What Really Matters in the Employee Value Proposition
BY Francine Brevetti November 24, 2023Discover Financial Services explores the human needs of its 11,000 agents to ensure the workforce is engaged. One way to do so is through the use of data, says Traci Wicks, senior vice president of talent and human resources strategy at Discover Financial Services.Wicks was interviewed by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company in a fireside chat during a From Day One virtual conference.Wicks’ purview over employee retention tracks talent, mobility, talent management processes, talent acquisition, and employee engagement. Wicks calls hers an employee-centric approach, or data with a dialogue. “We’re breathing life into the number by walking the floor and talking with people to really understand what their core purpose is, which may be beyond work.”Meaningful WorkBut how can data be communicated, made accessible, and even exciting? “To make the data powerful, you have to ask, ‘What’s your purpose? What’s driving you and your craft? What’s inspiring?’” said Wicks. For example, when Discover posed such questions to its engineers, they revealed their interest in tech academies that exist at Discover internally and externally.“If you want leaders to drive your technology transformation within the organization, you have them teach to make those connections outside of their work. Discovery is going through three core transformations right now and one is our tech.”Compensation is no longer the main driver for employees, says Dishman. Instead, employers seek what excites them about going to work in the morning.“Yes, you can see the social contract between employee and employer has really changed. The workforce is really looking for additional ways to find their purpose, volunteerism is an example of that,” said Wicks in agreement.Core Pillars for RetentionDiscover has created three core pillars to ensure retention. Employees may engage with one of them or all three.First, is a focus on meaningful work from day one. The organization encourages volunteering and making a social impact. Next is growth. At Discover, Wicks is focusing on finding the opportunities for mobility and also ensuring they differentiate themselves from competitors in this regard. Lastly, Discover wants the employee to feel at home in the company to create mental health and well-being. Thus, the third pillar focuses on belonging.The financial services company measures these pillars every six months. Leaders regularly talk with employees about what their purpose is and how the company can help them within those pillars.Discover uses an outside vendor to survey employees. The results help the company see “where we can win and also markets where we’re not going to win. We’re not going to change those pillars; it’s who we are," Wicks said.Lydia Dishman of Fast Company interviewed Traci Wicks in the grand finale fireside chat (photo by From Day One)Discover also conducts listening tours so that its agents can find areas of improvement for leaders. The listening tours survey live tapes of agents speaking with customers, whether about credit, fraud, or collection.Connecting VirtuallySince the onset of Covid, Discover has been working to build connections and other initiatives in virtual workspaces.“The result is that learning and development have taken on new accessibility because people have changed the way they deliver training and development,” said Wicks.The company employs about 11,000 hourly salary agents across the United States. It offers community centers to teach jobs skills and academies to teach entrance to the technology world.Training at Discover includes its tech academy, its advanced analytics research center and a tuition reimbursement program. The company offers advanced education tuition because it “wants to pay our folks to get their bachelor's degrees,” Wicks said.It has created guilds around various crafts and skills for training and communication. “We invest in our workforce with continuous improvement and growth opportunities. We make time for people’s professional development and personal development, including volunteerism and community outreach,” said Wicks.Francine Brevetti is a business writer, ghostwriter, and writing coach in San Francisco, CA. www.francinebrevetti.com.
