The Demonization of DEI: 10 Questions About What Went Wrong and What Happens Next
BY the Editors February 11, 2025When disaster strikes, the traditional way for leaders to respond is to mourn the victims, praise the first responders, and call for patience while experts figure out the cause. But in America’s culture wars, such forbearance is gone. One common suspect is targeted in calamity after calamity: the pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, the relatively recent approach to addressing inequities and structural racism going back centuries in the U.S.The accusations have become reflexive. Anti-DEI activists and politicians have blamed DEI for the tragic airborne collision in Washington, D.C., the California wildfires, a toxic train derailment, a major bridge collapse, the Silicon Valley Bank failure, and more. No evidence has emerged to support those theories, yet the rising chorus of accusations have turned DEI into a radioactive term. The assault reached a crescendo last month when President Trump veered from somber, prepared remarks about the DC tragedy into a half-hour attack on “woke” elements and diversity as the underlying cause. How could he prove the connection? “It just could have been,” he said. “Because I have common sense. OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.” His supporters have been more explicit, making the case that competent white males have been overlooked in favor of incompetent DEI hires, an alleged pattern of reverse discrimination.While the backlash against DEI has been building for more than two years, the momentum picked up steam when the president launched his second term with a sweeping attack on DEI in the federal government, academia, the scientific community, corporate America, and beyond. Calling DEI “nonsense,” Trump told financial leaders at Davos last month that “America will once again become a merit-based country.”Wielding his executive power over the federal workforce, which employs more than 3 million people, Trump ordered all DEI-focused offices to shut down, put their workers on leave, and ordered them to report any coworkers trying to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” Failure to do so “may result in adverse consequences,” the administration told workers, which created a prospective new persona: the DEI snitch. Workers were told to scrub personal-pronoun preferences from their email signatures, and the Pentagon announced that the military would no longer “use official resources” to celebrate commemorations like Black History Month.How did the cause of DEI become vulnerable to such vehement and often misleading attacks that even many of its advocates are losing the will to fight? Why are some major corporations backing away from their wholehearted embrace of DEI, while others are sticking to their commitments? Can advocates of DEI learn from its excesses and pursue their principles by other terms or other means? Should the term DEI simply be dropped?These questions need to be energetically explored, since the war on DEI has created a perilous landscape for HR leaders and corporate America in general. Companies will have to balance stakeholder interests, employee expectations, legal vulnerabilities, and their public reputation. They need to consider the impact of their DEI-policy decisions on recruiting and employee engagement, especially among younger and more diverse workforces who may view such retreats as a step backward. As we head into four years of a new administration that’s bent on escalating the backlash, how should HR leaders continue to build inclusive organizations? From Day One asked experts and sampled the latest surge in reporting on the DEI wars. Among the issues:Which employers are backing away from their DEI commitments, and why?In the racial-justice movement that arose after George Floyd’s death in May 2020, corporate America rushed to build programs and put money behind the cause of DEI. Yet within three years, the zeal flagged in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in higher education, attacks and lawsuits by anti-DEI activists, and financial constraints. Many DEI advocates questioned whether corporations were ever really committed, but the headwinds became undeniable.And the threats keep growing. Many types of DEI programs could draw new lawsuits accusing them of “illegal D.E.I.,” a term that has caused widespread confusion and has lawyers scrambling to interpret what it might mean. “We’re in a brave new world. People are freaked out,” Jon Solorzano, a lawyer who counsels corporations on DEI, told the New York Times.The trigger effect: Among President Trump’s barrage of executive orders was one that struck down a 1965 executive order by LBJ banning discrimination by federal contractors, which had inspired them over the decades to set up programs favoring marginalized workers and subcontractors. Trump’s executive order tells each federal agency to identify “up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” for companies pursuing such practices, like giving jobs or promotions to specific groups based on their race. No company wants to be among the nine called out.Even before this new legal threat, a parade of household-name companies had publicly dialed back their DEI efforts. Walmart, Ford Motor, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Amazon, Google, Target, and others have all announced cutbacks. Among the programs: DEI spending, labeling, diversity goals, and participation with partners who monitor DEI progress. While not long ago companies were often accused of “rainbow-washing,” or being performative about their commitments to DEI, now they’re “rainbow-hushing” by cutting or reframing their DEI programs.Walmart, which employs 1.6 million workers in the U.S., said it won’t renew a racial-equity center that was established through a five-year, $100 million philanthropic commitment from the company. Ford told employees it will no longer participate in an annual survey from an LGBTQ advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign. After showing little reluctance to support DEI causes in recent years, many corporate leaders now tend to acknowledge that they’re feeling the heat. “We are mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told employees in an email. “The external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve.”Which companies are sticking with their commitments—and why?Costco, which ranks No. 11 on the Fortune 500 and has more than 300,000 workers, has made headlines by bucking the trend. Its board of directors unanimously urged its shareholders to vote against a proposal by a conservative think tank that would require Costco to issue a report on the financial risks of maintaining its DEI program. The group criticized Costco “for possible ‘illegal discrimination’ against employees who are ‘white, Asian, male, or straight,’” as CNN reported.Costco’s response, in a statement to investors, echoed what many corporations has given as the purpose behind their DEI support: “Among other things, a diverse group of employees helps bring originality and creativity to our merchandise offerings, promoting the ‘treasure hunt’ that our customers value. We believe (and member feedback shows) that many of our members like to see themselves reflected in the people in our warehouses with whom they interact.”Apple, too, pushed back against a similar proposal. DEI hasn’t been a passing fancy for the company. Apple has had a supplier-diversity program since 1993, hired its first VP of DEI in 2017, and among its employees now has 67 “diversity network associations.” Apple said the proposal “inappropriately attempts to restrict” and “micromanage” the company.Speaking at Davos, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said, “We are going to continue to reach out to the Black community and Hispanic community, LGBT community, and the veteran community. ... Now if you point to something we’re doing that’s wrong, I’d change it. But we’re very proud of what we’ve done, and what we’ve done is lift up cities, schools, states, hospitals, countries, companies, and we’re gonna do more of the same.”Yet it was the National Football League that delivered the most well-timed defense of its DEI programs: on the eve of the Super Bowl. While the NFL had struggled to navigate the politics of Black Lives Matter and earlier social-justice waves, it more solidly committed after the murder of George Floyd. “We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we're going to continue those efforts because we've proven to ourselves that it does make the NFL better,” the league’s commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters. “We're not in this because it's a trend to get into it or a trend to get out of it.” In terms of hiring decisions, he added, “There are no quotas in our system. This is about opening that funnel and bringing the best talent into the NFL.”Did DEI advocates overreach—and how?While standing up for their basic values, many DEI advocates admit that the cause committed some self-sabotage. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating, making workers feel that they are being told what to think or how to feel. But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone,” writes Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African-American Studies at Princeton, in the New Yorker.Indeed, many experts in the field of corporate training say that part of the DEI backlash was triggered by poorly designed programs and overly righteous practitioners, not core values. “You cannot be inclusive by being exclusive and the way DEI has been operationalized over the last few years gives the appearance of being exclusive, rather than common-sense principles that uplift everyone,” Janine Yancey, CEO and founder of Emtrain, told From Day One.The current DEI movement gained momentum after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. A memorial to police-shooting victims sprang up near the site of his death in Minneapolis (Photo by Stephen Koepp/From Day One)“The current model of diversity needs a shift,” said Stefanie Christmas, global head of DEI for Inizio, a Dublin-based, life-sciences company. “We’ve defined it too narrowly, associating it only with ‘minorities’ instead of embracing the full spectrum of human differences. This leaves many—especially straight, cisgender men—feeling they have nothing to contribute.”“Decades of research shows clear problems with status-quo DEI,” writes inclusion strategist Lily Zheng in Harvard Business Review. “Despite their widespread prescription, DEI trainings often fail to change bias or reduce prejudice. Popular strategies for communicating the value of DEI can paradoxically both hurt marginalized communities and decrease leadership support for DEI. Common initiatives intended to create better workplaces for all might instead activate backlash, increase burnout, and fail to improve outcomes for underserved groups. DEI needs a reset,” wrote Zheng, who offers a prescription for responding to the backlash.What is the continued rationale for keeping up the fight for DEI programs?Backing up their DEI initiatives, organizations typically have made both a moral case (it’s socially just) and an economic case (it’s good for business), in various measure and emphasis, but always with a sense of inevitability about it. “Saying diversity is dead is like saying gravity is ending. Ridiculous,” said a diversity professional who didn’t want to be quoted by name given the crossfire of the moment. “Ask yourself, ‘Are you building the types of teams that are better for business?’ Managers are underprepared to get the best work out of diverse employees, whether we’re talking about neurodiversity, gender, LGBTQ+, accessibility. Most employers know they need to do and say the right things to keep and attract those new generations. It’s a math problem, a business issue, a growth issue.”Surveys of the workforce indicate steadfast support for DEI issues, despite the blitz coming from Washington. “Continuity of DEI as a value driver in the workplace doesn’t make the news. Pushback is part of the news cycle, but the commitment to DEI endures,” said Ripa Rashid, managing director of Seramount, which advises companies on building more inclusive workplaces. According to Seramount’s nationally representative 2024 survey of more than 3,000 U.S. white-collar and frontline employees across dimensions of diversity, geography, and political affiliation, 76% of employees agreed with the statement: “I am committed to helping my company fight racism and injustice within the organization” and 78% indicated that it is “very important” for their company to be an inclusive organization.The pronounced whiplash in corporate support for the LGBTQ+ community strikes some experts as financially self-defeating. “Inclusion is a driver of the business. Those businesses backing away from their support of the LGBTQ+ community will fall behind their competition who continue to show up for the community, Mita Mallick, author of Reimagine Inclusion: Debunking 13 Myths To Transform Your Workplace, told From Day One. “According to LGBT Capital, the estimated purchasing power of the global LGBTQ+ community is $4.7 trillion. Belief-driven buying consumers are on the rise, and they will continue to vote with their wallet and walk away from brands and companies they feel no longer match their values.”Did DEI programs make any measurable progress toward their own stated goals?Not all that much, at least in numerical terms, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 13 million workers at S&P 500 companies. In the four years since George Floyd’s murder launched the wave of DEI programs, “the workforces of the biggest public companies have become slightly less white, and Asian and Hispanic employees have made modest games,” reported the Journal. “The picture is more lopsided in the upper ranks of these companies. White men have lost a little ground but still occupy half of all senior manager roles. White women—a bigger focus of corporate diversity efforts before 2020—have experienced the least change since then. The share of senior managers who aren’t white, meanwhile, rose to 26% from 22%.”Amazon, which said in a memo to employees in December, that it’s halting some of its DEI efforts, has one of the most diverse workforces, the Journal noted. With hundreds of thousands of workers in warehouses and other operations, “about 69% of its roughly 1 million workers were people of color in 2023, compared with nearly 67% in 2020,” the Journal said. Though its senior management remains largely white, “Amazon embarked on a pandemic hiring spree and made a push to hire more Black executives into high-level roles. Over four years, the share of nonwhite senior managers nearly doubled, with those of Asian descent rising the most.”And at the top of the C-suite, the number of women CEOs running Fortune 500 companies was at 52 last year, more than double the number of six years ago—and a 2,500% increase from 1998, when only two Fortune 500 companies were led by women. One of the current women CEOs, Citigroup’s Jane Foster, is making a case for sticking with inclusive policies that benefit everybody, such as flexible work schedules and parent-friendly policies.Can DEI programs avoid the flak and focus their mission by changing their terminology?Many companies have shifted from standard DEI terminology to focus more on terms like just inclusivity and belonging, with the implication that no employee is left behind. This is reflected in job titles as well. For example, top leader Mark Brown of Starbucks, who has a background in both talent acquisition and DEI, since 2023 has carried the title of SVP of global talent and inclusion. “We want to represent the communities that we serve, and we want to innovate for all our different audiences,” he told a From Day One audience last year. “And if we don’t have more voices in the conversation and more backgrounds in the conversation, we can’t continue to create a sense of belonging and warmth in our stores, which is core to what we do.”Of course, anti-DEI advocates are wary of organizations doing a rebranding of such efforts without a more wholesale capitulation to dumping DEI, hence the warning from the Trump administration to anyone who might “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”Despite the high-profile statements from famous companies, however, surveys of U.S. corporations taken in recent months indicate that “these programs aren’t dying; they’re morphing,” according to DEI legal experts Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, writing in the Los Angeles Times. “The ‘DEI in the dustbin’ narrative is utterly unsupported by the data. The companies that have formally backed away from their diversity programs represent a tiny minority of corporate America. The conservative Heritage Foundation recently conceded that 486 out of the Fortune 500 still have inclusion statements or commitments on their websites,” they write. “This data jibes with our experience as scholars who study DEI. A vast majority of the hundreds of major organizations with which we have interacted over the last year or two are still deeply committed to these values. They are just doing the work more quietly and carefully than before, to avoid unwanted scrutiny and lawsuits.”What can DEI advocates do better, by whatever name they go by?Many DEI advocates assert that workforces and other communities need to dig even deeper into emthathy and brave conversations, rather than retreating into opposite camps based on identity or political affiliation. “If DEI reframes to focus on everyone's consciousness and intentionality—thinking about what each person needs to feel respected and a sense of belonging so they can deliver their best work—that gets the behaviors needed to foster DEI,” said Emtrain’s Yancey.“To create change, we need to highlight—through personal stories and self-reflection— privilege’s sliding scale and the impact of exclusion,” said Inizio’s Christmas. “Once people can understand what it feels like to lack privilege or be excluded, they’re more likely to empathize with other marginalized communities and drive real change.”Are liberals and progressives all on the same page in advocating DEI programs?No, a thoughtful cohort of thinkers and leaders on the left are skeptical of DEI programs, saying they’re a distraction from attacking economic inequality—and sometimes even get in the way. People in this camp “prefer activism that focuses on class rather than racial or gender and sexual identity. They tend to see labor unions and worker-led organizing as a more effective solution to inequality,” writes labor journalist Noam Scheiber in the New York Times.Faiz Shakir, a Democratic activist and former manager of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, told Scheiber that DEI programs often serve to divide the working class and “soften the actual confrontation with corporate power we need in society.” Workplace DEI policies essentially buy off workers on the cheap, he said, adding: “You get a penny for your efforts. A little trinket here or there, that should mollify you.” In that view, DEI is essentially a tool of management, rather than one that empowers employees.What are the stakes in terms of who else is hurt when DEI programs are dropped?The case has been made that the fallout will affect people ranging from women and minority contractors to rural poor communities. In late January, Target announced that it was concluding its three-year DEI goals and its Supplier Diversity team would be renamed Supplier Engagement. Pernell. “The announcement from Target, just a week before the start of Black History Month, hit Black entrepreneurs particularly hard. The company had created an infrastructure that helped Black-owned start-ups even before the 2020 protests, [coffee entrepreneur Pernell] Cezar said, and then set a goal of featuring about 500 Black-owned brands in its stores by the end of this year,” the New York Times reported. Since the entrepreneurs behind such startups tend to have less startup capital and fewer connections than their competitors, “It’s definitely the wild, wild West of the haves and have-nots if you don’t have institutional knowledge,” Cezar said.One of Trump’s executive orders also took aim at “environmental justice,” eliminating positions and assessing spending on projects, including those aimed at poor, rural communities, CNN reported. The order cancelled many financial grants designed to help small communities, including everything from wastewater-treatment plants to tornado shelters for schools in poor communities. The thinking behind such grants is that the effects of climate change fall disproportionately on poor communities. “Environmental justice is not affirmative action. It’s not DEI [to have] the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water and the right to have environmental laws to be enforced equally across the board,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental-justice pioneer.Employers, too, could face legal trouble from abandoning DEI principles by exposing themselves to more discrimination lawsuits by workers, experts said. While reverse-discrimination lawsuits do occur, they’re vastly outnumbered by those filed by members of marginalized communities. “Many common corporate policies that fall under the DEI umbrella, such as auditing pay practices, requiring diverse pools of job candidates, and ensuring that promotions are awarded fairly, are crucial tools for employers to ensure compliance with state and federal laws banning workplace discrimination,” lawyers and other experts told Reuters.Will corporate American start to deny diversity, either as a fact or value?Even the statements by leaders whose companies announced pullbacks in DEI programs seemed to be hedging their bets, from leaders of Tractor Supply Co. to Meta, the parent of Facebook. In a companywide meeting after Meta ended its DEI and fact-checking programs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to reassure his workforce that the company’s values hadn’t changed, despite the new regulatory regime in Washington. “I mean, it’s a little crazy that we need to say this,” Zuckerberg said. “We continue to believe that diversity is a strength.”Reported by Jenny Sucov, independent journalist, and Stephen Koepp, editor-in-chief of From Day OneFor further reading, here's a selection of more than 200 stories on DEI by From Day One.(Featured photo by FG Trade/iStock by Getty Images)
