Conscious Coaching: Guiding and Recognizing Talent With a Holistic Approach
BY Angie Chatman November 20, 2022In the 20th century workplace, coaches were dispatched to aid mid-level managers with high potential, who may have had some “issues” with staff and co-workers, but were too valuable to the organization to lose. Last century’s coaches set goals, provided learning modules, and monitored progress. But that coaching model is neither acceptable nor applicable in the 21st century workplace. “Where do you see coaches? They’re on the sidelines for each and every game for the entire game,” said Eileen Cooke, VP of enterprise learning, development, and performance for CVS Health. “They also aren’t there to coach one individual. They are there for every member of the team.” Rachel Lipson, co-founder and director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard University’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, echoed that sentiment. “During the pandemic we all heard about record quit rates, and the so-called Great Resignation. [Conscious coaching] is an opportunity to move beyond ‘churn and burn’ and instead make the investment in junior- level employees by being clear regarding promotion opportunities and providing education subsidies,” Lipson said. Cooke and Lipson participated in a panel discussion with several other expert speakers at From Day One’s Boston conference earlier this year. For decades, a holistic approach to recognize employee talents and bolster shortcomings has already been part of many enlightened organizations’ HR and people-management functions. But the Covid-19 pandemic spotlighted the fact that employees have families, the makeup of those families is often multi-generational, and caregiving responsibilities–for both the elderly and the young–fall predominantly on women. A Washington Post story from July 2020, at the height of the pandemic, reported that one in four women quit their jobs during the pandemic because of school closures and inadequate or unaffordable child care options. “Doesn’t it seem that we’ve been talking about inclusion forever?” asked Erin Hicks, senior director of HR for Applied Materials, a semiconductor and display-equipment company. She asserted that the concept of work-life balance must continue to expand to incorporate the realities of these structural barriers, which are baked into our economy. “Do you have flexible work hours? Do you have a commitment to pay equity? We must look beyond skills and education and hold leaders accountable to having family-friendly policies which reflect all kinds of families,” Hicks said, “because I guarantee you the younger workforce is looking for and demanding it.” “The primary message of holistic coaching is trust,” said Alyssa Johnson, VP of account management at Blueboard, an employee-recognition platform. Managers build trust when they recognize and embrace the whole individual, which then benefits the whole organization. “It’s important for us to pay more attention to developing that personal connection, which then allows us to coach our team members more effectively in the areas where they can make a broader impact on their team and the rest of the organization,” Johnson said. Ben Colvin, a partner and leadership coach at Coaching Works NYC, stressed two other aspects of the conscious coaching process. “Too often the [direct-line] manager isn’t involved. However, coaching conversation must go further than goals and action plans. The conversations must continue before, during, and after," said Colvin. Twenty-first century coaching programs must continue to morph, develop, and apply at all levels of the organization, in a variety of workplace contexts, and within ecosystems where employees come from a diverse range of cultures and backgrounds. “I challenge us, as people who have the really important job of taking care of the precious people within our organizations," said Cooke, “to think about coaching as something for everyone within our organizations. But not coach in the same way for every individual in the organization.” Angie Chatman is a freelance writer who covers business, technology, education and social justice. She earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
How Zapier Scaled the New-Hire Experience for Explosive Growth: a Case Study
BY Angie Chatman November 20, 2022Employees begin to form their first real impressions of an organization during the hiring and onboarding process. A troubled onboarding system is one that provides an inconsistent or overwhelming experience for new hires. Other problems include too much time spent on manual tasks, poor hiring-manager engagement and participation, and lack of visibility within the system to capture real time impact. On the other end of the spectrum, Enboarder uses an experience-driven onboarding platform to help customers like McDonald’s, Verizon, Shopify, and Zapier, an automation platform. Zapier, for example, has a workforce that is 100% remote, and has employees in 30 different countries. This complicates hiring and onboarding new team members. Zapier used Enboarder to scale onboarding during a period of explosive growth. “They’ve been hailed as that $7 billion Netflix of productivity because of their incredible business growth in the no- code productivity space,” said Matt Frank, enterprise customer-success manager for Enboarder, during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Boston conference earlier this year. Zapier’s