and homelessness. So, we added that to the list of places to reach out to and try to partner with.”

As it turned out, these kinds of organizations were swamped with donation and volunteer requests already. So Compass pivoted its outreach and worked to support majority-BIPOC organizations in Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Reno, and more–staying very much in the center of where the company and its employees’ priorities stood.

Lynette Bell, president of the Truist Foundation, the charitable arm of the Charlotte-based banking company, said the company created a matching-gift program for employees, agreeing to meet every dollar the staff contributed to a nonprofit of their choosing. This program resulted in $1.2 million in matched donations last year alone.

Putting Away the Parachute

One of the best ways to help a community? Listen to them.

That’s what Bell has found works best. It’s also the most effective way to ensure that the effort sustains long-term. To that end, Bell said that Truist has hosted listening sessions with community-based organizations and nonprofits to gain insight into their needs. "Whether we were in Baltimore, Miami or Macon, we got to hear directly [and] meet them where they are versus coming in like, ‘Hey, we have a great idea how to fix this.’”

That phenomenon of organizations swooping in to make some surface-level changes, then just as quickly exiting the scene, is often called “parachuting,” and it’s not an effective way to make a difference, Bell said.

Addressing Racial Inequity

In 2020, Corporate America made vast commitments in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to reduce racial and social inequities. However, in 2021, news organizations including Fortune reported that of the $50 billion pledged to racial justice by U.S. corporations, almost none of that promised funding had materialized. So when it comes to anti-racism work and addressing longstanding inequities, it’s vital that companies instill trust by turning their promises into concrete actions.

Bell said that her foundation looked at how to “embed racial equity into our process” from the start of the grant-application process to the perspectives of decision-makers. One way that has manifested, especially during the pandemic, is through investment in small businesses, which are “the cornerstone of our country,” she said, but also in the gravest danger of shuttering during the pandemic. “We wanted to look at who’s impacted by that. It was mostly BIPOC businesses. Our foundation has leaned into addressing those issues.”

On the HR and talent-acquisition side, CommScope’s Levy said she has spent time with her team examining and addressing unconscious biases among hiring managers and investing in making the hiring process more equitable. They’ve identified and changed potential barriers to entry, such as GPA or higher-education requirements, but it’s still a learning process. “We are not always going to get it right, but we’re always going to try and do better,” she said.

“We put the big goals out there,” said Bell, “knowing that we’re tackling large ecosystems that have been in place for a long time that need to have some disruption. We ask really hard questions of our grantees, like, 'How diversified is your board? How diverse is the team that’s going to support you?' I think it takes those small things to look at all ecosystems internally, including the one you work for, and go, ‘What is it today that needs to be disassembled?’”

Taking It Piece by Piece

Meaningful social impact requires a long attention span on an organization’s part. Vivian Greentree, Ph.D., senior vice president and head of global corporate citizenship and president of the Fiserv Cares Foundation at Fiserv, put it this way: “When you’re trying to lean into something that doesn’t exist yet, or you’re trying to create something or collaborate, it’s always going to be a little uncomfortable. That’s where a lot of us are a lot of the time. So, learning not to pause and not to quit. Think big, act small, move quick.”

Alexis Hauk is an Atlanta-based journalist whose work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including TIME, the Atlantic, Mental Floss, Washington City Paper, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