Want to Retain Your Workers? Show You Genuinely Care About Their Mental Health
BY the Editors November 20, 2024When employers make a sincere effort to support the well-being of their workers, does that investment have a positive return for the company? Does it go beyond goodwill to improved corporate performance? Nivati, an employee mental-health platform, decided to find out.In a study of 25,741 workers at 56 companies that used the Nivati platform during 2023-24, the company found a dramatic impact among employees who were fully engaged with the platform: a high level of employee retention. The overall turnover rate within this group of employees was only 1.7%, meaning they were eight times more likely to stay in their jobs than co-workers who were only casually engaged with the program.Retention is a key number for employers because unwanted turnover can be so expensive. According to Gallup research, “replacing leaders and managers costs around 200% of their salary, replacing employees in technical roles costs 80% of their salary, and replacing frontline workers costs 40% of their salary, excluding unmeasured losses in morale and knowledge.”Yet reducing employee turnover is not merely about cutting costs; it’s strategic investment in an organization’s future. By embracing programs that enhance engagement, satisfaction, and overall workplace culture, employers can cultivate a loyal and motivated workforce. The benefits—ranging from improved productivity to enhanced customer satisfaction—far outweigh the costs.The American workforce’s state of mental health is often described as a crisis. How does that present itself on the job? “Employees often approach Nivati struggling with mental health challenges like stress, burnout, anxiety, relationship challenges, and work-life balance issues, which are major contributors to workplace dissatisfaction,” said Nivati CEO Amelia Wilcox, who founded the company in 2020. “When companies don’t provide mental health support, employees are more likely to leave due to feeling unsupported or unable to cope with their work environment.”In the nearly five years since the start of the pandemic, many factors inside and outside the workplace have aggravated employee stress. “The shift to remote and hybrid work, combined with economic uncertainty and social isolation, has significantly affected employee wellness,” said Wilcox.Amelia Wilcox, CEO and founder of Nivati (Company photo)While many companies have stepped up their support for good mental health, there’s still a significant gap. “Many employees are still unaware of these benefits and underutilize them. This commonly stems from lack of communication and engagement strategies that remind employees and make employees feel like the resource is readily accessible and OK for them to use,” Wilcox said.Cultural challenges are a factor too, especially when a company talks a good game about mental health but fails to make it a core value. “For instance, if a company is saying they value mental health and then covertly sends the message that taking time off is not OK, the employees internalize those covert messages over the overt messaging the employer is trying to send,” said Wilcox. “Effective onboarding, consistent conversations on mental health, periodic reminders, and visible support from leadership increase utilization, making employees more aware that their employer genuinely cares about their well-being.”Karen Fikse, senior director of HR at Cummins, the engine manufacturer, said in a From Day One panel discussion that the idea of leaders practicing what they preach formed the basis of her company's “It’s Okay” campaign, which provides managers with resources to process whatever they’re going through–be it anxiety, stress, pressure or hardship.In the five years since its Nivati’s inception, said Wilcox, “we’ve learned that the key to impactful mental health support is a holistic approach, including therapy, fitness, finance, and self-care tools, all made accessible within a flexible platform that meets employees where they are. We’ve also learned that some people aren’t comfortable with jumping right into therapy. So our platform was designed to allow people to start in an area that’s less ‘scary’ for them and build trust with the platform and team. They can take baby steps to grow into therapy.”Before any therapy or other steps happen, the pathway needs to be a welcoming one. Nivati’s platform “provides an intuitive experience for employees to seek help: from signing in and selecting self-guided resources around mental health, nutrition, or finance—to scheduling and engaging with qualified professionals in each of those areas of well-being. The entire process is designed to be simple and confidential,” Wilcox said.Nivati partners with a network of hundreds of licensed therapists, registered dietitians, life coaches, financial advisors, meditation practitioners, yoga instructors, personal trainers, and more. These providers work 1:1 with employees, they facilitate group training and education for Nivati’s customers, and they create the content for the self-guided resources on the company’s platform.Even for workers who aren’t at risk of quitting their jobs, in many cases because they need the financial security, paying attention to their mental health can lead to thriving on the job rather than every day being a struggle. They can reframe their work experience and boost their resiliency. Nivati’s platform has a career development and coaching category to help workers grow in their roles as well. “Even if these employees aren’t leaving,” Wilcox said, “providing them with support can increase their satisfaction and productivity, ultimately benefiting both them and their employer.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner Nivati, who sponsored this spotlight.(Featured photo by SDI Productions/iStock by Getty Images)
Transforming Culture: A Case Study on the Power of ‘Thinking Patterns’
BY the Editors September 24, 2024At a critical point in the growth of a publicly traded data company, the company faced significant leadership challenges. Stock prices were down, an activist investor was applying pressure, and the leadership team lacked diversity. To add a bit more stress, the pandemic happened the day Martha Delehanty, chief people officer, started her new position.Having worked with fassforward in the past, Delehanty turned to Rose Fass and team to help executives adopt a new way of thinking. Her goal under the leadership of a new CEO was to help build a leadership team that would make clearer, more confident decisions and cultivate a healthier, more inclusive company culture.Setting the Stage for Cultural TransformationTo understand how Fass and Delehanty began the conversation about reshaping the company culture, it’s important to start with a clear definition of it. “When Rose Fass, founder of fassforward, is asked what culture in the workplace is, she says, ‘It’s the environment we operate in. Simply put, culture is how we do things around here.’ Building a healthy, inclusive, and durable culture goes beyond surface-level changes. It requires a shift in how leaders think and interact.”Rose Fass is the founder and chair of fassforward Consulting Group (company photo)Fass’s partnership with Delehanty spans over two decades, beginning when Delehanty was CHRO at Verizon Wireless. During that time, they worked together to roll out a leadership initiative that transformed how top executives approached leadership. Encouraging leaders to reflect on their thinking patterns and consider how others think opened the door to four critical leadership conversations: Courage, Vision, Reality, and Ethics.Their success at Verizon Wireless laid the groundwork for a broader business rollout. Verizon Wireless’s Realize program helped reshape the company’s leadership approach, thus strengthening the bench. And, when one leadership move at the top created 1,500 downstream opportunities, “we were ready,” Delehanty said. This transformation was then applied to her new role as CHRO of a well-known data company, and the conversation continued.The Four Elements of Leadership ThinkingCourage: Courage drives bold action. Leaders use Courage to determine the ‘when’—setting ambitious deadlines, making tough calls, and taking calculated risks.Vision: Vision focuses on exploring new possibilities. It’s about defining the ‘what,’ inspiring teams to think big, and setting a clear direction for the future.Reality: Reality is rooted in evidence and data. It’s the ‘how’ of leadership, ensuring decisions are grounded in facts and supported by actionable plans.Ethics: Ethics is about valuing people and building trust. It answers the ‘why’ of leadership, focusing on fairness, integrity, and keeping commitments.Tasked with attracting new diverse leaders and aligning the team, she realized that shifting the HR function from merely handling the "hard stuff" to embracing acts of courage was essential for the company's success.Creating a Common Language for LeadershipTo shift from doing hard things to leading with courage, the company needed a common language—and Thinking Patterns became that shared framework. Over time, the company’s leadership evolved, moving beyond silos and reactive decision-making. Bringing in new leaders from different backgrounds changed the conversation and the business. The leadership team embraced different perspectives, encouraged collaboration, and ultimately drove innovation.The tool not only aligned the leadership team but also fostered a more inclusive environment. Leaders began to think beyond immediate pressures, focusing on long-term outcomes and shared goals. This shift, made possible through the adoption of Thinking Patterns, played an important role in transforming the company’s culture and business performance.Fass, who has guided leaders through these transformations for over two decades, often references The Chocolate Conversation—a metaphor for how leaders often talk past each other, misunderstanding the real message. With Thinking Patterns, leaders are able to break through these barriers and engage in meaningful conversations that lead to action and change.Delehanty’s journey underscores the power of a different approach to leadership. Moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive, expansive thinking allowed her to align the team, attract diverse talent, and cultivate a culture where everyone could thrive.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, fassforward, for supporting this sponsor spotlight.
