Anticipating the Job Skills of the Future
BY Jennifer Haupt December 28, 2022In response to the tight labor market, especially in the tech sector, cutting-edge companies are investing more in training their current workforce to meet employment needs of the future. Four HR executives at forward-thinking organizations discussed what they anticipate to be the job market needs around the corner with journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, who moderated a From Day One webinar titled, “Anticipating the Job Skills of the Future.” The speakers focused on the fast pace of change, especially in digital fields. “Customer service has completely changed during the past few years,” said Judith Almendra-Rodriguez, VP of global human capital and talent acquisition at TTEC, a customer-experience tech and services company. While communication and service orientation are still key, now this role also requires complex problem solving, analytical skills, and a lot more cognitive flexibility. “The basic [customer service] things have been completely automated,” she said, “So now, you are dealing with a much more complex interactions, and multiple software. And as the market got tighter, there became a lot more jobs available than people looking for those opportunities. It’s an area that we need to continue to upskill.” This is the kind of transition HR managers and other business executives are trying to anticipate. The mass exodus from the office to work-from-home brought about other changes too. “The last two years taught us the importance of the ability to inspire and lead teams, and manage through significant change,” said Giselle Battley, senior director and global head of early-career talent at JLL, a commercial real-estate services company. She anticipates those trends to persist in the future. Rachel Lipson, co-founder and director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard University’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, flagged resilience as another skill that became a “must-have” during the pandemic. Tamara Jolivette-Smith, director of HR at Houston Methodist, one of the largest medical centers in the world, added that having an open mind about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is crucially important. “Embracing how that applies in your organization is also a necessary skill,”she said. McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza asked what kinds of jobs and job functions are most in need of upskilling. Lipson pointed to the tech sector in general as the toughest talent to hire, but added that companies need to also think about future needs. “The jobs that are growing the fastest now and will continue to do so are those jobs that have a mix of technical and soft skills,” she said. “So not just pure programmers or pure data scientists, but dual players who are needed to deal with humans and work in teams–and lead and manage–but also have strong technical competencies. Building skills like communication, management and teamwork, and leadership are going to transfer easily from role to role and also persist over the course of someone's career.” Expert speakers, top row from left: Rachel Lipson of Harvard University and Giselle Battley of JLL. Bottom row: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Judith Almendra-Rodriguez of TTEC, and Tamara Jolivette-Smith of Houston Methodist (Image by From Day One) How can organizations identify specific skills that need updating within an organization?Almendra-Rodriguez pointed out the importance of a robust assessment tool. TTEC launched a platform tool that combines performance management, talent assessments, mentorship programs, rotation, and e-learning into one single platform. This tool allows for self-assessment or peer-assessment. Jolivette-Smith said that Houston Medical relies on a partnership between HR leaders and executive leaders, as well as employee focus groups, to get an understanding of where the skill gaps are and develop a plan for filling those gaps. As far as how the actual training gets done, Battley explained that JLL has several initiatives. “We have a very robust learning and leadership development team that is constantly working hand-in-hand with the business to identify what the key skills needed are, and what the learning journey should be within each of our business lines,” she said. JLL recently created a talent-partner role, which focuses on understanding where the skill gaps are, where the future of the business is headed with our current talent landscape, and helping to bridge all of those things together. McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza brought up that a strong culture of DEI in an organization be a huge talent attractor, and asked how that can be used for recruiting. Lipson, who has studied this, explained that creating opportunities for work-based learning, especially for those who might not have had the economic opportunity to achieve an advanced education, needs to be more of priority for companies in attracting and keeping a diverse, skilled workforce. “We can learn from other countries that have invested much more heavily in apprenticeships,” she said. Battley added that it’s important for companies to walk the talk of DEI by offering in-house training and also promoting from within. More than 80% of JLL’s leadership team has grown within the company, based on a continuous commitment to employee development, she said. “It’s key that we actually execute the StrengthsFinder assessment for early-career professionals early on in the recruitment process,” added Almendra-Rodriguez. “We need to show our commitment to understanding where their strengths and not necessarily just their gaps are, and show our commitment to continuing to work on their strengths along the way.” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Lever, which provides employers with recruiting software. Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.