product is a tool that helps to automate repetitive tasks accomplished with two or more applications. With Zapier, your Facebook post will also appear on a specified Slack channel and will be sent via Mailchimp and/or Gmail via a Zap. When you send a job offer letter, Zapier then triggers an onboarding workflow. However, Zapier’s own onboarding system was misaligned. “Everything happening behind the scenes in HR was a nightmare,” said Frank. “Our open API enabled them to use Zapier, their own product, with their other HR systems and automate nearly all their onboarding tasks with an emphasis on employee experience woven into all the platform’s features.” Here’s what Zapier's onboarding process looks like now: The hiring manager is involved in the pre-boarding and onboarding experience. As soon as a new hire accepts the job, the hiring manager is then prompted to send them a congratulatory welcome text message, which can be done from within Enboarder. With that welcome message, the new hire is also prompted to complete a survey about their interests and hobbies, as well as pertinent operations information such as their address, emergency contact, and so on. This information is, again automatically, sent to the HR management system platform. In addition, two weeks before the new hire’s start date, Enboarder sends a reminder nudge to the hiring manager to create a 90-day work plan for that new hire. Matt Frank of Enboarder, center, and a colleague speak with an attendee at From Day One’s Boston conference Research on onboarding best practices has shown that having a “buddy program” in place increases retention. A “buddy” helps new hires become acquainted with essential information and unstructured knowledge about workplace culture, company policies, perks, and benefits, among other things. “A new-hire buddy program can also be incorporated into the program,” said Frank. “At Zapier, ‘buddies’ are called Zap Pals, and with Enboarder, they too are notified via Slack with instructions on how to be a great Zap Pal.” With the power of Enboarder’s automation platform, Zapier has saved its team more than 206,000 minutes otherwise spent on manual onboarding tasks. If your schedule is a traditional 9-to-5, five-day work week, that’s the equivalent of 86 work weeks saved. Zapier used that time to rethink what makes new hires successful. They defined their onboarding pillars based on internal and external research to be setting expectations, creating access to resources, building relationships and interpersonal connections, and communicating effectively across the business. Zapier also reported a 10% increase in hiring-manager participation with onboarding initiatives. “This is a huge win,” Frank said, “because the hiring manager is critical to the onboarding experience of a new hire.” New employees at Zapier are now 2.5 times more likely to check ‘strongly agree’ on the survey item asking whether their onboarding was exceptional when their manager has an active role. Moreover, there was a 70% decrease in employee turnover within the first three months of employment, a 65% increase in productivity, a 10% to 15% increase in sales appointments, and an impressive 93 out of 100 employee net promoter score (eNPS), a metric used to measure employee satisfaction and loyalty to the organization. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Enboarder, who sponsored this thought leadership spotlight. Angie Chatman is a freelance writer who covers business, technology, education and social justice. She earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Making Work Meaningful in an Uncertain World
BY Angie Chatman October 25, 2022Although the period during the Covid-19 pandemic has been called the Great Resignation, a more accurate description would be the Great Exploration, as employees and employers reevaluate the nature of work. “At Zensar,” said Shahina Islam, VP of HR for the tech company, “there were challenges, especially with onboarding new employees, but we were able to take advantage of technology and adjust the culture. There were huge growing pains, but eventually we landed on fully remote/camera on during meetings.” Zensar is a software company, so it’s not surprising that they leaned into technology solutions. “There was a huge amount of change management that had to be done, but more so to manage customer expectations,” said Islam, speaking at From Day One’s Boston conference in a panel discussion on “Making Work Meaningful in an Uncertain World.” Not so for the health care industry. “We had physicians and nurses who were working on site all during the pandemic,” said Dionne Wright Poulton, chief diversity officer at Care New England Health System in Providence. “I worked remotely on some days; on others I came into the office. This variety of experience within the organization primed us to think about diversity in a more active way. What about women who had to stay home with their children because the schools were closed? How do they balance their jobs given this new reality? What about the physician who has to leave the hospital and undress in the garage or basement of their home? It’s changed the way we look at work.” It has also changed how businesses recruit and retain employees. “Prior to the pandemic there was already a struggle to attract and retain top talent,” Islam pointed out, “Typically, those [final] interviews would happen in person so the candidate could experience the organization’s culture and