HR Is Already Behind in the AI Revolution. Here’s How to Take the Lead
BY the Editors November 16, 2023Most HR leaders didn’t go into their field because of their love of technology. Their affinity is more about seeing people reach their potential in the workplace. Yet now comes a transformative revolution in which they’d be best advised to embrace both. And do it soon. It was only a year ago, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT 3.5, that generative AI burst into the public consciousness. Within two months of its release, it had 100 million users, ranking it as the fastest-growing consumer software application in history. Tapping its uncanny cognitive capabilities, people began using it to compose songs, draft emails, plan parties, write software, and conduct myriad experiments. Yet in the HR world, most professionals have taken a guarded approach, one that could prove detrimental to their businesses given the speed and potential of AI’s transformative impact, according to a global study that surveyed 1,522 professionals in HR and related fields across 62 countries. Conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the study concluded that because of “HR’s purview of workforce capabilities, skills, potentials and deficiencies, this is a strategic miss that needs to change if organizations expect to truly leverage AI,” wrote Kevin Oakes, CEO of i4cp, in his foreword to the report, titled “Is HR Already Behind in the AI Revolution?” His answer to the titular question is yes, followed by a detailed assessment of the situation and recommendations for how HR can take a leading role. (An executive brief is available here.)As part of the survey, i4cp interviewed HR pleaders, many of whom testified to the benefits that are already apparent for those who have embraced AI early. “As an HR professional if you’re not digging into this space, then you’re already behind. It’ll change the way we do so many things,” said Cameron Hedrick, chief learning officer at Citi. An executive summary of i4cp’s new report can be obtained here.In the years since the pandemic, repeated crises have heightened the influence of HR leaders in their organizations. The arrival of generative AI is the next disruption, one in which HR profession could take a leading role at the decision table. “We’ve always said we want HR to be more strategic partners with the business,” said Dalia Kendik, head of digital HR for Thomson Reuters, the news and information giant. “There’s a lot of opportunity for generative AI to improve the employee experience and HR needs to be an advocate for the rest of the organization.”Approaching Generative AI: Three Organizational TypesBased on its survey, i4cp identified three archetypes to describe how organizations are approaching AI, which it calls the Generative AI Maturity Model:AI Laggards, where leaders have not communicated clear guidance on usage and have no formal usage policy.AI Enquirers, where leaders are researching potential uses but are largely in wait-and-see mode. They’ve likely told employees to refrain from using AI until there’s more evidence of how other organizations have used it.AI Innovators, whose leaders have communicated their support of AI usage and experimentation, and likely have put formal usage parameters in place.To evaluate these organizations, i4cp described nine AI Innovator practices that every organization should follow if they hope to stay current with the revolution. These practices range from openly communicating about generative AI to reduce fear and uncertainty in the workforce to providing a secure environment for workers to experiment with generative AI. The survey found a striking gap in engagement between AI Innovators, who on average have put into place 77% of those nine practices (or are planning to adopt them), the AI Enquirers, who have embraced just 13%, and the AI Laggards, who are at fewer than 1% of those practices. The difference can be huge for organizations who take the innovative path, the study forecasts: “AI Innovators lead when implementing these practices compared to others. Their gap-creating lead can be cataclysmic for those lagging in the number of practices they are planning to implement or have implemented.”How AI Innovators Can Create a Competitive AdvantageOrganizations who wait to embrace generative AI will face a huge opportunity cost. Here’s what they’ll miss: “Organizations that are the most advanced in AI applications (the AI Innovators) are more likely to have higher market performance, increased innovation and productivity, and healthier cultures than those that are slow to adopt,” the i4cp report asserts. To illustrate these points, the report offers several case studies of organizations that have acted quickly to apply generative AI to their processes. Felix Martinez, senior director of talent acquisition at General Electric Appliances, describes how TA leaders at his GE division are using an internal platform similar to ChatGPT to draft individualized recruiting messages to potential candidates. “Best practice is you send 10 emails and get four responses—that’s best in class,” Martinez said. “Our ChatGPT-crafted emails are generating 70% to 90% response rates. Now we’re able to reach individuals in a more compelling way and they’re responding at a higher rate, which affects time-to-fill and quality-of-hire.” The mandate to be innovative comes from the top, Martinez said. “We’re very fortunate to have a CEO who is leading the way,” he said, speaking of Kevin Nolan, CEO of GE Appliance.“He gave us a task where anyone could come up with any idea to use AI to solve for business problems. There were 300 submissions. And our CHRO is challenging us in HR—how can we use this and how can we get in front of it? If you don’t learn how it can impact you, you are going to be left behind." For Leaders, What You Don’t Know Can Hurt YouBesides the risk of missed opportunities, an overly cautious approach to generative AI has other dangers, some of which could strike quickly. In organizations where management have explicitly forbidden employees from using AI for work, 36% are certain their employees are doing so anyway, and another 36% say it is highly likely, according to the i4cp survey.In such cases, companies can increased the hazard of data leakage. “Exposing company information often happens unintentionally when employees copy and paste proprietary or sensitive data, such as a source code, into publicly available models like ChatGPT,” the reported noted. AI Innovators are more likely than their laggard peers, for example, to have data security and ethics policies, as well as requiring fact-checking and citations when AI is used.Another risk is bias in the system. “Since generative AI models are trained on content created by humans, it can perpetuate human biases at scale,” the report said. Such bias can not only undermine an organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but can also run afoul of the need to comply with new regulations among, local, state, and federal governments about how organizations use AI in candidate selection, hiring, and promotion.There’s Almost No Area of HR That AI Won’t ChangeThe list of tasks for which AI can be useful starts with the mundane (searching information, data cleaning) and rises to much more strategic levels. Today, HR professionals in the survey said they’re using generative AI in learning and development (58%), people analytics (57%), talent acquisition (54%), employee experience (46%), and leadership development (45%). Many AI Innovators say they plan to use it next in such areas as workforce planning, succession, labor scheduling, and performance management.To help organizations be on the forward-looking side of the AI revolution, the report makes four recommendations: Be prepared to lead strategic discussions about the workforce implications of generative AI; proactively prepare HR with the necessary skills for the AI revolution; approach generative AI as a systems enabler, not just a personal productivity tool; and create a change-ready culture.Already, HR leaders who have taken these steps on the journey start seeing exciting prospects down the road. At Sysco, the world’s largest foodservice distributor, the company expects to use the technology to make end-to-end HR processes more efficient, for example, by matching employees in need of specific skills with internal “gig” opportunities to help them advance. “Those are huge opportunities for us, and they are just some of the use cases,” said Michael Fischer, Sysco’s VP of global talent management. “You’ve got transactional work, then you’ve got really meaningful work around career development and around colleague development. We know it’s the future and we also know it’s early days. We are going to invest in this. But we want to be very thoughtful about it as we continue because it is changing so fast.” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks its partner, i4cp, for sponsoring this story. An executive summary of its new report can be obtained here. (Feature illustration by Quoya/iStock by Getty Images)
How HR Can Deploy AI to Enhance the Employee Experience
BY the Editors July 25, 2023Much of the emerging conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) is full of doom and gloom, focusing on how the technology will replace human workers–or turn their work lives upside down. Yet it’s possible to envision a near future in which AI will have a beneficial side, especially when it comes to the employee experience (EX) in companies that are determined to put people first.That’s the scenario illustrated by two leaders from Erudit (pronounced AIR-uh-dite), an AI platform for companies to track and manage employee-experience initiatives, who gave a workshop presentation on the future of work at From Day One’s San Francisco conference. Erudit’s team of psychologists and data scientists is on a mission to demystify AI for HR, specifically regarding culture management and initiatives to enhance EX, said co-host Corey Jordon, Erudit’s head of growth. In the interactive session, the Erudit leaders told their audience how and why EX is the next big thing for AI and HR tech, advised on practical ways to address issues like burnout and turnover, and how AI for EX levels the playing field for employees and management alike.Corey Jordon, left, Erudit’s head of growth, presenting with Joe Meyer, Erudit’s senior natural-language processing researcher and engineer (Photo by From Day One)“Staying informed about tech goes beyond just ‘tech’ roles,” said Joe Meyer, Erudit’s senior natural-language processing researcher and engineer. “It’s important to dispel myths around AI as people leaders, recognizing the value it has for understanding and improving the employee experience.”The co-hosts offered a bounty of statistics to show the scale of the AI boom: Private investment in AI was 18 times greater in 2022 than in 2013. Invsetment in AI for HR Tech doubled from 2021 to 2022, reaching $1.63 billion. The benefits for people leaders can be striking: 56% of AI early adopters report significant improvement in the EX space. Generative AI technology is showing plenty of uses: creating job descriptions, filtering and tracking prospective hires, and screening candidates. Erudit focuses in particular on employee sentiment, monitoring it in real time and tracking trends across teams.Yet it’s all a lot for HR leaders to absorb. When the co-hosts took an “AI vibe check” among the attendees, their responses were on a spectrum of “uneasy” to “optimistic.” The participants asked plenty of questions too, which served to highlight the major issues that need to be sorted out: How can big-business changes like mergers and acquisitions impact employee experience during onboarding? How do members of marginalized groups feel seen and heard in a dispersed workplace? How can companies convey that employee-sentiment tools are helping employees–not there to infringe on their privacy?The co-hosts sought to demystify the science as well, explaining that machine intelligence, loosely based on the human brain, is math, not magic. They pointed out that the old data-processing maxim of “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” applies to AI as well: data quality is crucial.The back-to-back crises of the last three years finally gave HR leaders a seat at the table when it comes to corporate influence, and they’re not going to give it up easily. But they need to pursue their initiatives with a mind toward business impact and connection to the workforce. While pulse surveys can give insight into culture initiatives, People leaders need real-time, actionable data from their workforce. This is how Erudit empowers HR and people executives to tap into organic interactions for data instead of relying on gut instinct only, the company’s co-hosts said. Each workforce is unique and complex, and workplace sentiments change by the minute.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks its partner, Erudit, who sponsored this workshop. To find out more about them, tune in to the brand’s podcast, The Employee Experience Experience, and sign up for the People-First Newsletter.