Coaching in Fair and Effective Ways in a Hybrid Work Environment
BY Jennifer Haupt June 20, 2022The hybrid work environment is here to stay–and companies need to provide coaching in a personalized way to match an employee’s remote, hybrid, or in-person work schedule. What are the emerging best practices for ensuring equity in such a variety of situations? How can employers avoid favoring those who spend more time in the workplace, known as proximity bias, and offer recognition to those who might feel isolated? How can an environment of inclusion and belonging be fostered? These questions and more were addressed in a panel discussion moderated by Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman as part of From Day One’s May virtual conference on new approaches to coaching and recognition. The session kicked off with a discussion on the difference between coaching and mentoring which, the panel agreed, cross a lot of gray areas. “When I think of mentorship, I think of partnerships, guiding a person with experience that you have been through,” said TeNita Ballard, global diversity and inclusion business partner at Intel. “I look at coaches as eliciting answers already within an employee.” Ballard gave the example of when she was a mid-level manager and her boss asked her to speak on a panel. She was nervous and felt insecure, but her boss coached her through it so she could succeed. “She wouldn’t have put me on that platform if I wasn’t ready, said Ballard. “What she had to do was coach me to make me laugh or make me realize she asked the right questions: So what are you working on? How are you going to guide them through X, Y, and Z? She coached me through the process.” Jill Carter, director of leadership and organizational development at Intermountain Healthcare, added that at her organization, mentoring is more for competency development, and coaching is about helping an individual achieve their own goals and objectives. Speaking on coaching, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Mary Vinette of Technicolor, and Caitlin Collins of Betterwork. Bottom row: Jeff Orlando of Medtronic, Jill Carter of Intermountain Healthcare, and TeNita Ballard of Intel (Image by From Day One) As a coach, making sure you ask the right questions, questions that a person understands, is critical for success. “Focusing on developing fundamentals, versus always focusing on outcomes, is also key. It makes a huge difference to be able to help guide someone in understanding how to improve certain skills, behaviors, knowledge,” said Caitlin Collins, an organizational psychologist and program-strategy director at Betterworks, a performance-management platform. Collins learned her first lessons in coaching from her father, who played pro football and then volunteered as a high-school coach. “All that applies in the world of work outside of sports—making sure we’re doing something better on a smaller scale, so that we can improve the outcomes on a bigger scale.” Mary Vinette, global head of learning and development at Technicolor, spoke to the importance of using coaching to create safe spaces for employees to grow into their best self in the workplace–and gain the confidence that leads to success. She said coaching can lead to higher levels of well-being at home and work, and integrating those two parts of life has become more important than ever in the hybrid workplace. “If I’m trying to be this person at home, this person at work, this person with my boss, and this person with my direct reports, that’s exhausting,” she said. “What we are in now is a time when everybody’s exhausted. It’s this integration of the whole person that helps you say yes to the things you want, say no to the things you don’t, and be okay with it. It’s the coaches role to create the space to say it’s okay.” The panelists agreed that implementing an equitable coaching program becomes more difficult with employees working remotely. According to Jeff Orlando, VP of global learning and leadership development at Medtronic, a health care technology company, greater employee initiative may be required to level the playing field. “Raise your hand, let people know if you need to be coached,” he said. “We don’t necessarily know, through our talent processes. We need to hear it from you.” As far as creating a safe space during virtual meetings, Ballard suggested allowing people to be visible who want to show up on camera, and also allowing people to have their cameras off. “To create a safe place to create well-being,” she said. “We’ll check in versus just jumping into our meeting. How is everyone doing? What's going on?” Carter added that training coaches to be inclusive is another piece of the puzzle. “We’ve taken the opportunity over the last year to train inclusion coaches, specifically for [diversity, equity and inclusion],” she said. “We actually step our coaches through something called ‘How do you be an inclusive coach?’” When it comes to implementing a coaching program in the most equitable way possible for all employees, Orlando recommended starting with peer mentoring. “It’s a step in the direction of coaching and broader mentoring,” he said. “There’s been some great research that peer-to-peer mentoring builds affiliation, builds engagement, builds a sense of belonging, and it builds that muscle between employees.” Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.
