The Role of the CHRO in Shaping the Employee Experience
BY Steve Hendershot April 25, 2023A year ago, the Great Resignation was spurring HR leaders across the country to reconsider their approaches to recruitment and retention as Americans abandoned their jobs in droves. The “quit rate” in the U.S. hit a two-decade high in late 2021 and the trend continued into 2022, with workers citing factors ranging from a lack of opportunities for advancement, employer inflexibility and feeling disrespected at work among the top reasons they were moving on, according to a Pew Research report.Now, with a potential recession looming and layoffs roiling the technology sector, employers have regained some leverage and conversation could look different.But should it?The HR leader of Northwestern Mutual, the Milwaukee-based insurer and investment firm that consistently ranks among the country’s best places to work, says it’s a mistake for companies that have taken the lessons of the Great Resignation to heart to abandon those learnings now that the labor-market dynamics are shifting.Northwestern Mutual didn’t experience a spike in turnover during the Great Resignation, and doesn’t plan to lay off staff or strong-arm its workers in the event of a downturn.“Pre-pandemic, we didn’t have this attitude that the employer controls everything, and therefore we're going to put all these draconian things in place,” said Don Robertson, Northwestern Mutual’s executive VP and CHRO, during a conversation with Bloomberg’s Chicago bureau chief, Isis Almeida, at a From Day One conference in Chicago.The company is sticking with the same approach now.“We play a long game,” Robertson said. “Anytime we hire an employee, they’re part of us, and we want them to be with us for their entire career,” Robertson says.That commitment to longevity isn’t limited to avoiding layoffs. It applies equally to a culture that’s focused on fostering connections and opportunities for career-long growth.Don Robertson, EVP and Chief HR Officer of Northwestern Mutual speaking on the importance of connection (Photo by Tim Hiatt for From Day One)“We’re very much focused on really creating a personal experience for every person—how they grow their career, how they develop, how we interact with them,” said Robertson. “As a result, we’ve just been much more intimately connected to our employees.”Of course, pandemic-era shifts toward remote work can make those sorts of connections more challenging. Almeida asked Robertson about how Northwestern Mutual is approaching hybrid work arrangements as many employers are calling their workers back to the office.Robertson said there’s value in gathering in person, and that some teams will gather in person more than others—but that the company isn’t planning to turn back the clock to its pre-pandemic culture. Instead, he’s focused on ensuring that Northwestern Mutual’s culture remains strong regardless of where employees do their work.“I don't think engagement is about proximity; it’s about connecting with people,” Robertson said.Building and maintaining those connections sometimes means tailoring leadership styles to the specific contours of remote work. At Northwestern Mutual, for example, managers are now trained to schedule more frequent one-on-ones with employees to facilitate relational connection, because impromptu water-cooler gatherings don’t happen as frequently.“You have to be much more intentional about connecting,” said Robertson.Robertson also cautioned against focusing on productivity metrics, which can be a factor in calling employees back to the office. He said Northwestern Mutual bases its evaluations on performance rather than productivity—and had the two best years of its 166-year history during the pandemic, when remote work was the norm.Embracing remote workers also opens up the potential to build remote teams. Robertson said it has become easier for Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual to hire tech talent, for example, by expanding its footprint and adding employees in cities such as Atlanta, Denver and San Francisco. Yet Northwestern Mutual’s emphasis on connectedness also comes into play there: rather than hiring isolated employees in far-flung regions, Robertson said the company aims to add clusters of employees in target markets.Community-building is just one of Northwestern Mutual’s points of emphasis regarding employee experience. The company also has altered its approach to accommodate young employees, for example, who expect to be more involved in high-level projects early in their careers than workers in previous generations. The idea, Robertson says, is to ensure that the company shows that it values its people as essential stakeholders rather than disposable parts.Robertson was interviewed by Bloomberg's Chicago Bureau Chief, Isis Almeida, at From Day One's 2023 Chicago conference (Photo by Tim Hiatt for From Day One)“If you want to be a talent magnet to those employees out there, you need to be thought of as a company that actually puts the employee on the same plane as the shareholder or customer,” Robertson says.The value of that sort of intentionality also applies to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In response to a question from Bloomberg’s Almeida, Robertson said Northwestern Mutual has remade its approach to hiring and developing diverse employees over the last five years, substantially increasing both the overall number of women and Black employees, but also the number of people in both groups who hold leadership positions. The key, Robertson said, is structure: holding regular meetings with groups of diverse employees to ensure that their voices are heard, and ensuring that hiring processes includes slates of diverse candidates.“Be very intentional, but with a lot of action,” Robertson said. “Your strategy has to match your operational rigor.”There’s a lesson there for companies that find themselves in a reactive mode as the economy swings from the pandemic and Great Resignation to an era when employees are returning to work—and may need work more than work needs them.Rather than press their advantage, those companies are well-served to foster cultures that will endure across trends and seasons, and that value employee well-being on the same level as shareholder returns.Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.