The Making of a Master Builder of a Strong Company Culture
BY the Editors July 10, 2023A corporation’s culture can be challenging to define, let alone build. Kelly Ann Doherty, the chief administrative officer of the home-loan provider Mr. Cooper Group, takes an architectural approach that has helped earn the company a reputation as a Great Place to Work.Doherty’s own career trajectory is a case study on how a company leader can learn how to successfully communicate the beliefs and behaviors that guide the actions of individuals as well as the company as a whole. Doherty traces her growing mastery to her attendance in 2018 at The Fellowship, a four-day master class in organizational culture for HR leaders in Santa Fe, N.M. Doherty was always passionate about building her career around people, and knew that communicating culture was part of her role as Mr. Cooper Group’s chief communications officer. However, it wasn’t until she attended The Fellowship that she saw what a career in building culture could look like. She realized that it wasn’t just her responsibility to communicate culture, but she could design and build the culture Mr. Cooper’s workforce and leadership were longing for.“People in organizations across the world are focused on building customer-journey maps. For the first time at The Fellowship, I saw a way to build a culture blueprint for our team members, and I knew I wanted to lead our culture efforts. Our culture blueprint has not only dramatically impacted our team member experience, but has directly translated into the way we care for customers,” Doherty said.Her company’s CEO, Jay Bray, had endorsed her attendance at The Fellowship and was eager to hear what she learned upon her return from Santa Fe. However, Bray never imagined what she would come back with. Doherty had put together a full presentation, complete with the culture blueprint from The Fellowship, along with the ways that she thought their organizational culture could change for the better. Within six months of that conversation, she was promoted to chief people and communications officer.“I’m so grateful for Jay’s belief in me. While human resources wasn’t in my background, he put his faith in me because he knew I wanted to put our people first,” Doherty recalled. “At The Fellowship, I realized HR is not just about the process and the policy. More than anything, the HR team are the champions of culture. Now, I’m responsible for caring for team members in the same way our customer-care representatives are responsible for our customers. I want everyone who works in a people-focused or communications role to know that they can and should be cheerleaders for their organization’s cheerleaders, champions for their organization’s champions, and challengers to their organization’s challengers,” she said.Kelly Ann Doherty, chief administrative officer of Mr. Cooper Group, at The Fellowship gathering with a colleague, top, and in a photo courtesy of Mr. Cooper GroupThe proof of Kelly Ann and her team’s work is in the results. Mr. Cooper Group has now been named a Great Place to Work four years in a row, has seen a 14-point increase in their Great Place To Work survey scores, and was most recently named a Best Workplace in Texas by Fortune magazine and included on Forbes’ Best Employers for Women list.In 2021, Doherty was named the company’s chief administrative officer. “Kelly Ann has a natural ability to bring teams and people together to drive change and propel our culture forward,” stated Bray in making the announcement. “She and her team have made tremendous improvements in our team member experience as they have focused on putting people first, and in her new role, she will work to ensure we continue to infuse our culture and brand into everything we do to truly delight our customers and team members as we strive to be the best in our industry.”For corporate leaders looking to emulate her approach, Doherty recommends a step-by-step approach. “Culture can sometimes feel so big it’s hard to wrap your arms around it, but you don’t have to do everything at once. Ask your people what they want, and start by attacking the areas that will have a high impact at a low cost to your organization,” said Doherty, who will join The Fellowship again this year to serve as host and emcee. “What is different about The Fellowship is how action-oriented the programming is. You won’t just walk away feeling good. This is an experience that gives you a plan to turn what you learn into meaningful change for your organization.”The event, which will take place Nov. 6-9 at the Four Seasons Rancho Encantado in Santa Fe, will feature a host of guest speakers including Cynt Marshall, CEO of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team; Nawal Fakhoury, director of employee experience at LinkedIn; Ginger Hardage, founder of The Fellowship and former SVP of culture and communication at Southwest Airlines; and David Salyers, the original Chick-fil-A marketing executive and pioneer. To find out more about The Fellowship and register to attend, you can visit the organization’s website here. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, The Fellowship, which previously published a version of this story.
Giving Working Families the Benefits and Flexibility They Need Today
BY the Editors January 17, 2023Inclusion means supporting workers who are caregivers of all kinds. What financial, health, and scheduling challenges do families face today? How can innovative benefits and workplaces empower workers to meet their responsibilities and excel on the job? From Day One gathered expert speakers for a virtual conference titled “Giving Working Families the Benefits and Flexibility They Need Today.” Among the highlights: Where a Family-Friendly Culture Is a Core Organizational Value Working parents have long grappled with the challenge of balancing family with career aspirations. For Serena Anthony, chief people officer at the global advertising company GroupM, one of the most difficult aspects of being a working parent involves spearheading the people-management function for her organization for an entire continent–North America–while managing travel for work. “My favorite saying at home is ‘the juggle is real.’ As a mom of twin girls, there’s guilt associated with having to pick up and leave.” HR professionals are tasked with upholding the well-being of their people: building a family-friendly culture is now more important than ever in the wake of changing work lifestyles. “We have the ability to accommodate the personal lives and commitments in our work days that we once didn’t have,” she said. As a client-focused business, much of GroupM’s work culture revolves around in-person efforts and collaboration. However, that approach has shifted gears to focus on what their people need now. “We want to provide autonomy to manage your days, to perform your work, but also not have it infringe on personal lives,” said Anthony. “We’ve all about convening with purpose when we are in the office–and fostering a sense of flexibility when we’re not.” Flexibility has become an all-too-common phrase touted by corporations these days, but then they have to deliver on that promise. For GroupM, it means forming a working style and an ability to execute on deliverables that align with employees’ personal circumstances. The company regularly hosts town halls with staff to emphasize communications around work-life policies and foster a sense of collaboration. “There’s no one-size-fits-all as it relates to how someone should perform their work day,” she said. Moderator Ericka Sóuter, a journalist and author, left, and Serena Anthony, GroupM’s chief people officer for North America (Image by From Day One) Moderator Ericka Sóuter, author of How to Have a Kid and a Life: A Survival Guide, posed a question on how to strike a happy medium with employees who are reluctant to return to the office. Per Anthony, it was important to maintain a realistic approach based on an individual's specific role responsibilities. “We have over 7,000 employees. If you occupy a role where you absolutely are required to be in the office, or not being there would pose a business risk for us, let’s talk about what that looks like. What do you need from us?” she said. In the face of the Great Resignation, many organizations responded in a knee-jerk manner to try to slow attrition. But instead of throwing money at people who are leaving to take a similar job with slightly better pay, said Anthony, “we can go all-in on creating an environment that makes our people feel like they actually want to work with us.” To do so, GroupM onboarded programs such as an internal mental-health-allies program–training employees to catch red flags among peers and introduced health care and wellness services. In the rise of social justice and political issues that permeate work cultures, GroupM no longer adopts a noncommittal approach, as its people expect leadership to speak up. “I took on the job in the midst of the pandemic shortly after the George Floyd incident, amid the racial uprising. One of the first conversations with my CEO was needing to speak on it,” Anthony said. Anthony underscores how important it is for HR teams to check on their own mental health as well. “We’re the first point of contact for people when they’re struggling,” she said. “You have to 100% check on yourself and make sure you’re okay. Put yourself first.” Sóuter pointed out that in order for individuals to put themselves first, companies need to ensure they are creating a climate where people feel that they won’t be penalized for doing just that. For that purpose, GroupM designed a formal, centralized place where trained investigators are present to create that sense of safety. “If there’s ever a feeling that an employee feels like they’re on the receiving end of reprisal because they spent too much time focusing on their mental health but their manager may be discriminating, we now have a function where you can take your concern to employee relations and have it looked into with objectivity and consistency,” she said. According to Anthony, the best way for HR functions to drive change at companies reluctant to embrace this new culture is by positioning proposals in a way that translates new programs into greater output and performance for the company. Said Anthony: “If we can’t keep pivoting to accommodate what is happening around us, we’re doomed.”