determine if there was a fit,” she said. “Now, retention and recruitment efforts include a mentor from the very beginning who answers questions and helps the candidate understand the culture.” Among the panelists: Robert Livada of CyberGrants, left, and Dionne Wright Poulton of Care New England Health System “Nurses were in short supply before the pandemic. We’re offering signing bonus to compete in the market, but we’re also doing something similar to the buddy system, partnering new employees, especially those who are relocating to the area,” echoed Poulton. “It’s a wraparound service approach.” “A similar trend I’m seeing with the companies we work with,” said Robert Livada, senior VP of solutions architecture at CyberGrants, “is that the employee engagement programs of the past were driven from the top down. Now, [the goal] is to cultivate grassroots engagement, allowing employees to participate in programs which they champion because it means something to them, not because it directly aligns with the corporate pillars.” Wendy Richard, director of corporate social responsibility and community relations for the pharmaceutical company Sanofi, added, “Sanofi has approximately 4,300 employees based in Massachusetts, 100,000 in total. We’ve had leadership buy-in to the challenge that we must partner in the communities where we live. But it’s really been the employees that are driving the conversation regarding the type of workplace they want to have. We can’t do everything, but it’s about listening and responding to the employees you’re trying to attract and retain the ones you want to keep, particularly in this competitive innovation centered economy in the greater Boston area.” “I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about George Floyd,” said Poulton. “The aftermath was transformative. Having been in the DEI space for over 20 years, the conversations got more real, deeper, and richer. Employees feel like they can really say what they think. I had an employee tell me, ‘You know we don’t have a space to pray during Ramadan.’ And I found a prayer space for Ramadan. It’s really fantastic to see this happening.” “That’s a segue into one of my favorite stories,” said Livada. “Disney is one of our clients. They opened up one of their employee-engagement programs saying, ‘Listen, you can record any act of kindness that you want.’ One person posted a selfie of helping a turtle cross the road. It went viral. Every week, employees were posting pictures of themselves either helping turtles or helping other animals. That’s not one of Disney’s direct pillars, but it got everybody engaged and got everybody focused on the programs, which is great.” Angie Chatman is a freelance writer who covers business, technology, education and social justice. She earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Is Your Company Developing an Inclusive Culture?
BY Angie Chatman May 23, 2022Alban Jacquin, VP of diversity, equity, inclusion and well-being for Schneider Electric, introduced himself as follows, “Hi, everyone. I am alone. You can hear that I have a French accent. I am 41. I am white. I have glasses on; and I’m wearing Jordans VI, black-and-red edition.” Jacquin did this to demonstrate to the audience how to be inclusive, the topic of a panel conversation at From Day One’s Boston conference on the realignment of the relationship between workers and their employers. “First, you cannot assume that people don’t have a disability. Begin by trying to level the playing field,” Jacquin said. KeyAnna Schmiedl, global head of DEI for Wayfair, followed. “[For me] it’s about being open and honest. After George Floyd was murdered, I told my team, ‘Right now is really hard for me.’ And they appreciated how honest I had been with them, so they felt like they could let me know when it felt like too much for them. It’s about demonstrating that humility,” she said. “One of our corporate values is sharing your humanity,” said Julie Law, head of HR for John Hancock. “If you share some of yourself and be authentic, people feel more open to sharing their experience ... then you’ve got to listen intently when people do share, meet them where they are, and don’t leave anyone behind.” “I started as an engineer in the lab,” said Amina Lobban, director head of HR business excellence at pharmaceutical maker Takeda, “and have been working in grassroots women’s organizations for years. I felt included when company leadership recognized our efforts to enhance gender parity.” “In the past seven to eight months, we were able to grow from 15 to 80 people,” said Savina Perez, co-founder and chief customer officer at the talent-development platform Hone, “and still maintain a 50/50 gender parity. We were very intentional about how we wanted to build a certain type of culture, a certain type of team, an extremely diverse team, and we’ve been able to get that done.” Boston overview, from left: moderator Steve Koepp of From Day One, Savina Perez of Hone, Alban Jacquin of Schneider Electric, and Lobban, Schmiedl and Law Having shared their inclusion successes, the panel addressed what a New York Times story called “a two-year, 50-million-person experiment in changing how we work.” After all, the office was never one-size-fits-all. It was one size fits some, with the expectation–no, the mandate–that everyone else would comply. At the same time, “we need to acknowledge that there may be part of the workforce that never will have the option to work from home. We have folks in call centers, warehouses, fulfillment centers, and drivers,” said Schmiedl. “What we did was to figure out a way to acknowledge them. We would offer meals-to-go as a ‘thank you.’ We’re discussing implementation of a shared-hours model. [We continue to have] those conversations to understand the roadblocks for folks. Our thinking is different than it was pre-pandemic.” “Yes,” echoed Lobban. “I went to visit a plant in Nashville, and in France, and noted what inclusion and office work mean for shop-floor employees. ‘If you bring me in for a shift, ensure that there are enough paths for me to finish that shift, otherwise I’m going to be sent home without pay,’” one worker told her. “As a small organization in hypergrowth mode, it’s easy to say, ‘Let’s build a culture of trust,’” said Perez. “But how can you do that when everyone has 3,000 things that they’re working on every given day? From a leadership perspective we are having those conversations, trying to figure it out, and having our team members be a part of trying to find answers.” “One of the things we did,” said Law, “is make an inclusive-language effort. In the technology space, there’s blacklist and whitelist, for example. This terminology is embedded. We’ve been thoughtful and intentional about eliminating that because it can help systemically drive bias. We have a longstanding, tenured-employee base, so we’re on a cultural journey.” “When it comes to language,” Schmiedl said, “when you say diverse and use it as a euphemism for women, for black employees, for those with disabilities, you’re then saying it’s not the default group, it’s something else. We must stop doing that,” she said. “We’re not going to move forward by not having white men as part of the conversation or not having those who are abled as part of the conversation. I went to a conference where the entire panel was either blind or had low vision. And [one of them] said, ‘I keep hearing this term, you know, around creating accommodations, and how much does it cost if you have an employee with XYZ disability? Do you know how much you pay for the lights? As a blind person, I don’t need the lights. We’re paying for all you people to see, to not walk into things. I can do the job without lights.’ So, it's the language that sends a message of inclusion or exclusion, whether or not you intend that. And it’s not about your intention, it’s about your impact.” Schmiedl added: “Wayfair ran a natural-language process analysis of our performance reviews and identified words or phrases used to describe opportunity areas. We found that the word ‘confidence’ came up more often as a differentiator between men and women. We told everyone in the organization that we might be using this word in a biased way, and if it’s not tied to business results, then why is it important? In one performance cycle, women were on average rated higher in their performance reviews than men and that has been sustained over the last four or five cycles.” “Plus,” said Lobban, “confidence is a very Western quality. [We are] a global company headquartered in Japan, with additional operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India. In many countries a woman saying I’m confident is not something you would ever hear because it’s taboo, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t just as capable. There are also cultural differences that require consideration when you rate people.” The New York Times story was based in part on a survey of more than 700 readers, plus over two dozen interviews. Lobban noted that, “these surveys say the reason that underrepresented groups don’t want to go back to the office is that they don’t want to deal with the daily micro-aggressions and code switching that they have had to do. [In addition], over the past two years, people’s lives have changed in such a way that you need more flexibility in your life, not just in work. It’s not really flexible work, but it’s sort of a flexible life. And so in my division of the company, we’re looking at creating what we call an Exceptional Employee Experience. Because all of this is linked to well-being.” The panel’s consensus: The more people feel good about themselves and their organizations, that’s when they feel included. They’re also tend to be more productive and they stick around, whether working from home or in an office. Angie Chatman is a freelance writer who covers business, technology, education and social justice. She earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
What It Takes to Enhance the Whole Employee Experience
BY Angie Chatman October 17, 2019With today’s unemployment rates at record lows, many companies are competing strenuously to attract new workers—and retain the ones they have. What are their best lures? Turns out that the intangibles matter. “Large salaries and monetary perks help, but cannot offset the need for purpose and meaning,” said Naina Dhingra, a partner at McKinsey & Co., the consulting firm. “Employees want to have a clear sense of the company’s mission, how the employee can contribute to this mission, and how they can work with their co-workers to achieve the mission.” In fact, most Americans say they would take a sizeable pay cut in order to take a job more meaningful to them, noted Albert Siu, corporate vice president for learning and development at Parexel, a biopharmaceutical company. Yet there is no one-size-fits-all approach to keeping employees satisfied and engaged, so