The Future of Work Is Now: Offering Child Care Benefits Is Essential
BY Steve Hendershot April 12, 2023As the pandemic subsides and Americans return to a reimagined version of everyday life, the question is exactly how much reimagining is in order.Will the millions of workers who grew accustomed to remote or hybrid work arrangements return to their desks? Offices are certainly busier than they were during the pandemic, but there remain plenty of signs that workers will continue to seek at least a measure of the flexibility they gained in recent years.Family dynamics are changing, too, as working parents who spent more time in the home alongside their kids now attempt to redefine their work-life balance. Many experienced firsthand the relational value of family proximity during the pandemic—while also gaining appreciation for the challenges that go along with juggling child care and professional responsibilities.As a result, working parents who are returning to the office are placing special emphasis on child care. Child care ranks as the second-most valuable benefit in retaining employees, ahead of paid time off and retirement contributions, according to a 2023 report from KinderCare. Two-thirds of working parents want their employers to offset the cost of child care, up five percent from 2020.Sixty-nine percent of working parents said they had either switched jobs or would consider switching jobs because of childcare concerns, according to the report. Similar numbers reported a willingness to scale back their professional activities to better accommodate their kids’ needs.Dan Figurski, president of the KinderCare Education and Champions divisions presenting on the importance of child care benefits at From Day One's Chicago conference (Photo by Tim Hiatt for From Day One)That puts the stakes for employers in stark terms: support families or risk losing your people. Yet it’s unclear whether most companies are getting the message. In an informal, show-of-hands survey at From Day One’s conference in Chicago in March, a group of HR leaders indicated that forms of childcare support were far less common at their companies than other benefits.“I’m not surprised by the hands that came down. I am surprised about the disconnect,” said Dan Figurski, president of the KinderCare Education at Work and Champions divisions within KinderCare Learning Companies. “The benefits that served us five years ago are not the benefits that are going to serve us going forward.”One reason for the lagging adoption of child care benefits may be that employers don’t understand the extent of the burden that child care places on workers. Figurski said that during one presentation to a prospective health care client, the organization’s CEO asked an assistant how much of her income was allocated to child care—and was stunned when the answer was nearly half.“We see the cost of childcare continuing to be a big prohibitor, and keeping people on the sidelines,” said Figurski.Companies looking to add or expand their child care benefits have several options, ranging from strictly financial offerings such as subsidies and access to pre-tax dependent-care accounts, to providing either daily on-site care or backup care. In the KinderCare report, more than half of parents indicated they would be motivated to stay at their job if their employer offered on-site care, even though only 17 percent of full-time working parents said they currently had access to such a benefit.The best approach varies based on the company, Figurski said. He recommends that companies start with a survey to assess their employees’ needs.Investigating a child care benefit can feel unfamiliar for companies that offer traditional packages focused on health care, time off and retirement support. But working parents are making clear that in the post-pandemic work world, they’re relying on their employers for child care support.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, KinderCare, who sponsored this thought leadership spotlight.Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.