–By Tania Rahman The Motherhood Penalty: How Employers Can Help Abolish It While most people are familiar with the term “glass ceiling” concerning the challenges women face in business, less common is the term “motherhood penalty,” which refers specifically to how mothers are disadvantaged in the working world. “It impacts every part of a woman’s career—we’re talking about earnings, ability to get hired, evaluations and promotions,” said Lydia Dishman, a senior editor at Fast Company, who moderated a executive panel conversation on the penalty and what employers could do to mitigate it. This penalty comes in many forms. Working mothers earn 70 cents to every working father's dollar, and mothers are offered $11,000 less in starting salaries than non-mothers. And during 2020, 34% of men with children received promotions, compared to just 9% of women with children. But the penalty rears its head in other ways: how women often need to leave the workforce because their families cannot afford childcare or the difficulties they experience when they try to re-enter later in life. A challenging part of the motherhood penalty is that many people don’t know if they’ve been affected by it, said Deborah Hanus, co-founder and CEO of Sparrow, a company that manages leave policies for employers. “Rarely does someone tell you that you’ve been passed over for promotion for the reason that they’re perceiving you as less competent,” Hanus said. “But I think a lot of it comes back to this concept of this idea that women are uniquely qualified as mothers and caregivers in a way that fathers are not.” Expert panelists, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Phyllis Stewart Pires of Stanford University, and Deborah Hanus of Sparrow. Bottom row: Liat Krawczyk of the NYC Childcare Innovation Lab, Ann Roberts of Flo Health, and Amie Major of Verisk Analytics (Image by From Day One) To eradicate the motherhood penalty, we must first change the culture. Liat Krawczyk, founder of the Childcare Innovation Lab at the New York City Economic Development Corp., shared that during the pandemic, she struggled to work from home while raising a three-year-old child and pregnant with another. But she realized that many women do not have the same opportunities and are forced to leave the workforce due to a lack of flexibility or childcare’s high costs. “We’re constantly being told to adjust to existing structures, instead of changing the structures to adjust to moms in particular,” Krawczyk said. “So I think the conversation needs to start to change in the other direction.” Ann Roberts, chief people officer at Flo Health, a technology company focused on women’s health, contributed a European perspective to the panel. Because European countries mandate maternity leave, there’s never a question of whether a mother will be able to come back to work or have enough time off—even if she doesn’t always take all the time offered. Roberts compared the lack of regulation in U.S. with many state laws prohibiting puppies from being sold before they’re eight weeks old because it would be cruel to take them away from their mothers. “Where the regulation and where Social Security is failing, the private market is stepping in. So there is a fierce war for talent. Companies are hemorrhaging good people that are not coming back to work,” Roberts said. “And there is a shift starting to pick up [of companies] being a lot more vocal about what is being offered that is kind of bridging the gap, but it’s still in the niches.” Phyllis Stewart Pires, senior director of WorkLife Strategy at Stanford University, shared how companies and organizations offering paternity leave and more flexible solutions for their employees help everyone—including the company and its bottom line. “It is such an enormous opportunity to attract and retain talent, particularly when we’re looking to attract and retain women, but really everyone benefits from it,” she said. Companies may offer various plans for caretaking leaves. But panelist Amie Major, VP and head of talent management at Verisk Analytics, emphasized the importance of managers embracing flexibility and considering all options when helping their employees. During one of her pregnancies, she had preeclampsia, a life-threatening condition, and opted to take her leave early so she wouldn’t have to go into the office. But her manager insisted that she work from home to avoid cutting into her maternity leave. She used this experience to help guide the return-to-office policies at Verisk, where managers found that there was no one-size-fits-all approach because every employee had a unique situation. “What we really needed to do was to train up our managers around how to have conversations, how to think about a plan, how to consider what the work is, and then leave it to them,” Major said. Employers have many options to consider when creating parental benefits. New York City’s Childcare Innovation Lab released a toolkit for employers to compare their options while focusing on employee well-being and high return on investment. Some companies may offer payment assistance while others work directly with daycare providers, but assuring that the solutions make the most sense for their employees is of utmost importance. Only when employers recognize the struggles mothers face in the workforce–and strive to make changes–will the motherhood penalty start dissipating. Until then, Hanus recommends that the most important thing working parents can do to help is to take the caregiving leave they have to help propel working culture toward recognizing its importance. Companies may become aware of the many situations that families may face, including bereavement, loss of a pregnancy, or other medical issues. “Fathers should be taking leave, mothers should be taking leave. Families do come in all shapes and all sizes,” she said. “And I think that designing policies that account for those unexpected situations, and understanding everything that can happen, is so, so incredibly helpful.”–By Erika Riley Working While Parenting Is a Balancing Act: How to Make It Work for You When 73% of working adults have some caregiving responsibility in their family and when, per a FlexJobs survey, 53% of mothers and 51% of fathers say that that working makes it hard to be a good parent, the concept of work-life balance is invoked quite frequently. But it has one big assumption that needs to be dispelled: “Balance implies that we’re juggling things, that we’re perfectly aligned,” said Angela Nelson, executive director of clinical services at the benefits platform Rethink Care, in a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference. “That’s just not real life. What can we do to make things work?” The concept started in the 1970s, during an era of major shifts in gender roles and societal pressure towards equal opportunity, when it was known as work-family-life balance, Nelson said. And while there’s no single definition of it, the main components are two domains (work and life) that both require attention, but not to the detriment of the other; the need for satisfaction in both of those domains without conflict; and the acknowledgement that, while we have different roles in life, the demands in one role can creep into the other. “Work-life balance should be considered as a degree of autonomy that we have over the demands and our capacity to meet goals,” Nelson explained, summarizing the findings of Thomas Kalliath and Paula Brough from their Journal of Management & Organization article in 2015, “Work-life balance: A review of the meaning of the balance construct.” So, why is it important? From an employer standpoint, having work-life balance translates into more productivity, fewer sick days, and more longevity. In fact, when employees have to leave the workforce for caregiving reasons, the result is a loss of institutional knowledge. By contrast, employees who achieve some kind of balance report lower levels of fatigue, better health outcomes, and more time spent with loved ones. Work-life balance is a key component in the burnout vs. engagement equation, where burnout is a syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment. “I don’t feel like I am succeeding in anything,” Nelson recalls telling her husband at the height of the pandemic, where work and caregiving happened not only at the same time, but also in the same place. By contrast, engagement is a work-related state of mind characterized by positivity, fulfillment, vigor, dedication, and absorption. Angela Nelson, executive director of clinical services at the benefits platform Rethink Care (Company photo) Key strategies Nelson recommended: An assessment phase comes first, with questions such as, “Am I sleeping enough?” and “Am I constantly falling behind?” Next, one has to define their own values. “We think of values as our heart’s deepest desires, but it’s more about how we want to act on an ongoing basis, and how you want to treat yourself and those around you,” said Nelson. The key strategy is organization, part of executive functioning. “There’s a lot of value in embracing organization or making it a goal to be more organized,” said Nelson, using as an example, something as mundane as putting keys on the same tray upon getting home as opposed to just forgetting about that and then wasting precious time trying to look for them. Part of organization is the act of managing time, and how we like to prioritize tasks. Take care of smaller ones at first and hard ones for later, or the opposite? As a clinician, Nelson also teaches “the time detective,” which is about understanding and feeling the passage of time. While traditionally this applied to children with special needs, it’s something adults in the workforce also benefit from. “We want to look at our phone monitor: Are we spending more time on the apps than we thought?” she said. At work, the culture and the benefit packages are finally skewing towards work-life balance, Nelson said. “Collaborate with employers. Do self assessment; be specific; be positive and proactive; be realistic,” said Nelson. “Our managers want us to be happy.” In general, the breakdown of tasks is not always going to be 50:50, sometimes it’s more of an an 80:20. “Having an open discussion can prevent resentment,” said Nelson. “Align values with co-parents, let go of expectation and embrace partnership.” This also means really determining where to set the priorities, even at homed. If you’re teaching your kids how to do laundry, is it worth it to put a lot of emphasis onto their learning how to fold clothes properly? “I am not going to sweat it, I am not going to put it on my parental load,” said Nelson. Similarly, “If I spend all weekend doing sports tournaments, attending birthday parties, things are really piling on. We need to think about how to do things better–even at home.”