RELATED STORIES

Building a Workplace Culture That Prioritizes Well-Being

When it comes to well-being in the workplace, one can hardly generalize, as every generation has its demands. Boomers are gearing up for retirement, Gen X is sandwiched between childcare and eldercare, Millennials are starting their families and dealing with a housing crisis, while Gen Z is fresh out of school.“It’s not a one-size-fits-all, so if you don’t know what the population is looking for, you might be investing in the wrong places,” said panelist Stefanie Christmas, global head of diversity, equity and inclusion at Inizio, during From Day One’s Philadelphia conference.Still, there are some industry-wide areas that are demographics-agnostic. In 2023, The American Psychiatric Association found that the majority of the employers think the work environment is healthier than it actually is. More than 50% of workers strongly (21%) or somewhat (34%) agreed that their employer thinks their workplace environment is a lot mentally healthier than it actually is, and 43% reported worrying that if they told their employer about a mental health condition, it would have a negative impact on them in the workplace, reads the report.Well-being does not just mean wellness. “We’re looking at well being in the less traditional way: we’re looking at it through the lens of social, emotional, and financial wellbeing,” said Magdalena Dexter, SVP of communication and HR at manufacturing company Saint Gobain, which operates in 76 countries and has a workforce of 76,000 in North America alone. “Think about well-being holistically. It [encompasses] physical, financial, career growth,” Christmas said.When thinking about well-being and how to build it within an organization, the first question Tyler Zalucki, client executive at Marsh McLennan Agency asks is: “‘What is your feedback loop?’ and ‘How are you capturing the sentiment of employees and colleagues through a well-being lens?’”The panelist spoke in a discussion titled, "Does Your Company Genuinely Care About Well-Being? How to Show It Through Your Culture," moderated by Lizzy McLellan Ravitch, Business Coverage Editor, the Philadelphia Inquirer“In our organization, the respective manager will fill out a survey and speak with individuals to capture their sentiment and aggregate it,” he said. Then, during their town hall, the CFO and HR Director offer solutions to what was shared. “This feedback led to changes like implementing paternity leave, increasing contributions to the 401(k), and making December 24th a full day off,” he said. “It reinforces the sense that ‘my voice matters,’ because if feedback goes into the ether, employees feel unheard.”Getting Specific With NeedsCora Claus, VP of HR at Burlington Stores, emphasized the importance of understanding the employee population: who are they? What do they need? What do they want? “I work for a retailer, largely female based, and for a long time we had a lot of them going on leave of absence, starting their families, and they’re not getting paid but a minimum wage,” she said. “We now are implementing policies: as you’re designing the policies, who are you writing them for?”Getting to know the workforce also means helping to clear away any misconceptions. Scott Thompson is the CEO of Tuition.io, which helps employees with financial education. The total amount of student-loan debt is close to $1.8 trillion dollars, and you might be surprised at who the most affected group is. “The fastest growing segment for student loans is 55 and up,” said Thompson. “That’s parents taking on debt for their kids.”In order to thrive at work, people need to feel included. “As we know, DEI is under intense scrutiny, but at its core, it’s about inclusion—making sure people can bring themselves to work in a way that feels comfortable,” said Christmas. “A lot of people say, ‘Bring your whole self to work,’ but many employees feel more comfortable bringing just 55% of themselves. How do we support that?” Christmas emphasizes the idea that for DEI work to work, “it has to be seen as everyone’s responsibility. This includes sponsoring events and encouraging leaders to show up. One impactful practice is having senior leaders participate in quarterly calls, asking questions, and engaging in the conversation.”Ultimately, a company can have the best programs, but if the leaders don’t buy into them, don’t lead with that and implement them, you really don’t have a culture of well-being. “You can put the best parental leave in place, but if a senior leader can complain that he has 3 people out, it’s going to send waves through the organization about how we truly feel about it,” said Dexter. “It’s not just about having the program, it’s about talking positively about it, showing examples of how important it is to take advantage of it.”Universal NeedsStudent loan debt has only become more challenging for borrowers, partly due to all the noise in the media. Efforts to improve the situation have unintentionally made it worse, as some employers diminished the importance of loan support, assuming it would be resolved under the current administration. “That hasn’t happened—and likely won’t,” said Thompson.“When we break down student loan debt by age segments, we see the impact. For example, a recent college graduate with $40,000 in debt faces a monthly payment of about $500 after taxes,” he continued. “At 25, I would not have been able to make that payment. And it doesn’t get easier over time; most people aim to pay off their loans in 10 years, but it often turns into a 21-year commitment due to the financial missteps that come with starting a career,” said Thompson.And while he is not suggesting that all companies need to contribute to loan payments—though that would be nice and certainly helpful, “offering assistance in understanding options and finding pathways to manage debt is a big win, with spectacular retention benefits,” he said. “It’s about meeting employees where they are and helping them move forward.”In many companies, the adage seems to consist of teams being told to do more with less, and that might be at odds with well-being. “When I think about my own organization, when I think about doing more with less, we have an AI tool that allows you access to compliance resources and will also write emails,” said Zalucki. Other resources include open office hours to ask questions and then do modules exactly on what one is working on that day. “Do the things you like and enjoy and iterate admin tasks,” he said. “At the end of the day, we want to spend more time with our family.”A similar mindset also steers employers and employees towards an 80/20 perspective. “For so long, our organization has been focusing on being perfect,” said Claus, noting that they changed towards 80/20. “Are we comfortable with 80? It’s that permission to be directionally correct so that we don’t spend too much time getting to false perfection.”This also requires leaders to understand the cycle of an organization. If Q4 is the busiest time of the year, for example, a slower Q1 should allow employees to take a break. “Don’t let them sprint through that, let them have moments to breathe,” said Dexter. “What can we deprioritize? What can we take off?”“It’s about how you’re showing up but also how we empower our team to have conversations that need to be had,” said Claus. She speaks about how frustration can pile up because we don’t have the courage to speak or there’s no safe space to do so or there’s no empathetic leader. They began coaching associates to handle conversations independently, teaching them to engage and leaders to respond with positive intent.Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Boston and Milan.