The New Frontier for Work-Life Balance
BY Steve Hendershot April 10, 2023While last year’s hit TV show Severance conjured a world where there was total separation between characters’ home and work lives, the recent real-world trend veers in the opposite direction. The line has blurred dramatically between work life and, well, life life—especially over the course of a pandemic in which, for many people, home became the new office. It’s created a fascinating dynamic for HR professionals who are attempting to respect and facilitate their teams’ rich personal lives, while also nurturing a cohesive and high-performing company culture. Among the challenges—and opportunities—is that many employees are now looking for a high degree of personal fulfillment from their jobs, rather than just a paycheck. “What's been bubbling to the top [of employee priorities] is meaning and purpose and a sense of belonging in the company,” said Rose Sheldon, Chief Learning Officer at KeyBank, speaking as part of a March panel discussion at a From Day One conference in Chicago.In response, KeyBank has tweaked its onboarding process. Before teaching new employees “our purpose, we need to understand their purpose. When you can help lead someone to how their personal purpose aligns with the company's purpose, then it gives you more of a reason to not just be a high performer, but actually care about the work you're doing.”Creating that sort of alignment is hardly the only step HR teams are taking to encourage employee wellbeing without sacrificing performance. There’s also an increased focus, for example, on ensuring that employees don’t burn out—a particular danger among the hard-charging, high-performing employees upon whom companies often depend most. It falls to managers to keep their star performers from reaching that point, sometimes in spite of the workers’ objections. These aren’t people who like easing back on the throttle, so one tactic to help them maintain a healthy level of focus is to ask them to participate in mentorship and coaching programs, which provide variety and a focus on investing in others—along with an intentional absence of deliverables.“A lot of people get engaged around how they can help someone else and how can they pay it forward, so that's not as draining to them,” said Kim Nero, Executive VP & Chief HR Officer at railcar lessor GATX, another of the From Day One conference panelists. “There’s not a deadline or result that you expect from them.”The full panel of speakers, from left moderator Alex Maragos, Kat Frosolone of Care.com for Business, Matthew Willis of Advantage Club, Rose Sheldon of KeyBank, Kim Nero of GATX Corporation, and Jordana Kammerud of Claire's (Photo by Tim Hiatt for From Day One)Of course, that approach only works when those employees aren’t worried that they’ll fall behind if they take their foot off the gas pedal. Thus it’s crucial for senior leadership to model healthy work habits—including a willingness to unplug. People in the C-Suite “have to step away, and they have to be really vocal about it,” said KeyBank’s Sheldon. When executives post social media photos of a family beach day, it sends the message that spending time on family and leisure is both worthwhile and brag-worthy. In the remote-work era, many professionals have discovered that they’re able to do great work at odd times, and in strange places. Alex Maragos, an anchor and reporter at NBC5 News Chicago who moderated the discussion, asked about the “future of flexibility“—and how companies should think about balancing productivity and remote or hybrid work arrangements in the post-pandemic era. The panel’s consensus? Flexible work arrangements are here to stay and can correlate with great productivity. The onus is on companies and managers to learn to accommodate asynchronous work—and workers.“It’s understanding that my working hours may not be your working hours, and that just because I am not doing something at eight o'clock in the morning doesn't make me less valuable,” said panelist Kat Frosolone, director of strategic partnerships at Care.com for Business. At their best, flexible work arrangements enable employees to better manage their schedules and fulfill a broader range of personal and professional priorities. “People's families come first, and understanding that will allow them to be more productive and happy employees,” said Frosolone.But there’s also a danger to such arrangements: some people who work from home struggle to unplug, which can lead not only to burnout but also to other unhealthy outcome. Accordingly, managers must be prepared to help with that, too. “Everything's melding a bit now, which is helpful and important for flexibility, but also potentially harmful from a standpoint of creating separation and finding opportunities to disengage from stress,” said Jordana Kammerud, Chief HR Officer at fashion retailer Claire’s. In those cases, she recommends employers provide some guardrails—structure that’s not for the company or manager’s benefit, but where it’s “needed to support the health and well being of the full employee.”One such strategy is building in time for relationship-building. In the past, work friendships formed naturally in the cafeteria, by the water cooler, or around the conference table. But a remote or hybrid work environment necessitates “more time spent learning individual needs, and doubling down on those structures to fill that [relational] void with belonging and recognition and trust,” said panelist Matthew Willis, Senior VP and general manager for North America at employee-engagement platform Advantage Club.Amidst a series of seismic shifts in employee expectations as well as ways of working, companies and HR leaders are working to find a playbook that will serve their organizations’ needs as well as the needs of their workers. In times of upheaval, there can be a tendency both for people and organizations to revert to what they know best, but in this case, Claire’s Kammerud says the right move is to invent a new corporate template.“The future of work is about balancing these opposing forces,” she said. And like any balancing act, success will require trust and confidence. “We have to trust that people are adults, and that we're in it to win it together,” said GATX’s Nero. “Hopefully there's a vision and a mission that compels us to work at this place, and we’ll trust each other to do our best every day.”Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.
