Here’s a unique twist on workplace belonging: a veterans Employee Resource Group (ERG) collaborated with a local Nashville nonprofit, where the veterans shared their personal stories, which musicians then turned into songs.

“This initiative was incredibly successful,” said Michal Alter, co-founder and CEO of Visit.org, which facilitated the ERG experience. Alter spoke on a panel moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company during From Day One’s Manhattan conference.

The veterans’ songs resonated so deeply within their company that the CEO invited the musicians to perform at a major town hall event. “These employees were celebrated and thanked for their service. The emotional connection is what we aim to create, and we love seeing these heartwarming stories,” said Alter.

Visit.org partners with companies like Amazon, AT&T, KPMG, and Comcast to bring intersectional topics to life through team-based activities with local nonprofits. Alter says that ERGs provide employees with the opportunity to have meaningful conversations in safe spaces, and are an effective way to foster workplace belonging.

After conducting experiences for companies, Visit.org surveys participants about the impact on their sense of belonging. In a survey involving 40,000 participants, 60% responded, with 73% of those reporting a significant positive impact on their workplace experience. “We see that 99% of respondents ask their employers for more of these types of activities,” Alter said.

Alter emphasized that these activities help employees feel connected to their community and their colleagues, fostering a strong sense of belonging.

Help Employees Develop Empathy

Panelist Derek Gordon, chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer for Colgate-Palmolive, is a black man who grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods. He shared an experience that took place years ago but has stuck with him ever since.

When Gordon took his high school best friend, who is white, to a predominantly black space, his friend looked around at all the people who didn’t look like him and said to Gordon: “This is how you feel every day?”

“His empathy clearly came through. He recognized from that experience that this wasn’t about how he was feeling,” Gordon said. “He provided a real sense of understanding.” One way to cultivate inclusive culture in a company, says Gordon, is to help employees develop empathy for each other’s unique experiences.

Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, far left, moderated the panel discussion about "Fostering Workplace Belonging: Overcoming Barriers and Cultivating Inclusive Culture"

Another way companies can ensure they are being inclusive, and helping employees to develop empathy for their colleagues, is to be intentional about hiring. “Put in extra effort to make sure that you are going to where those population pools are, so that you can find the great talent that you would not otherwise consider,” he said. It’s important to lay that foundation from hiring onward to increase inclusion and representation.

Adding to that is tracking the numbers. Senior management will want to know if what you’re doing is working, so try to quantify your efforts. “At the end of the day, if you're not showing progress, it means you are not moving forward against the path,” Gordon said. “It also provides for accountability for the leadership and the organization.”

Recognize Layered Experiences

Panelist Lukeisha Paul, head of diversity, equity and inclusion for GroupM, experienced what it feels like not to belong. Born and raised in New York with roots in Trinidad and Venezuela, the layers of her unique experience were branded as not fitting in during college.

“I found myself at a cross section of, ‘where do I fit in?’ And it was very uncomfortable,” she said. That led to her work in DEI.

“I have a deep appreciation of intersectionality and the different layers of diverse dimensions that we all exhibit based on our unique lived experiences,” Paul said. “Today, that helps me because I understand that any individual can experience being the only one or the underrepresented.”

One way they cultivate an inclusive culture at GroupM is to waive the four-year degree requirement and add on a program called Launchpad which teaches new hires how to be successful in the company. That helps to level the playing field, no matter what the person’s background is.

Even with a good start in a company, some may find it hard to grow if you look different than other leadership or if you don’t know how to advocate for yourself. “Once you continue up the corporate ladder, you’ll see that there’s a major decrease in disparity between people of color, the more senior that you get,” she said.

That’s why they offer the GroupM Career Advocacy Program, which includes masterclasses to help build understanding and skills. “We focus on how to set big goals and how to move forward,” Paul said. Another focus of the program is pairing them with senior leadership who can truly advocate for them.

From these classes, they’ve seen raises and promotions and from the advocacy program they’ve seen leadership become courageous as they speak up. “They have a greater understanding of some of the hindrances that people of color actually go through,” she added.

Pay Attention to Age Diversity

Every age group can bring unique and helpful perspectives to organization, says Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor of financial resilience at AARP.

In a previous role, she was the youngest person on a big team of leadership, lawyers, and consultants looking to negotiate a big contract renewal.

“I just felt so intimidated,” she said. “Most of them were men, and they just looked right past me.” One of her takeaways from that experience was to acknowledge everyone at the table, no matter their age or how they are different from everyone else.

Representation is important, including age diversity. Many companies have websites with pictures of young people, which can make it hard for older people to feel like they belong. There is some messaging out there that certain ages are “too old” for companies to hire, when that is not only not true, it’s ageism.

People of all ages want to contribute and be in a job they enjoy, and as Tinsley-Fix says, every age wants to keep learning and developing soft skills that help no matter the job you’re in. “Just paying attention to that, in addition to this sort of hard skills, can really diversify your hiring pool from a perspective of age,” she said.

The Pillars of DEI

Panelist Marie Carasco, vice president of organization development culture and diversity at Github, was one of very few black women enrolled during her doctoral degree program. It made an already challenging experience even tougher. Representation is a baseline in belonging, she says.

Then came a full circle moment. She had the opportunity to teach at the ground level. “There were a number of students that came up to me so happy that I was there. And it made me feel that I was making a difference for them.”

That’s why she works in the DEI space, and at GitHub, she is helping to shepherd work around organization development, culture and diversity. The company has four pillars of DEI, says Carasco, who supports each of them.

One is understanding psychological contracts, or employee expectations. If those are broken, it’s hard for the person to reach their potential in the workplace. Second is psychological safety, because if they don’t feel safe they won’t take risks. Third, having those deliberate cross-company collaborations to foster an inclusive culture. And the fourth and final pillar is leveraging employee engagement and understanding, so they can take part in helping move DEI forward.

“I know we have a lot of listening systems around employee engagement,” Carasco said. “But quite rarely do we even ask an employee, do you want to participate in service to drive this work?” If companies could have those conversations and bring them in, they can help drive the very programs that can help everyone.

Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

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.

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.

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.

The Role of Leadership in Promoting Workplace Belonging

RELATED STORIES

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

Building a Workplace Culture That Prioritizes Well-Being

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