Angelica Frey | November 06, 2024

The Backlash Against DEI: How Perceptions Are Being Driven by Fear and Sensationalism, Not Facts

DEI has faced intense backlash, often turned into a partisan dog whistle by those aiming to politicize its goals. But is this pushback grounded in reality? In truth, the vast majority of companies remain firmly committed to DEI, both in the U.S. and internationally. Most Americans approve of DEI initiatives, including 78% of Black workers from a Pew Research poll from 2023.Dr. Stephanie J. Creary, Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, says the backlash against DEI doesn’t tell an accurate story. “What we found is a story that is not being shared in the media or by politicians, and that is that of all the industries that exist right now, finance is leading the charge. Tech–its commitment to any kind of DEI, including towards black employees or black communities [has] continued to increase–in spite of the external environment. And Pharma is in the middle.”Creary spoke with Earl Hopkins, arts and culture reporter for the The Philadelphia Inquirer, during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference. They discussed the false narrative around DEI and its future in the workplace.Recently, Creary spoke at a conference of bankers, a group that Hopkins identified as being stereotypically not diverse. Creary was worried about what kind of crowd she was going to have and what the reception was going to be like. “What does banking look like? It’s predominantly white and predominantly male,” Creary said. But what she found was encouraging and inspiring.“I was inspired by those institutions that were continuing to lean into the evidence, either internally from their own organization or externally from academia. That suggests that it does make good business sense. There were a lot of people in the room who were saying it’s hard that the topic has become so politicized when that’s not why they had invested all these resources into [DEI].”Earl Hopkins of the Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed Dr. Stephanie J. Creary, of the Wharton School Hopkins pointed to the politicization of DEI and how recently it’s faced a lot of legal and political backlash. “Which has prompted many companies to retreat on their initial commitments, or at least...keep their head down amid the storm,” Hopkins said. For example, Ford Motor backed out of its DEI initiatives this past summer, no longer participating “in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.”The headlines can be misleading and frustrating. “I lead with evidence, and every day I get some person in HR or DEI calling me saying, ‘Can you come speak at our organization and help us?’” There's a contradiction between the headlines and what she sees in her inbox.Right now, she and her team are “combing DEI reports from 2019-2023 (2024 data won’t be available until next year)” in Fortune 100 companies in three industries: financial services, pharma, and tech, which all show DEI efforts as stable or increasing.“Now that’s not to say that a few companies are reducing their commitments, changing practices, but it’s not a trend. It’s not an empirical trend in the way that is being suggested.” Still, the reported decline in DEI in the media, she adds, isn’t accurate to reality and may be more related to how news is covered and how we consume it.“I think what we’re suffering from is people who are covering these stories, the people consuming them, are very new. They’re novices. And I can say this as an educator, when people are new and they’re learning something the first time, they tend to make concrete generalizations about things that are complex.”She points to our innate tendency to “reduce the complexity of the world around us,” she said. “There’s an over simplistic reporting and consumption and interpretation of something that is much more multifaceted and dynamic and nuanced.” Basically, we’re not hearing enough from experts in the field. “And certainly political leaders are not experts on this conversation.”Looking to the future, does Creary think DEI is going in the right direction? She says she’s hopeful but skeptical.“So the challenge with the field of DEI practices [is] that there's not always evidence being used to justify the problem that needs to be addressed. And, there’s not always evidence showing that we should continue down this path with these practices, because they’re working.”There’s hope, she added, in organizations that are “leaning” on the data to identify the problem that needs addressing but also looking to see if the interventions they put in place are working.However, having access to the right data is still a problem, and Hopkins pointed out a wide discrepancy between quantitative data and qualitative data. “We’re beginning to understand what's happening with people who are in the minority. Oftentimes that doesn’t show up in the quantitative data because they’re underrepresented,” Hopkins said.Creary confirmed this in a recent analysis conducted with a media company. In her team’s analysis, they looked at the performance reviews between Black and white employees, where the performance reviews were “way more telling than” the quantitative data. “The quantitative data would say that Black employees don't perform as well as the qualitative data. But when you look at the qualitative data, it's very clear that the managers are not all using the same metrics to assess performance. And sometimes the Black employees are getting measured on things like, do they turn their cameras on during meetings and not on things that are actually agreed upon performance indicators.”“The qualitative data can often tell a much richer story about what's happening and why something is happening than the quantitative data can,” Creary said.Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