Closing the Connection Gap: Redefining Modern Leadership
BY Steve Hendershot April 04, 2023A paradox of post-pandemic life is that even though people and organizations are better connected than ever before, many people are also struggling with a sense of relational disconnection. Despite the proliferation of tech tools like Zoom, Slack and teams, more than a third of workers say they’re dealing with feelings of loneliness, isolation and disconnectedness, according to a 2022 survey. How can we spend so much time communicating while building so little community? One potential factor is that while people are spending a lot of time interacting with colleagues, they’re missing out on opportunities to go deeper and build more meaningful relationships. And when isolated employees look elsewhere to seek more fulfilling professional opportunities, it’s bad for business. That puts added pressure on employers looking for ways to engage and retain their people. Their challenge is to “create that kind of psychological safety in our workplaces, so people can be centered around something that's all about community connection, warmth, and kindness,” according to Megan Galloway, head of learning experience at Campfire, a company that provides training and development that enables managers to better engage and support their teams. Galloway spoke at From Day One's recent Chicago conference.Galloway pointed to research on psychological safety by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson that indicates that leaders can enhance the perceived level of psychological safety on their teams by modeling behaviors such as admitting mistakes, approaching problems with curiosity, and adopting a collaborative work style. When those behaviors are present, not only are there positive implications for employee wellbeing, but overall team performance is booster, as well. Research at Google indicates that how a team works together—influenced heavily by psychological safety—has a greater impact on the work product than the roster of people on the team. Megan Galloway of Campfire presenting in Chicago (Photo by Tim Hiatt for From Day One)Then there’s the retention risks associated with disconnection. In her presentation at From Day One, Campfire’s Galloway highlighted McKinsey research showing that a perceived lack of care from leaders was the top reason for people to leave a job without another one lined up. That implies an exceptional amount of influence among leaders, but it checks out with the findings of another recent survey from UKG that managers impact on their employees’ mental health is equal to that of a spouse, and substantially greater than the impact of a doctor or therapist. Organizations whose leaders and managers excel at building connections and an atmosphere of safety and trust clearly have a competitive advantage, not to mention a happier and healthier workplace. So what are the keys to equipping and encouraging managers to operate in that mode? For starters, Galloway suggests ensuring that those leaders are taking time to reflect on their own wellbeing, possibly aided by insights from 360 assessments. She also suggests encouraging leaders to build new connections with others. While feeling isolated during the pandemic, for example, Galloway began hosting virtual coffee meetings with LinkedIn connections—an exercise that blossomed to include more than 750 participants located around the world. During those gatherings, she sends participants into breakout rooms and encourages them to eschew surface-level conversation in favor of more vulnerable stuff. When the breakout sessions conclude and everyone returns to the primary session, Galloway describes the atmosphere as “electric.” “These people have made these incredible, deep connections, they've found intimate things that they have in common with these other folks that they've met, and it's just been an absolutely amazing experience to show how much you can connect with people in a virtual environment,” Galloway says. There’s another lesson in Galloway’s virtual gatherings: they were her idea, not something foisted upon her by her company. She says HR leaders interested in fostering organizational community are smart to look for organic groups and activities that they can support and amplify, rather than developing and pushing out their own programming. “The engagement initiatives that have always done the best are not the ones that HR started,” Galloway says. “They're the ones that somebody inside of the company was super excited about, and so they took the initiative to go and put themselves out there. And they show up as their own authentic selves, and they attract other people that are also able to show up as their authentic selves.”It’s never been easy for organizations to foster trust, community and relational depth among their leaders and teams. These days, despite the presence of so many high-tech communication and collaboration tools, the task appears to be as challenging as ever. Yet there are several strong incentives for organizations that commit to nurturing that sort of culture: better work, lower employee turnover and happier people. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Campfire, who sponsored this thought leadership spotlight.Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.