Lessons of Boeing’s Cultural Decline–and How It Can Recover
BY Jennifer Haupt May 01, 2022Boeing, a creator of the jet age, was once seen as a prestigious American corporate icon. Yet the company’s relationships with employees, investors, and business partners went into a tailspin after its merger with rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997. That’s the thesis of journalist Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, who spoke at a From Day One conference in Seattle about how this revered corporation went astray by neglecting some of its original core values, and what other companies can learn from this cautionary tale. “The conflict ensued almost immediately with a strike that was the largest white-collar strike in U.S. history at the time,” said Robison, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. “A federal mediator talked with an engineer I also interviewed who said, ‘This company is doomed.’ The reason he gave was that on one side you had hunter- killer assassins, the McDonnell Douglas side, which was more stockholder focused, and on the Boeing side, you had boy scouts who were customer- and product-focused. So when you look at the Max tragedy, you have to look at the DNA that started with that merger. It had impacts that lasted that long,” he said in a fireside chat with Marissa Nall, staff reporter of the Puget Sound Business Journal. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the Boeing 737 MAX airliner worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 passengers died in two crashes. This was the longest-ever grounding of a U.S. airliner, which cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation and legal fees, with indirect losses of more than $60 billion from 1,200 cancelled orders. Engineering reviews uncovered design problems, and lawmakers investigated Boeing’s incentives to minimize pilot training for the aircraft. Author Peter Robison (Photo courtesy of the author) Nall asked about the impact of the merger on leadership and what that meant operationally for Boeing. “When you think of an aircraft, it's a product that has such a long product cycle, and decisions made at the management level filter down to the employee level,” said Robison, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Boeing engineers. “Culture is a word that seems so amorphous, but it’s amazing how specific people get about it.” The culture of Boeing, he said, became all about “its schedule, its cost, its shareholder value. And that stems directly from the influence of some of the top leadership who came from McDonnell Douglas in the late 90s.” Robison explained that the leadership focus was centered on cost containment. He looked at one engineer’s evaluation that said ideas are measured in dollars. Another engineer was given specific performance and time requirements tied to reducing costs. The culture became one stemming from the idea that corporate executives ultimately make the best decisions about allocating resources, and ultimately about safety. The leadership was under pressure from stockholders to reduce costs, and that trickled down to managers and their teams. The compliance regulation of Boeing by the FAA lapsed, since the regulators were under pressure to cut costs as well, so both the FAA and Boeing were rewarded by stakeholders for speeding designs through production. This tension between Wall Street and the more product-focused engineers corroded the corporate culture that had defined Boeing in its heyday and helped to make the company so successful. The good news is that Robison believes corporate America has learned something from the MAX tragedy. “In the late 90s, the Business Roundtable put out a statement and said, essentially, the shareholder is right and a company’s first duty is to the shareholder,” Robison said. “Everything else will take care of itself as long as the shareholders are rewarded. But in 2019, the roundtable revised that stance and said companies owe a duty to everyone, including customers, employees, and communities.” And, Robison said, Boeing has shifted its business practices to reflect a closer alliance with its former corporate culture’s product focus. For example, Boeing's current CEO, David Calhoun, is getting weekly reports from his engineering team and there's a safety committee on its board. So how does Boeing build back its credibility with both the airlines and the flying public? “I think that will take showing integrity,” Robison said. “Part of the reason that Boeing struggled so much with the MAX crisis was that there were multiple moments when it was found to be saying things that weren’t true. There was a moment I described in the book where Boeing was claiming after the first crash that it was maintenance errors. But pilots in America knew that was not the case. Boeing, both in public and behind closed doors, needs to show absolute integrity.” Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.