–By Angelica Frey No Longer a ‘Nice to Have’: Do You Know What Benefits Are Now Critical for Success? Yesterday’s traditional benefits programs are now just the baseline for today’s workforce, according to Elizabeth Myers, senior director of thought leadership for the childcare provider Bright Horizons. The past few tumultuous years have exposed the challenges facing employees at all life stages, whether they are working parents or those juggling other caregiving responsibilities like elder care. What all have in common is a need for healthy work-life integration. Even more, workers want a chance to grow, both personally and within a company, Myers said in a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference. Further complicating the picture are the complex organizational structures that have evolved since the pandemic’s onset, creating a patchwork of full-time, part-time, and freelance employees working remotely, onsite, or in hybrid arrangements. But with greater flexibility comes the critical issue of trust. Employers want to trust that their employees are making the best decisions about their own productivity, while employees want to know that their organization is standing up for key values, Myers said. She advises employers to find ways to ensure that employees feel they have control over their own work, are appreciated for their contributions, and are connected to the organization. Elizabeth Myers, senior director of thought leadership for the childcare provider Bright Horizons (Company photo) “I’m a big fan of self-determination theory, which in its simplified state means that motivation comes from a combination of feeling autonomy, competence and relatedness,” Myers said. The good news is more organizations are recognizing that success in business depends on paying attention to the unique struggles employees face and then developing effective, flexible programs to meet their emotional, educational and economic needs across the life stages, Myers said. For example: •Wellstar Health System in Georgia, where the majority of employees are frontline workers who provide direct care to patients, has put in place childcare programs that have helped retain and attract new workers. Three childcare centers remained open during the pandemic even as programs operated by others were shutting down. Employees can use backup care hours, a flexible benefit for when a primary caregiver arrangement breaks down, for both child and elder care. Wellstar offers onsite employee assistance program counselors and is launching proactive mental health care. •Massachusetts General Hospital, which considers childcare an investment in its workforce, relies on its centers for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to give its nurses and doctors peace of mind knowing that their children are well cared for when they come to work. The hospital also provides backup care centers for employees’ children up to the age of 12. •Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts rebranded all of its sick time to wellness time, destigmatizing time off for mental health as well as physical health. Benefits include reimbursement for massages, acupuncture, mental health apps, gym memberships, home workout equipment and ergonomic home-office furniture. Educational tutoring supports students from childhood through graduate school. •Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas had a 94% retention rate for participants in its education assistance program, and more than 700 employees have graduated. •Bloomberg offers employees 25 days of backup care that can be used to fill in the gaps in their children’s calendars when school is not in session. The program covers general and virtual tutoring. Employers are increasingly offering higher education support to compete for and retain talent, Myers said. The support takes many forms, including counseling for student-loan refinancing or consolidation, contributions toward student loan repayment, free and low-cost degrees, classes toward career pathways, and tuition reimbursement. College coaching is another attractive benefit for parents worried about their children entering college. Coaching tools can range from assistance with deciding on which school is the right fit to essay reviews, help with applications and financial aid forms, and advice on financial aid negotiation. Myers said many clients that launched programs to help working parents during the pandemic have retained these benefits because they proved successful. One organization researched what its remote workers found they had time for that their onsite counterparts did not. The employer then provided onsite resources such as parking lot oil changes and car detailing, concierge laundry services, and food-delivery gift cards to allow onsite employees to accomplish the same goals. “That really raised the equity between the groups,” she said. Generation Z and millennial employees especially are looking for flexible benefits that grow and change with their life and family trajectory, Myers said. This demographic represents a large portion of the workforce and its emerging leaders. They are the most educated generation in U.S. history, yet they earn 20% less than baby boomers did at their age. Often saddled in educational debt, they face an out-of-control housing market and, now, a potential recession. “Millennials, as a demographic, just can’t really catch a financial break,” Myers said. Women are particularly at risk of dropping out of the workforce, Myers said. A recent Bright Horizons survey found that 53% of women workers report they are more stressed out than they were a year ago, and 46% also feel burnout. Because of that burnout, 40% of working mothers are ready to leave, and more than half are planning an exit within the next two years. “That says to me that the Great Resignation and the Great Reshuffling are far from over,” Myers said.–By Susan Kelly
Workers and the Corporate Values Revolution. Which Changes Will Endure?
BY the Editors January 02, 2023More than years into the pandemic, what has the workplace revolution revealed? From Day One’s one-day conference at Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House brought together leading thinkers and top executives in HR and related fields for a conversation about how organizations can build stronger bonds of trust with their workers and their communities. The speakers included leaders from Western Union, VF Corp., Vail Resorts, Medtronic, Hunter Douglas, and the City and County of Denver. Among the timely questions: How can companies stay true to their core values, and accountable to their stakeholders, while making enormous changes? Highlights from the conference: Weaving New Threads Into Today’s Talent Acquisition Fabric As an institution, Western Union operates in more than 200 countries, has a 130-currency portfolio, and serves more than 150 million users; it was the first company that, in 1861, completed the first transcontinental telegraph. Thus, it’s not surprising that, when it comes to talent acquisition, the company has kept diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the forefront for some time, even though its first chief diversity and talent officer was only appointed in October 2021. Such person is Shannon Armbrecht, a HR professional who once dreamt of being like the heroic FBI trainee Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs. “DEI is the foundation of our talent project. Originally, WU believed that, naturally, we’re a diverse company,” Armbrecht told journalist Spencer Campbell, features editor of 5280 magazine, during the conference’s opening fireside chat. “We move money in different currencies, and have employees all over the globe. When we realized we had an opportunity and needed to work at DEI, we still wanted it to be owned by the executive team.” In fact, the main criterion for WU’s talent acquisition is: Can they represent the community that we serve? “WU’s clients need people who understand that what we need in the U.S. is different from what is needed in Argentina, Lithuania, or Costa Rica,” Western Union workers need to be “people who understand our customers, their needs, and live those lives, understand why moving money is so important: it’s about people,” she said. Mostly, WU wanted to avoid having an individual come in and just dictate the course of action that employees and executives were then to follow. This outlook is a reflection of Armbrecht’s own disposition. During an early-career job in sales, in fact, she realized that, while ambitious, she was not competitive. “As soon as I started doing well, it started becoming a competitive environment,” she said. “That wasn’t for me.” In fact, the DEI efforts informally started seven years ago, with an employee resource group (ERG) called Women@WU, which yielded a lot of development, and a lot of grassroots efforts. “We had great programs, we needed to measure them,” Armbrecht recalled. “Asking people to do it on the side was not going to move them forward.” Shannon Armbrecht, left, chief of diversity and talent at Western Union, interviewed by journalist Spencer Campbell of 5280 magazine The three foundational goals consisted of increasing women in leadership (40% by 2025) racial and ethnic diversity (25% by 2025) and maintaining pay equity, and having DEI woven in the company’s very own fabric. It wasn’t easy at first. “Some of the places we started were just diverse slates and panels, and I had no idea how hard it’s gonna be to find talent, in a world where we’re used to–I'm just gonna put it out there–the privilege of white male being more educated,” she said. “When you put out a slate with X women and X diversity, sometimes it’s hard to find that talent. It takes longer, it takes time, it takes leaders who understand it”s the right thing to do.” An early goal was that, by the time of a final interview to fill an opening, the slate had to have one qualified gender diverse and one qualified racially diverse individual; in turn, the deciding panel had to have at least a gender-diverse individual on it, and from other teams. That sounds simple enough, but it’s not always easy in practice. “It made a difference for us. It increased the diversity we were bringing into that panel and who we were hiring in the end, and we won’t work with vendors who won’t do that,” Armbrecht said. Armbrecht observed that sometimes even people with the highest potential don’t necessarily come forward themselves due to their own circumstances. During the pandemic, for instance, caregiving responsibilities tended to fall even harder on women than they usually do. “Oftentimes, an employee you see potential in, doesn’t see they have the time to give to home and work the same way,” she said. “In creating environments, creating benefits, creating opportunities for individuals to believe in themselves and want to go for that development, that promotion–it takes awareness.” Awareness comes from insights and data. “Four years ago, we went into a more digitized insight strategy. We went to a monthly survey model: a few short questions each month, then we ask a more expanded one quarterly,” she said. “We know engagement is local, it’s local to your manager. You can pull these reports, and understand exactly what’s going on and take action very quickly.” Western Union’s leaders were, for instance, able to see how they were doing with burnout, Zoom fatigue, and ergonomic issues at the height of the pandemic. “We were able to get agile about the question. We put in different benefits: caregiver leave, mental-health-awareness apps, things we would not have understood or known had we not had the ability to have that agile strategy.” So much of the progress was about this inclusion context, and it’s something for the long run, she said, beyond contingent and temporary measures. The approach presents a way to look at the end-to-end lifecycle of the employee and really think about how inclusion is built into it. “There’s such opportunity,” she said, “to use the data and for the team to be understanding of the impact they have on each other and the impact they have on people from the moment we advertise to them to bringing them in the door, developing them along the way, and hopefully providing them opportunity if they’re going to leave us to get that bigger, better role somewhere else.”