How to Excel–and Exhale. Balancing Performance With Compassion
BY Steve Hendershot April 03, 2022Servant leadership has become a C-suite buzzword. Empathy is now a power skill. Collaboration, rather than competition, is the team dynamic that managers most covet. Business leaders across industries are coming around to the notion that high-achieving workplaces can show compassion—and that doing so can benefit their team members’ performance in addition to their well-being. Grafting an ethos of compassion into a performance-oriented culture is “not just possible, it’s necessary,” said Melissa Versino, assistant VP for talent development and manager development at insurer Zurich North America. “To really be able to create a mechanism where you can achieve sustainable results, where you can be innovative and you can hit your business outcomes, I think it's a direct result of leading with compassion and empathy. It’s not actually at odds.” Versino’s comments were part of a panel discussion, titled “How High-performing Workplaces Can Show Compassion, Too,” at From Day One’s March conference in Chicago. The speakers expressed agreement about the value of compassionate leadership, but identified several challenges to exercising it. One issue is concern about fairness and equity among managers. A manager may be inclined to behave compassionately toward an employee by accommodating a work-from-home request, for example, or a flexible schedule. Is it right to grant one employee that sort of flexibility if others don’t have the same opportunity? If you accommodate everyone on the team, will performance suffer? For organizations committed to fostering a more empathetic workplace, it’s useful to communicate guidelines with managers so they better understand their decision-making latitude, as well as the company’s overall attitude toward those sorts of arrangements. “Companies have to really put the processes and procedures in place for their managers to say, ‘These are the guardrails within which you can operate,’ and then give them the agency to then take it as far as they need,” said Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of the employee-coaching provider Bravely. “Clarity is kindness. When we give people the guardrails, but then trust them to make their own decisions, that’s when we create these healthy cultures and the compassion piece.” That flexibility is especially relevant when it comes to accommodating employees who are caregivers. There’s an equity angle: Most caregivers are women, and the pressure on caregivers amidst the pandemic is a primary reason women’s participation in the U.S. labor force dropped to a 33-year low in 2021, according to an analysis of federal government data by the National Women’s Law Center. Panelists Lisa Bomrad of Homethrive, Christine Doucet of Ace Hardware, Melissa Versino of Zurich North America, Sarah Sheehan of Bravely, and Corey Flournoy of Aurora Companies and managers can support caregivers in lots of ways, ranging from flexible hours to meal kits and housekeeping stipends, pointed out Lisa Bomrad, chief HR officer at Homethrive, an Illinois-based company that supports caregivers. Bomrad said managers need to be educated about the support tools at their disposal. “Helping managers with the skills, the coaching, and giving them the guidance” can equip them to better model empathy and compassion within their teams, Bomrad said. “This is uncharted territory for a lot of them.” Just as important as establishing those expectations is modeling them. Organizations should not expect their managers and teams to demonstrate empathy and compassion to one another if that behavior isn’t evident at the top. “People model the behaviors that they see the executive teams doing. If the CEO and others are empathetic, I think managers know they have the opportunity,” said Corey Flournoy, VP for people development and cultural engagement at Aurora, which develops technology for self-driving vehicles. That’s the best-case scenario. Flournoy also warned that upper management also has the ability to undermine an organization’s efforts at fostering a culture or compassion. “If the CEO and others are so driven towards profits and everything else that they don't see the human side, that also lets you know as a manager that you possibly can’t afford to spend much time on people,” Flournoy said. The ethos and impact of a compassionate culture aren't limited to issues of work-life balance. They also extend to the way companies emphasize their mission or environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals alongside the push for revenue and profit. When employees connect to a collective sense of altruistic purpose, the response is often positive. “We’ve found that the biggest driver of employee engagement is meaningfulness,” said Christine Doucet, director of employee engagement at Ace Hardware Corp., and a director of the Ace Hardware Foundation. Doucet pointed to Ace Hardware’s longstanding support of the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals as something that galvanized employees, and said that in recent years the company has added 20 hours of paid volunteer time for each employee to donate to a charity of their choice. The idea, Doucet said, is to demonstrate both that the company cares about social impact and that its employees play a key role in bringing that vision to life. “You should tell your company’s philanthropic story, but then also allow your employees to be part of it,” said Doucet. “Give them credit, give them kudos, and make them feel like they're part of something bigger.” Building a culture that incorporates empathy and compassion alongside an emphasis on high performance is a challenge—one that requires a new C-suite mindset as well as a different managerial toolkit. The pandemic has only made the transition more dramatic as managers contend with new obstacles, such as integrating new team members during an era of virtual work and building community among remote teams. “The role of manager has changed from decision maker to connector, and it’s a huge leap for a lot of managers,” said Bravely’s Sheehan. “The role of the manager is to now facilitate all these connections, and it’s like a new set of skills that we have not required in the past.” So, as managers emerge as the front-line ambassadors of a new culture of corporate compassion, it’s worth remembering that they, too, are worthy of a healthy dose of empathy. Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.