A Publisher's Plan to Make His City More Connected and Inclusive
BY Jennifer Haupt May 01, 2022Veteran entrepreneur Jonathan Sposato, the new publisher of Seattle magazine and Seattle Business, is always thinking about what's new—really new. “Not only do I think about what would be fun for me to do, but also what is the sort of negative space,” he said in a fireside chat at a From Day One conference in Seattle. “There’s the positive space of all the things that exist currently. But there’s the negative space of what doesn’t yet exist. I felt Seattle was missing a certain type of journalism,” he told Steve Koepp, From Day One’s co-founder and chief content officer. Sposato is the chairman and co-founder of Geekwire, a technology news website, an investor in numerous technology companies, and he also founded, grew, and sold two companies to Google. His vision in purchasing two of Seattle’s premier publications is to strengthen Seattle’s voice as a world-class city on the forefront of technology, biotech, quality of life, and so much more. He’s looking to do more long-form journalism and delve into topics such as social inequality in housing and the tech industry, as well as in other booming industries in the region. One of Sposato’s goals is to deepen the editorial content at both publications. That means being unafraid to take on local business giants when there’s a story worth telling. “In some ways Geek Wire has normalized me to being thicker-skinned with someone thinking our coverage is not fair,” he said. “If a CEO doesn’t like a certain piece, they don’t call the editors, they call me. Maybe they think I’m the nice guy they can squeeze or something, and I understand the impulse. This may sound a little cliché but we do need as much independent journalism as possible. I’m very proud of the fact that Geek Wire is wholly independent. There’s no other stakeholders that we are beholden to, other than ourselves or the public and doing a great job.” Sposato on affordable housing: “We have to move with conviction, we have to move with intelligence, and we also have to be patient” Deepening content also means coverage that creates a more connected and inclusive environment. Sposato, 55, grew up in Seattle and was often the only Asian American kid in the room. Sposato said he would never have imagined being in the position he is now, to facilitate a platform for quality journalism that promotes inclusion and equality, back when he was getting beat up on a schoolyard for being different. Seattle is more diverse now, and the city’s news coverage needs to reflect diverse backgrounds and experiences. In Sposato’s case, he was raised by a single mom who couldn’t afford to care for him so she sent him to live with his grandparents in Hong Kong. All this has shaped his worldview and commitment to widening the editorial lens of the journalism he publishes. One issue he’s particularly passionate about is affordable housing. “We have to move with conviction, we have to move with intelligence, and we also have to be patient,” he said. “And I believe that if you can kind of cut through all the noise, regardless of what you think about the issue or what you think about the city council or the mayor, whatever, that at the end of the day, we have a supply-and-demand problem with regard to affordable housing.” “And how much do we want to address fundamentally at its core, the high-order bit, as we engineers like to say in technology? The high-order bit is: How much do we want to allocate the city’s resources to creating that affordable housing stock so that people who are teachers, nurses, and firefighters and who are not making $175,000 a year at Amazon can afford to live close to the city?” Another major consideration, he said: “Investing in the right infrastructure–light rail, all of that public transportation.” Sposato also pointed out that we can deconstruct the homelessness crisis as being two-thirds about affordable housing and one-third other things. “But we shouldn’t over-focus on the other things at the expense of folks who are marginalized despite the fact that they have jobs, despite the fact that they’re not drug addicts and thieves.” Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.