Matthew Koehler | November 06, 2024

How People Analytics Can Help Employers Match Worker Skills to Future Needs

As technology continues to evolve and impact our daily work lives, is it an employee’s technical skills that will be the most valued? Not necessarily. “These more enduring human qualities that all of us possess, these are the things that are going to differentiate workers in the future. It’s really that resiliency, the decision making, and the ability to exhibit emotional intelligence,” said Peter Boyle, VP, HR, Dell Technologies, said during an executive panel at From Day One’s Denver conference. “As we blend digital and human labor together,” he said, it’s these skills that will drive future organizational success.With the universe of workplace skills expanding constantly, employers have to think ahead about what they’ll need as their businesses change and grow. What are the best ways to assess the skills of current workers, predict the skills that will be needed soon, and build the methods to bring employees up to speed? At the same time, how can employers adapt their talent pipelines so they're drawing on a wider and more relevant pool of candidates?Putting People Analytics to WorkData collection has been around for a while, but it’s the predictive power of software that’s truly transforming the landscape. “We’ve been studying and counting people and tracking what they do for centuries. What is changing is the technology that we can lay over people analytics that allows us to not just describe where they're at today, but what's possible tomorrow,” said Matthew Gosney, VP, organizational development at UCHealth.People analytics can, and should, be incorporated holistically into an organization’s overall metrics, noting how one worker’s tenure, background, and employment history might correlate to the quality and quantity of their output. “That is really the future of people analytics: looking not just at the person, but the work they do, and how you can help them to be the best they can be,” said Neil Taylor, VP of product marketing at Visier.The panelists spoke about "How People Analytics Can Help Employers Match Worker Skills to Future Needs"Organizations are also using analytics to measure soft skills and decide how to leverage them. “We love how the technology can tell us a story, but we really want to see how we can bring those human-centered skills (better thinkers, problem solvers) to address certain issues and build up more organizational confidence in productivity and teamwork,” said Erin Gabrysh, head of learning and development, Bundle. “It’s more than just [attaining] the numbers, but using that to take action.”Another area where people analytics is playing a major role is employee listening and engagement. For Jennifer Herrod, senior director of talent, global learning & development at Johnson Controls, her team works with managers to help them understand and utilize the insight gained through employee listening software. “What are their teams telling them through the survey that they’re not telling them face to face? And how can they then leverage that data to get them the right skills that they need? It’s [about] finding the detail in the data and the story behind it, which is how it can help connect to skill-building,” she said.It also can help improve employee retention, as well as prepare for future hiring needs. “People analytics can actually help you predict who might resign, and along with that, which skills are walking out the door,” Taylor said. “You need to understand the learning development plans that you have in place to develop those skills internally, how you’re hiring, and how you’re retaining skills that might be in demand. And the only way you can do that is through connected data that is pushed out to the edges of the organization.”Adapting to a Changing Work EnvironmentThe skills needed to succeed in the modern workplace are evolving as rapidly as the workplace itself. Fortunately, the tracking technology is keeping pace. Traditionally, says Boyle, employees would simply check off boxes for skills on an internal database. “But that doesn't necessarily tell you the depth of their knowledge.” Nor does it stay up-to-date for long. Nuanced people analytics software