While at work about a year ago, Glenn Jackson, chief diversity officer for M&T Bank, took what ended up being a memorable trip to the office bathroom. Jackson, who is a person of color, bumped into a 60-something white male co-worker he’s known for years, but hadn’t seen in a while. Jackson noticed the man was, for the first time at work, sporting long locks of hair.

Wait, how does a white co-worker with long hair have anything to do with DEI?

Like many companies, M&T Bank had responded to the killing of George Floyd by committing to cultural change within the organization. Leaders promised to boost the equity of team members from underserved groups and better establish a sense of community throughout the company.

Enhanced engagement with company ERGs, particularly those that represent worker experiences for M&T women, LGBTQ+, Latino and Spanish, and Black staffers, were among the initiatives, Jackson said. Those efforts led to sponsorship and leadership development programs geared toward supporting specific demographics. It also prompted policy changes that just made life at work more comfortable for M&T employees.

“Multiple groups talked about hair,” Jackson explained to a From Day One audience in Brooklyn this month. Workers asked M&T leaders if they could finally start showing up to work with their “natural hairstyles,” Jackson said, some of which were not allowed according to workplace bylaws.

“We said, ‘Could we go back into that policy and say words that were never said before, like: Afros are fine?’” Jackson recalled. And they did.

Upon seeing his now long-haired white compadre in the office restroom last year, Jackson was surprised, but also realized the policy change affected more team members in a positive way than intended.

“We thought it was for those three or four groups,” Jackson said. “You find out there’s themes across [community groups], you attack those and you communicate it. You never know who it’s going to benefit.”

Jackson told the story as part of a panel discussion, “The Role of HR in Helping Employees Flourish at Work,” moderated by Trey Wiliams, a senior writer at Fortune. Onstage, the From Day One speakers discussed the changing expectations of people managers and the challenges that have come with the radical workplace culture shift of the past few years, especially those revolving around the need to keep workers of different backgrounds content, secure, and engaged.

“HR has the responsibility to come up with a holistic plan to address these different areas [of concern] in different ways,” said Angela Li, VP of HR, chief data office for Citigroup, a company she noted was “pretty big”—with 250,000 employees—and, thus, difficult to establish consistency.

“It really needs to trickle down to every manager and every manager’s manager,” Li continued. “Every team needs to understand: This is the direction where we’re going; these are things companies are doing for you, and they have to be implemented and tracked with some sort of metrics, because what’s measured is always what can be achieved later on.”

“We’ve [also] been helping organizations to think about their culture holistically, which includes things like hybrid work, DEI, all of it together, rather than continuing to keep things separate,” said Anthea Hoyle, executive vice president of United Minds, a global management consultancy.
“Thinking about all of this in terms of inclusion…all comes down to managers being more aware of who’s on their team and how they can connect meaningfully with them, so we focus on equipping managers and leaders to do that better.”

Achieving as much might not take much effort at all—just some attention to small, but crucial details.

Laura Lomelí, AVP of people insights for the coaching platform company BetterUp, said a key for people managers is to locate “that authenticity space” in their interactions with workers. Employees, of any demographic, she continued, do not want to think, “How do I show up at work and not feel like I have cover who I am?”

Using her own experience as an example, she said while comfortably applying a Latino accent that she wants to go by “Laúra Lomelí” around the office, not the under-emphasized, diluted version. So simply taking the time out to learn how to appropriately pronounce employee names can go a long way in helping workers feel included.

Whatever the initiative, Jane Cha-Lee, SVP of global talent & culture leader at Nielsen, the ratings company, said its implementation will come down to the foundational element of communication.

“It really takes every employee and every manager having those critical conversations and making sure there’s alignment, meaning, focus,” Cha-Lee said. “It’s the easiest stuff and the hardest stuff because it’s so basic and yet we don’t do it. So I would just go back to the need for those human conversations to take place, so that people are treated as such.”

Given the chance to express themselves, perhaps prompted by a greater sense of inclusion, employees have the opportunity to provide managers with ideas on how to make the workplace better, with thriving and productive team members. Otherwise, there’s greater risk of attrition and worker disengagement, Cha-Lee observed.

“People are the knowledge holders, the heart of the culture, the ones that really are the glue that makes a company what it is,” she said. “Every individual that comprises a company brings so much, so I think we want people to be at their best and to really contribute to a culture that makes people stick around.”

Considering the current “paradigm shift” in workplace culture and expectations, as Glenn Jackson from M&T Bank described it, and the real financial risks that come with not adhering to the demands of today’s employee, he predicted that “the winners coming out of this in the next 10 years are going to be the companies that actually focus on that human center and that employee experience.

“If you don’t,” he added, “you’ll lose.”

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.