Go Beyond Resumes to Hire Better, More Diverse Talent
BY Jennifer Haupt February 17, 2022Henry Ford said, “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.” This certainly rings true for talent-acquisition efforts. According to Tigran Sloyan, co-founder and CEO at CodeSignal, if you want to bring more diverse candidates into your talent pipeline, you need a fresh approach. “Resumes are a terrible way to identify and hire talent,” said Sloyan, whose company has developed an objective, skills-based interview and assessment platform that can be used as a standard for technical hiring. Speaking at From Day One’s January conference in Seattle, he drew on both his own experience and that of CodeSignal co-founder Aram Shatakhtsyan to illustrate his point. Both men grew up in Armenia and studied extremely hard, Sloyan excelling at math and Shatakhtsyan excelling at computer programming. Both won medals in international competition. The difference between the two young men was that Sloyan was an extrovert who hung out with a lot of international students and found out about this wonderful university for math nerds: MIT. He applied and was given a full scholarship, which of course looked wonderful on his resume. Shatakhtsyan, on the other hand, didn’t have the same experience. He didn't know about MIT or other top-notch schools that might offer him a scholarship, and he attended a university in Armenia that virtually no one in the U.S. had heard of. “Once both of us graduate, I’m literally being chased by every recruiter in the country,” Sloyan said. “I ended up working at Google, making way more money than any new grad should be making. When Aram went out and tried to get a job [in the U.S.], people would literally not bring him in for an interview.” While Sloyan was working at Google, his friend ended up freelancing because his resume didn’t reflect his aptitude. The realization that resumes aren’t an effective way to identify talent is what led to Sloyan and Shatakhtsyan to launch CodeSignal in 2015. They wanted to make sure that qualified engineers were given the opportunity to at least interview for the jobs they were going after. CodeSignal's mission is to help employers to go beyond resumes and traditional credentials in technical recruiting by structuring, automating, and scaling interviews with its technical assessment platform. Two Forces Democratizing the Hiring Process According to Sloyan, there are two fundamental forces making it imperative to go beyond resumes in finding talented employees. First, the Internet has democratized education. Thirty years ago, the only way you could actually gain top-level technical skills was to go to a university such as MIT or Stanford, and then one of the companies associated with those higher-learning institutions would offer mentorship. “So if I looked at your resume and I found neither one of those on your resume, it wouldn’t be too far off to say you probably do not have the skill,” he said. But online learning has changed everything. Last year, virtually every university recorded lectures and published their courses for free. “You can get on YouTube and literally learn anything you want,” Sloyan said. “So that notion that unless you're associated with one of those few educational resources, you’re not qualified, is gone." The second force is demand. “Over the last 30 years, technology has been eating the world in every aspect. You’ve gone from, ‘Yeah, we just need a handful of those engineering people,’ to everybody hiring,” Sloyan said. “Every company is a software company, from Starbucks to Macy’s to Costco. Everybody is literally trying to reinvent themselves as a software company.” Sloyan went on to say that the pandemic accelerated the transformation to digital commerce and the demand for tech engineers. And yet, despite the high demand for talent, everyone is still looking for resumes that fit the outdated standard model. “Less than three percent of the whole pool that’s available has a resume that includes a flashy name that you recognize,” he said. “And fighting for those very, very limited resources is leading to the situation in which everybody is just, like, recycling. You go from Google, to Uber, over to Facebook, back to Google. It’s like this dance where perks are running out, and salary inflation is hitting a crazy point.” The Future: Going Beyond Resumes Even still, Sloyan said, resumes remain the primary tool for hiring, whether it’s an electronic CV or LinkedIn. But he does believe there will be a transformation in the hiring process, moving beyond resumes listing education and previous employers. It’s just a matter of time. “Any year that that transformation doesn’t happen–to a system in which it’s more about skills, it’s more about ability, it’s more about potential of doing the job versus a list of institutions that you’re associated with–there’s a whole generation of people who are actually struggling to live up to their full potential,” Sloyan said. “At the end of the day, talent is the most precious resource humanity has. And if we’re not cherishing it, if we’re not growing it, if we’re not discovering it, if we’re not developing it, we’re literally not going to be able to make the transformations that we need toward the future.” Editor's Note: Thank you to our partner CodeSignal for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.