companies are increasingly looking at the whole employee experience. Among the elements: the right benefits to fit employees at different life stages, work schedules that offer flexibility in multiple ways, community-building efforts, and a physically healthy work environment, according to the speakers on a panel on employee experience at last month’s From Day One conference in Boston, moderated by Doug Banks, executive editor of Boston Business Journal. Employers in recent years have been focused on one generation in particular, millennials, who now constitute the largest segment of the workforce. And they’re restless. Nearly half of them plan to leave their current jobs in two years, according to a Deloitte survey. This rate of turnover costs businesses billions of dollars. Part of the cause is that, compared to earlier generations, millennials tend to be disengaged employees, indifferent to their work and wondering if they can find a stronger sense of purpose somewhere else. McKinsey’s Dhingra described how her firm’s new office design in New York City features ample amounts of natural light, plus an outdoor terrace As a result, employers have a strong interest in showing workers how their efforts have an impact on the world. In the case of government workers, who may not have the same financial incentives as private-sector workers, leaders emphasize the importance of their service. “Fortunately, the majority of people who apply to work for the government choose that option because they already have a desire to serve the public,” said Dana Yonchak, senior director for talent and culture for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Yonchak’s challenge is to share all of the positive things that government is doing and create a brand proposition that’s encouraging to prospective hires, especially young people who’ll make up the state’s future work force. “My team and I are working to publicize the fact that in addition to the social workers and court clerks, the doctor who is investigating the outbreak of EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis) is a state employee. Marine scientists who study climate change’s effect on fish and their habitats work for the state, and so on.” In the health-care field, a sense of helping people is something workers feel directly. “They want to make a difference in our clients’ lives,” said Anastasia Bergmann, vice president of talent management, diversity, equity and Inclusion for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. But after caring for patients, the workers need to take care of themselves, so Harvard Pilgrim takes a holistic approach to the benefits it offers employees, said Bergmann, in part by helping with the obligations in their personal lives. One is the burden of student loans; many medical professionals join the company with debts topping six figures. For call-center employees, Harvard Pilgrim added flextime and work-from-home options, which dramatically reduced rates of lateness and absenteeism. Harvard Pilgrim also offers three volunteer days which an employee can use to visit their child’s classroom during National Poetry Month, for example, or march in support of climate change. “Our goal is to be more intentional, more strategic, with benefit packages and a-la-carte options,” Bergmann said. The speakers reflected on the importance of healthy office environments as well. But there’s no clear consensus on what that looks like, since management thinking about office design has gone back and forth over the years. Earlier in his career, Siu worked at Hewlett-Packard, where the engineering floor was an open space because it facilitated information sharing and general communication. Then came the era of the cubicle, which put an emphasis on personal space and privacy. Now, following the example of Google and other tech firms, the open-plan office has returned, but this time around has produced a strong backlash among workers. “If you look at startups now, a lot of people wear headphones to block out noise, minimize distractions, and create a personal bubble,” said Siu. Jane Steinmetz, Ernst & Young’s Boston managing principal and New England markets leader, spoke at the conference about ways to promote the advancement of women into leadership positions McKinsey has recently redesigned its flagship offices in New York City and London in an effort to produce a healthy combination of those design ideas, based on the firm’s observations of employee workflow and activity, Dhingra said. In New York, the space is a combination of conference rooms, cubicles, and lounge spaces–all with lots of windows supplying natural light–and an outdoor terrace. But some organizational guidelines had to be adjusted because of how employees responded to the new design. “Team” conference rooms can be booked for a maximum of three hours, she said, because managers had noticed that teams would spend the entire day and well into the night in those rooms. Perhaps not a sustainable work pattern. In closing, moderator Banks pointed out that “over the nearly two decades since the Journal started publishing the Best Places to Work list for Boston firms, one thing is clear. Businesses that are ranked high offer their employees more than good salaries. It’s not all about money.” Angie Chatman is a freelance writer who covers business, technology, education and social justice. She earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Find her on Twitter @angiecwriter