In Chicago, One City's Response to the Racial Reckoning
BY Steve Hendershot April 03, 2022The murder of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a nationwide reckoning over racial justice–and that conversation reached a fever pitch in Chicago. The city is among America’s most segregated, made so in part by decades-old policies that shoehorned Black residents into specific corners of the city. While those policies are no longer in effect, they have left an enduring legacy. Chicago’s South Side, especially, remains overwhelmingly Black, and many of the neighborhoods there continue to contend with the effects of poverty and a lack of community investment. The city’s leaders already had begun attempting to remedy those circumstances well before Floyd’s killing. Indeed, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced her signature INVEST South/West initiative in the fall of 2019, shortly after her election, pledging to direct $750 million in investments into those communities. “Government got us into this. Now government has a an obligation to get us out of it,” said Marquis Miller, the city of Chicago’s chief diversity officer, in a fireside chat with Michelle Relerford, a news anchor at Chicago’s NBC 5 News, at From Day One’s March conference in Chicago. Miller highlighted several ways Chicago is attempting to fulfill that obligation, in addition to Lightfoot’s INVEST South/West program. One is improved transparency in hiring. The website of the city’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice includes an Equity Dashboard that shows the composition of the city’s workforce by ethnicity as well as age and gender. The dashboard also compares the city’s workforce to Chicago’s population at large, and breaks down current-year hiring totals, as well as hiring by department. The dashboard shows off some substantial gains: Black Chicagoans make up 29.2% of the city-government workforce, for example, just behind their 29.8% share of the city’s population, and they accounted for 32% of new hires in 2021. “You can actually compare the progress that we’ve made and will continue to make, because this is not work that is easy to do overnight,” Miller said. “It is important work that we've done, and using data has allowed us to tell a different story within the city, as well as external to the city.” The conversation’s moderator, Michelle Relerford of NBC 5 News, with Miller onstage in Chicago Relerford pressed Miller on whether the city is doing enough to recruit candidates from communities where there is an entrenched skepticism toward city government. “What can be done when when people feel like they’re seeing these patterns year after year? And there’s talk about change, but people still feel like they’re being left out intentionally?” asked Relerford. Miller defended the city’s recruitment and applicant-testing practices, and said that while Chicago has struggled to attract applicants to public-safety positions amidst calls for police reform—he described “monumental challenges at recruiting”—he believes real progress is underway. “We’ve seen significant change, especially change along the lines of how we go out into the market to recruit individuals to serve in the Chicago Police Department and the Chicago Fire Department,” he said. “I don't want to say it’s been a sea change, but it has been a change that has been long overdue.” Miller said the city is drawing on successful elements from its pandemic playbook to influence its approach to concerns around citizen distrust of city police. During the pandemic, for example, Chicago convened a series of community roundtables aimed at garnering input regarding how the city could address Covid’s disparate impact on Black and Hispanic communities. Last August, Mayor Lightfoot announced the creation of a Community Safety Coordination Center that is “designed to address violence and public safety in the same way we addressed the pandemic,” Miller said. Miller also highlighted Chicago’s participation in the Government Alliance on Race & Equity (GARE). He said the city has adopted several of GARE’s equity guidelines and best practices within city-government offices, and that each city department now has a formal equity liaison. Miller described the effort as “normalizing the conversation around race,” and said the city also is piloting employee resource groups (ERGs) that convene gatherings of city employees with similar backgrounds and identities. The program is currently in a pilot phase with groups for veterans and people with disabilities, “and we expect that at the end of our pilot, we will open city government to other identities, because we want people to feel a sense of belonging, we want them to feel like it’s their government,” said Miller. Miller acknowledged that there remains ample room for improvement, but said he believes Chicago’s equity efforts are on the right track. “We’re asking people for advice, we’re engaging them, and we’ve become far more transparent,” Miller said. “Sometimes people don't believe that government is actually being that open and transparent, but our administration’s bywords are to be equitable, to be transparent, to be accountable and to be inclusive.” Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.