can help leaders infer a greater depth of knowledge among a talent pool, cross-referencing other factors like certifications, tenure, and employment history, and match them accordingly to future roles.And the ability to adapt to rapid change itself is a quality that is vitally important but hard to measure traditionally. “Human-centered leadership, which I think is the emerging model for leadership in the future, is focused on change management, psychological safety, and key components of leadership that are going to be critical in a very dynamic work environment,” Gosney said. During Covid, his organization’s workforce quickly had to make a transition to virtual care. “We knew who could do it, and we could move them there. The challenge was in understanding, capturing, and quantitatively measuring soft skill. I don’t know if we have a great answer for that yet, but I know that’s the next mountain to climb.”One way human qualities like psychological safety can be measured, Gabrysh says, is through their impact on other areas. “When organizations embed psychological safety training, when organizations create this safe space, people are more comfortable saying or doing [certain] things. That’s where we start to see change occur, and the rest of the metrics start to improve as a result,” she said.And the utilization of people analytics itself, Taylor says, should engender psychological safety within an organization, “because [workers know] the entire person is understood, the entire workforce is understood, their impact on the business is understood, as well as the business impact on the person. If it’s just a manager making a decision based on emotion [then] there’s no psychological safety in that.”People analytics is also making strides in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion, shedding light on areas where it may be lacking and where, Gosney says, leaders can enact change. “People analytics is changing our HR structures to support solving problems instead of supporting traditional processes,” he said. And for UCHealth, it’s paid off. “We’ve improved our BIPOC internal promotion rate by 40% in two years.”Making People Analytics Work For YouSo how can an organization that has yet to dive into people analytics get started?“When you’re talking about people analytics, you need to start with desired business outcomes,” Gosney said, noting the need to first define the goals, objectives, and challenges the organization is facing. “Then you translate that into key employee experience components. Is it psychological safety? Is it flexibility? Is it skills development? Is it retention, or is it engagement? That then informs the questions that you ask in an engagement survey, or the data points that you’re looking for.”The measurement of skills should then impact the action taken by the organization, particularly when it comes to developing talent and filling the gaps. “Developing that continuous learning culture is paramount,” Gabrysh said.Adding AI to the Equation“Data is organized and structured and predicts outcomes, whereas psychological safety is constantly moving,” said moderator Noelle Phillips, senior reporter for The Denver Post. So how can it be quantified? That’s where AI comes in. Herrod’s organization introduced an AI conversation coach–after a deep data privacy review–to boost employee engagement. The AI reviews comments gained from employee listening to identify meaningful themes and recommend leadership actions.The ability to work with AI is also a skill that will need to be accounted for. “We’re all feeling this need, individually and as businesses, to adapt to a dynamically changing market, and AI is compounding that,” Taylor said. Workforce planning will need to happen more often, he says, than once a year. “This is an ongoing thing that needs to happen every day. And it isn’t just an HR job. It’s the manager’s job to make sure that you have the right workforce. And so, having the right data around the skills that you need, the skills that you have, [and] the skills you need to develop internally becomes really important, and you have to continuously shapeshift your workforce in today’s day and age.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

Katie Chambers | November 05, 2024