Solving a Universal Domestic Problem: Unequal Labor on the Home Front
BY Francine Brevetti August 01, 2023“There is no nation on this planet where men do more unpaid labor than women,” said Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). Women still do more than two-thirds of domestic work despite advances in society, says Rodsky.Lila Seidman, reporter at the Los Angeles Times, interviewed Rodsky during From Day One’s virtual conference focused on family health. Their fireside chat started with a screening of the trailer of Jennifer Siebel Newson’s documentary based on Rodsky’s book.“I felt I was the default for every single domestic task in my family,” said Rodsky in the trailer. A mother, wife, and attorney, Rodsky was placed in a balancing act to manage her work and home life. Frustrated by the unequal domestic labor that was placed on her plate, Rodsky set out to research women’s labor in the household around the world. Righting the injustice of women’s unpaid labor requires more than verbal agreement from husbands. Instead, in her book and work, Rodsky enumerates the steps that are needed to save women’s well-being and maintain happiness in the home.From her research beginning in 2011, Rodsky crystallized the requirements for healthy households: defined expectations, fairness, transparency, accountability, and trust. If one of these components is missing, the home becomes disharmonious and stressful.Rodsky was interviewed by Lila Seidman during the grand finale fireside chat session (photo by From Day One)Since the publication of Rodsky’s book in 2019, she has seen its impact around the world. Procter and Gamble sponsored her trip to the World Economic Forum where she spoke to an international audience. There she learned of similar movements in India.The author also received “a wonderful message from politicians in Germany, who were realizing the difference in women’s labor force participation rates in the regions where kids have to come home for lunch versus when lunch is provided in schools.”The ‘jar of mustard challenge’ was a scenario Rodsky posed in the countries she studied. Imagine that a woman asks her husband to go out and buy yellow mustard. She is specific because she knows her son will not eat protein without the condiment. Instead, the husband returns with brown mustard every time. Now the wife loses trust in her husband.Women “cannot trust their husbands with their living will because they’re not bringing home the right type of mustard,” she summarized.The author reflects on the impact of this one poorly executed task multiplied by the innumerable duties that comprise household work.While male partners may assert that they are willing to bear the load of housework and childcare, in fact, they maneuver themselves out of considerable responsibility. “Women tend to under-report and men overreport” the amount of work they do, says Rodsky. “We need to invite men to their full power. Men have to do domestic work.”The problem of women’s unpaid work appears in the workplace as well. It is analogous to a female worker’s assuming the burden of an office party and all that entails. Her colleagues expect her to produce the festivity by ordering balloons, the cake, issuing announcements, and more.But how does one get both domestic partners to buy into Rodsky’s remedies? Seidman mentioned the deck of cards that the book Fair Play offers readers. These 100 cards represent tasks that are to be divided fairly. Once someone accepts a card, he or she agrees to complete it from conception to execution.“It’s not only about fairness. It’s about ownership,” Rodsky said.Francine Brevetti is a ghostwriter, author and editor at www.francinebrevetti.com.
Why America’s Wage Gap Leads to Its Decline—and What to Do About It
BY Francine Brevetti July 17, 2023Only the revival of workers’ bargaining power can remedy the desperate situation of the working poor in this country, according to Michael Lind, in his book Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America.Lind, a columnist at Tablet and a fellow at New America, outlined the decline of American workers’ bargaining power in a fireside chat at From Day One’s conference in Austin, Texas. Interviewed by Will Anderson, managing editor of the Austin Business Journal, Lind offered some remedies. Low-wage jobs were still living wage positions in the 1920s, but now they are poverty jobs. Lind points to his grandfather, who was earning a living wage as a janitor in the 1920s.Today, janitors, fast food workers, nurses aides, construction laborers, and others can only meet the monthly bills with food stamps (EBT), housing vouchers, and earned income tax credits.Lind calls the American workplace a two-tier system–the working poor on the bottom create benefits that redound to employers. But the costs of the low wage system are spread across the whole country in the form of subsidies.“You’re privatizing the benefits to the employers and to the consumers of goods and services produced by low wage workers. And you’re socializing the costs to the rest of us, to the taxpayers, we have to pay,” he said.Lind, right, was interviewed by Will Anderson, left, of the Austin Business Journal during the grand-finale fireside chat session (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)Now 25% of US jobs are in poverty positions versus 3% in Norway, a country he has studied for this work.Why? The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which was to support workers’ bargaining power, is flawed, Lind said, calling its decline the main reason why today only 6% of the workforce is protected by unions versus 20% in the 1940s and ‘50s.Nor is this decline the fault either of globalization or technology, as so many believe. Instead, Lind points out, other democracies have experienced the same transformations, and yet their low-skill workers can thrive. Rather it is the encroachment of employers and institutions over the power of production and labor.Besides the flaws of the NLRA, Lind lambasted the proliferation of non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Meanwhile, legal or unauthorized immigration also bolsters employers’ ability to suppress wages.Paying higher wages is not a simple solution.One reason is that today’s academic economists hold the belief that wages rise as productivity does. This belief is untrue, he says.Instead, we want to strengthen the bargaining power of workers in sectors.Despite their illegality under trust law, companies still use salary bands – employers across industries establish wages in relative complicity.Instead, he proposes reviving a century-old system called wage boards. Here, the governor or the mayor appoints industry representatives, say fast food, and the workers set wages and hours.In New York State in 2015, under Governor Andrew Cuomo, the workers “came up with minimum wages, hours, scheduling benefits only for fast food workers in New York.”“I argue that this kind of granular specific approach is better than simply raising the minimum wage,” Lind said.Employers, governments, or institutions cannot remedy this system that keeps the poor poor. Instead, it’s the workers themselves that can have the muscle to repair our unjust system.Francine Brevetti is a business writer, ghostwriter, and author, residing in San Francisco, California.