Translating Corporate Values into Social Impact—and Deeper Employee Relationships
BY Steve Hendershot March 08, 2019We live in an era when trust is under strain. The prevalence of ideological polarization, economic instability and uncertainty over the reliability of news reporting has tested the bonds that underpin society. As people’s faith wanes in traditional societal institutions—not to mention social media—they are turning elsewhere for trustworthy guidance. And according to a global survey released in January, the Edelman Trust Barometer, a leading beneficiary of that reallocated trust is “My employer.” That shift has weighty implications for leaders who sense both the opportunity and responsibility of an era when corporate values will increasingly set the tone for broader societal values. What’s more, it’s unlikely to be a blip. “Every trend line that we see [suggests] that this is going to be even more important as we look at the future,” says Seth Green, founding director of the social enterprise-focused Baumhart Center at Loyola University Chicago. This week, Green moderated a panel at the From Day One conference in Chicago, focused on how organizations can lead by establishing strong values and following through on them. Here are three steps organizations can take to ensure that they’re worthy of the trust employees are placing in them, according to the panelists: Be Trustworthy Green and his panelists agreed that for employers, the key to making of the most of the trust placed in them is, well, to be trustworthy. That means not only outlining a collection of noble corporate values, but taking care to live them out. “I’m being tested every day in terms of my decisions, my behaviors, my attitude,” says Howard Sherman, CEO of Good360, an Alexandria, Virginia-based nonprofit that distributes excess inventory from retailers to charitable organizations. Specifically, Sherman pointed to flashpoint moments such as decisions that may put the short-term interests of the executive at odds with the company’s long-term interests. “You get a chance each and every day, particularly when you're leading an organization, to increase the level of trust between you and an organization. But man, if I just trip up—and nobody's perfect—it is so, so hard to get it back,” he said. Abbott’s Daugherty talked about her company’s global social-impact programs Reciprocate Your Employees’ Trust Just as with interpersonal relationships, organizations do well to remember that trust is a two-way street, said Bob Dixon, head of sustainability for Siemens. Dixon said that when Siemens changed its policy for expense reimbursements to one that placed more trust in employees, the change was palpable. Even though the process tweak was minor, “it was so profound to a lot of people, because it was like, ‘They trust me, and I trust them,’” said Dixon. “It starts building mutual trust. A lot of times I think we say we want our employees to trust us but we don’t really trust them. And so that's what I encourage people to do, is figure out how to trust your employees—allowing them to talk, to use social media, to make decisions.” Demonstrate Commitment to Social Good The notion of the triple-win—the idea that a smart business practice can benefit your company, its customers and also deliver a social or economic benefit—is a popular one, but of course easier to dream about than to achieve. Yet this “mutualism,” not traditional altruism, is the future of corporate philanthropy, according to Good360’s Sherman. Taking the time to find these opportunities and capitalize on them conveys your organization’s commitment as well as its creativity. What’s more, the identification and pursuit of these opportunities can help deepen the relationship between you and your employees. “We get this alignment of personal purpose with organizational purpose,” says Jon Powell, executive director of the People Advisory Services group at consultancy EY, who spoke at the conference later in the day. “It’s part of how we establish resonance.” Here are three examples from widely divergent industries where business leaders were able to deliver triple-wins: Best Buy Teen Tech Centers. Electronics retailer Best Buy operates training programs in underserved communities aimed at preparing students for careers in technology. There’s a social benefit there, sure, but it’s not just charity. “We're looking at those not just to help teens from underserved neighborhoods get access to tech and tech education, but as a talent pipeline for us and for our partners,” said Andrea Wood, Best Buy’s head of social impact. “That's where you have the greatest impact, [by preparing someone for a job] and not just by cutting a check.” Univision Chicago’s Christmas party coverage. When TV station Univision Chicago was approached about covering a Christmas party for families at a struggling urban school last December, the station not only covered the event but recruited a corporate sponsor to make the event even more special. It was an unconventional move for a news organization, but one that made Christmas brighter for the families in question. Jon Powell, of the consultancy EY, talked about having a sense of purpose “A lot of trust can come as a result of finding that intersection [of interests] without pretending that we’re too disconnected from reality,” says Teri Arvesu, VP of content for Univision Chicago. Abbott’s decentralized healthcare initiative. Healthcare manufacturer Abbott is investigating whether its diagnostic tools can be used in remote African areas, far from the big-city hospitals where the devices were intended for use. “If we can get access closer to people who live in very rural, hard-to-reach, low-income parts of the world, and if we can actually raise the standard of care that they have access to—and we’re able to sell a product at the same time—that’s a win-win. And there's an incredible business case for that,” says Jenna Daugherty, divisional VP for social responsibility at Abbott. Employers increasingly find themselves in a strange role, not only as providers and creators, but as a trusted anchor in a turbulent time. When they prove worthy of that trust, both their organizations and employees benefit—and, often, so does society. Steve Hendershot is a multimedia journalist in Chicago. He writes about technology and entrepreneurship for Crain’s Chicago Business, and also is the author of a bestselling book about the videogame series Street Fighter. Follow him on Twitter at @stevehendershot