Is Your Company Developing an Inclusive Culture?
BY Jennifer Haupt February 17, 2022Instead of looking for a “culture fit” in new employees, how can companies make their workplace better-suited to diversity? How much do career growth and employee retention add to a company's reputation for inclusion? These are some of the questions that journalist Steve Scher asked a panel of experts at From Day One’s January conference in Seattle, focused on “Listening to What Workers Want.” Here’s what the panel members had to say about how companies can develop a more inclusive culture: Listen and Make Sure Everyone is Heard “When people come to you with what concerns them, listen,” said Steve Zwerin, director of the HR Investigations Unit for the City of Seattle. “People feeling heard will go a long way. Empathy goes a long way, especially right now. Everybody’s suffering from the bottom of the organization all the way to the top.” Zwerin also emphasized the importance of being transparent. If something’s broken, don’t just talk about how you can fix it, but outline steps you’re taking and the actual fixes you’re making. Empathy is key to effective listening, added Denise Bañuelos, director of equity, inclusion and diversity & workforce development for Kaiser Permanente Washington. Employees know there’s a process to file a complaint with the Employee Relations department, or through the compliance department, but they often want to connect with someone they have a relationship with to get some guidance, she said. “We listen, even though it’s out of our scope, and hear their whole story,” Bañuelos said. “We’re listening for clues of where there may be not necessarily a violation of policy, but an inclusive issue, or lack thereof, or respect, or the bordering line on potential discrimination–microaggression.” Employees are often reticent to bring problems related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to company leaders, points out Madhukar Govindaraju, CEO of Numly, an AI-enhanced, peer-coaching platform. “People need forums, they need help, and support. If you can enable that with whatever mechanisms, then it becomes really effective. And so, for me, that’s what excites me day-to-day when I talk to my own team, as well as my customers and partners. What are they solving today? What is the problem? And how we can bring that to bear?” “At the end of the day, people want to be heard," said Cassandra Mitchell, SVP of DEI strategy and engagement at KeyBank in Seattle. “People want to know that whether it’s their opinion, perspective, whatever it is, people are hearing and listening to them. And so whether we agree with it or not, we allow that space.” Implement Unconscious Bias Programs Both Kaiser Permanente and Keybank have enterprise-wide programs designed to increase employees’ understanding of how bias can impact decisions and begin to dismantle racism in the workplace. Govindaraju of Numly and Mitchell of KeyBank “If you have a brain, you have a bias,” Bañuelos said. “Everyone’s born with it. It can be positive, it can be negative, and just breaking that down and understanding how your brain works and how it can be effective or ineffective in the way we do work [can be helpful].” At her company, employees view the hour-long program sessions independently, and then come together with other employees for a debrief. The goal is for them to voice where they see discrimination happening in their workgroup, and discuss how to stop it. “We encourage small-group discussions, but it’s not required,” Mitchell said of KeyBank’s efforts. “But you know, the small-group discussion is really what has the impact, right? Because people can go through the training, kind of check the box, and set it aside in their mind.” KeyBank has created toolkits to make it as easy as possible for people to discuss these sometimes uncomfortable issues together. The Benefits of Peer Coaching About ten years ago, Numly’s Govindaraju did an experiment partnering with his HR leader around reverse mentoring, in which junior employees counsel more senior ones. He required managers to do reverse mentoring with their teams and it was such a big success that years later it led to Numly's peer-coaching program. “You can connect with anybody,” he said. “In fact, we force managers to be learners, with potentially coaches who are not managers within your organization.” The idea is that when a manager becomes vulnerable and says they want to learn from someone farther down on the corporate ladder, that’s a show of strength. According to Govindaraju, there are two parts to creating an inclusive culture through peer coaching: one is e-learning and the other is human interaction. Both of these components have been incorporated into his company's platform. “When you enable people to work with each other,” he said, “you will find a change in culture.” Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.