Managing a Diverse Workforce in a Changing City
BY Steve Hendershot March 08, 2019Recruiting a diverse workforce often means developing a more diverse recruitment playbook—one with strategies that can differ from block to block if necessary, so the message can be calibrated to the audience. That’s one of the lessons that Chicago’s human-resources commissioner, Soo Choi, says she’s learned during an eight-year career leading the department. Choi’s remarks this week at the From Day One conference in Chicago had a reflective tone, which is fitting as the city approaches a turning point. There’s a mayoral runoff election in April, and two-term incumbent Rahm Emanuel isn’t on the ballot. That gave Choi, who was named commissioner of Chicago’s HR department shortly after Emanuel’s election in 2011, an opportunity to take stock of her department’s progress. She focused on her efforts to improve equity and diversity in the city’s hiring practices. Diversity “is the city’s passion,” Choi said. It’s “definitely our strong belief that our workforce should reflect the demographics of the city.” Choi, an attorney, came to the job after spending five years monitoring city hiring practices on behalf of Chicago’s Office of Inspector General. City hiring practices had been under federal oversight since the early 1970s, owing to a history of jobs handed as rewards for political patronage. One of Choi’s signature accomplishments as HR commissioner came in 2014, when the city was finally released from that oversight. However, last week Chicago's troubled police department went under federal oversight while it undergoes a reform process. Conroy and Choi after their onstage conversation at the conference At the From Day One conference, where Choi was interviewed by Lorraine Conroy, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Healthy Work, Choi focused on another of her most substantial challenges: recruiting and managing a diverse city workforce. She has found that successful recruitment of African-American and Latino candidates depends on tailored messaging that sometimes needs to varied by neighborhood. For example, during a push to hire minority police officers, Choi’s team determined “that in some neighborhoods, people really took the advice of their churches; in other places, maybe it was the gym or the barbershop. We really looked at it in granular detail to figure out, with the resources we had, how to communicate with people to tell them about the opportunity, get them excited about applying, and encourage them to participate,” she said. “I'm really proud of those efforts because they really made a large difference.” Recently, Choi has aimed to apply the same playbook to a similar challenge: the city’s difficulty in attracting and hiring Latinos, despite that group’s growing share of the city’s overall population. Latinos represent about one third of the city's 2.7 million residents, but reportedly hold only 15% to 17% of the city's 35,000 municipal jobs. A dearth of applicants “tells us that we are losing something in the communication,” says Choi. In response, she’s begun partnering with career-development organizations focused on the Latino community, as well as with the City Council’s Latino Caucus. “We’re working with them closely to figure out what are we doing here that isn't quite making the mark,” said Choi. “Those kinds of initiatives, I hope, will produce better results.” Last Spring, Choi hired Marquis Miller as the city’s first-ever chief diversity officer. She said Miller has been useful in fine-tuning the city’s hiring processes as well as in reviewing the policies and work environments of differing city departments to make them more friendly to workers from diverse backgrounds. “We wanted to engage departments to really think about what kind of workplace cultures they actually have,” Choi said. Having those conversations throughout an organization as large and diverse as the City of Chicago was “a monumental challenge,” Choi said—but it’s one she says has been worthwhile. One of the new elements introduced with Miller was a pilot program used for testing proposed policy or procedural changes. The city now tests its changes on five or six departments. “That way we can kind of see how effective they are before we do larger-scale change,” said Choi. A related initiative is making sure that city employees at all levels feel empowered to share their feedback—including their frustrations—with Choi’s team. She said she has begun to share more employee complaints with department managers, and also prioritized follow-up to see how those team leaders responded. Even when employee complaints don’t qualify as policy violations, “often they clearly tell us there's something going on. So we decided to start using that information to communicate with department heads and say, ‘Look, you know, we really think you need to take a closer look at this particular division because we're seeing complaints that at least show us that people are not happy,’” said Choi. Ashley Oster and Julie Caldwell of E4E Relief at their breakout session Choi’s goal, then, is a city workforce that is hired equitably and reflects the city’s diversity, and also that finds their workplace to be one in which workers feel valued and accepted. That’s not easy in a city as large as Chicago, but as Emanuel’s tenure as mayor approaches its end, Choi believes she has made important progress. Breakout sessions: Earlier in the day at the From Day One conference, J Zac Stein, chief operating officer of Lattice, led a workshop on the often-uncomfortable art of giving feedback to employees; Melissa Anderson, co-founder and president of Public Good, spoke about the power of inspiring people to take social action alongside a corporate brand; and Julie Caldwell and Ashley Oster of E4E Relief told how their organization helps companies support their employees in need and build good will in their communities by administering charitable grants and managing employee-relief programs. Steve Hendershot is a multimedia journalist in Chicago. He writes about technology and entrepreneurship for Crain’s Chicago Business, and also is the author of a bestselling book about the videogame series Street Fighter. Follow him on Twitter at @stevehendershot