–By Angelica Frey Building a Truly Inclusive Company Culture: Beyond the Buzzwords When protests over the murder of George Floyd flashed across the country, Minneapolis was ground zero. Executives at Medtronic, which has its U.S. headquarters in that city, knew instantly that their response was crucial to supporting their 95,000 employees. “It’s a critical time for our company, and for our employees to see how we would show up in that situation,” said Kate Langhorst, an HR director at Medtronic, the largest medical-device company in the world. “Our organization really had to look inside and ask, ‘Do we have the expertise to really address what's going on in our employee populations in our communities?’” Langhorst and four other HR leaders spoke on a panel titled, “Is Your Company Developing an Inclusive Culture?” moderated by Denver Post reporter Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, which focused on how companies can examine their DEI efforts to make their workplaces better-suited to diversity. The Floyd protests and subsequent events have prompted many companies to reexamine the effectiveness of existing DEI initiatives. Teresa Hopke is CEO for North America of Talking Talent, a global coaching firm that inspires inclusive cultures. “As a consultant, I think that there were a lot of really well-intentioned things that came as a result of what happened with the protests and the murder of George Floyd. Organizations really stepped up and wanted to do something. But I think that a lot of them have missed the mark. [Efforts] can become transactional, not transformational.” For Jamie Alvarez, director of corporate communications at Vail Resorts, the Floyd murder prompted some hard questions. “The ski and snowboard industry is not diverse, it is not the most diverse sport. And it’s not growing, there’s not new people coming in. So really the first step was acknowledging that we are part of the problem. And asking ‘How do we start to look internally and do this work internally so that we can better lead the industry externally?’” Speaking on inclusion: Jamie Alvarez of Vail Resorts, left, with Teresa Hopke of Talking Talent For Vail Resorts, which has 40 resorts in 16 states and four countries, investment signals action. The company has focused on fewer catchphrases and more meaningful initiatives. “LGBTQ health care is a good example of that,” Alvarez said. “But specifically for our industry, we’re also thinking about affordable housing, health care and access, mental health access. We recently announced a $175 million investment into the employee experience that included raising our minimum wage to $20 for specific skill sets across all of our North American resorts. We have a couple of resorts outside of Philadelphia; their pay went from $7.25 an hour to $20. And that’s meaningful.” Monica Jackson, VP of global inclusion and diversity at Eaton Corp., agrees that action extends beyond terms. “We all know that allyship isn’t a new thing–we used to call it sponsorship, we used to call it advocacy. I think it really goes back to the crux and the foundation of, What are we solving for? Then the resulting actions don’t feel as much like an initiative or flavor of the month, because it’s solving for true business.” Walmart’s much-criticized and hastily recalled Juneteenth ice cream fiasco provides a perfect example, says Eaton. “How does that [ice cream] tie back to what you’re solving for? What is the challenge? Sometimes it’s over-engineered, just doing something to say you’re doing something, but it doesn’t really relate back and solve the true problem.” Medtronic let its African Descent Network ERG lead the way on observing Juneteenth, following their request that the new federal holiday be used to educate employees about what the date actually commemorates. “If you don’t know the history, if you don’t know why different things are important to different populations,” said Langhorst, “it’s hard to be an educated ally.” “I don’t need an organization to be my ally as much as I want them to pay me fairly,” said McKendree Hickory, PhD, head of facilitation at the leadership-training consultancy LifeLabs Learning. “I want them to hire equitably. I want them to offer the health care that myself and my family and my employees need. And so I think it’s even less about ‘What are we trying to become?’ and rather like ‘How do we embed this [DEI] into the infrastructure of our organization?’” And how to embed this, to move beyond fads and flavors? Eaton Corp. has instituted a series of ongoing listening sessions where senior leaders, who are typically accustomed to doing most of the talking, listen to the concerns of rank-and-file employees. Hopke adds that it’s important to instill a culture of listening, where managers check in one-on-one to support workers on an individual level. Hiring and retention practices bear reexamining, as well. LifeLabs has opened its pipeline, examining what truly makes facilitators successful–for example, the ability to engage a crowd–and expanding beyond psychology degrees to hire people with backgrounds such as improv comedy. Vail Resorts is attempting to do something similar, eliminating ski and snowboarding questions when interviewing for positions that don’t require expertise on the slopes. “Do I need to know if our best accountant can ski?” said Alverez. “No.” And Medtronic is examining how to support employees after onboarding to eliminate the ‘leaky bucket’ when diverse employees, unsupported by the company culture, quickly exit. Hopke thinks these changes are key. “We need to figure out how to do this differently,” she said. “We can’t keep checking the box on programs and trying to think that we’re going to solve this. I call it a back-door approach: to start to change our cultures without people thinking we’re forcing some big DEI initiative down their throat. We can teach people to be more empathetic, more curious, more compassionate, and more human. And that is going to get us to an inclusive workplace.”–By Cynthia Barnes Do Your Employees Feel Valued? How to Improve Retention in a Hybrid Workplace When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, the changes it brought to the workplace were revolutionary–and many of them are here to stay. A September 2021 Gallup poll found that 45% of full-time U.S. employees worked from home either all the time (25%) or part of the time (20%). It’s estimated that by 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely, an 87% increase from pre-pandemic levels. While much has been written about the Great Resignation, surveys show that workers aren’t leaving work–they’re leaving jobs (and careers) where they don’t feel valued. Moderated by journalist Tamara Chuang, who writes a column for the Colorado Sun call “What’s Working,” a panel of executives explored ways to foster community, cohesion, engagement, and a sense of belonging among workers–no matter where they’re physically located. Amy Cohen, a VP of total rewards for Hunter Douglas, a leading maker of window coverings and architectural producets, was one of the reshufflers, joining the company during the pandemic. “For me, [the job change] was just a growth opportunity that would have happened with a pandemic or not. But one thing coming into a new organization during that time, I was asking a lot of questions. ‘How do our employees feel right now?’ [Hunter Douglas] had never done a survey to see what employees really wanted, whether they’d rather have X or Y. And that was so valuable, hugely informative. For the first time, we could use data directly from our employees to then tie that back to what we were going to roll out as part of our annual benefits packages.” While Hunter Douglas’ office support workers transitioned to a hybrid-work model, manufacturing staff need to be in a facility by necessity. The company switched the manufacturing schedule to four, 10-hour days, to offer flexibility within the onsite framework, and that schedule has been well-received. (Of the almost half of American workers either actively seeking or contemplating new jobs, 27% say they’re seeking flexibility in scheduling.) “Employees really, really enjoy that opportunity to now have three-day weekends. And that came from us really listening, and then doing something about it. That time off was important to people wasn’t surprising,” Cohen said. “But what was surprising was disability parental leave–employees found that really important. So we now realize that’s an area for us to invest in, and to enhance those programs.” HR leaders on the panel about employees feeling valued, from left: Amy Cohen of Hunter Douglas, Judith Almendra of TTEC, Danae Atkins of Ball Corp., Bonnie Dowling of McKinsey & Company, and Carla Anthony of the City and County of Denver Bonnie Dowling, an associate partner with global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, agrees that listening to employees is key, and praised Hunter Douglas’ scheduling shift. “Flexibility has always been really important. In 2019, before the pandemic, the No. 1 ask of employees was for flexibility. That outpaced things like equal development opportunities, or mentorship or sponsorship or equal pay. But I don’t think that all of the employees who ranked it as No. 1 meant the kind of flexibility that we have today during the pandemic, which for those of us who work at a computer sometimes means being in front of a video conference screen for 12 or 13 hours straight. That’s flexibility to wear pajamas, not flexibility to do anything else. So when we think about flexibility, we have to think about not just where we work, but when we work and how we work. And when we expand that definition to include those elements, we can absolutely figure out flexible options for our on site staff as well.” As for Dowling’s company, they’ve moved to a model they call ‘purposeful presence’ that has McKinsey seriously evaluating which activities truly benefit from in-person presence, and which can be accomplished just as well from an employee’s home or a coffee shop. For Carla Anthony, director of HR at the Department of Public Safety for the City and County of Denver, the concept of making decisions based on ‘purposeful presence’ really resonates. “That’s pretty much what we’re doing with the Department of Safety. We have responsibility for the police, the fire department, sheriffs, 911, community corrections, and our gang-reduction unit, with three unions and about 4,500 employees. And in our organization, we differentiate between our first responders and our professional staff. So of course, our first responders have 24/7, various 24/7 schedules, and our professional staff operates very similarly to what you've described, where, generally speaking, we’d like to have them in the office two days a week, but it really depends on the type of work that they’re doing. And we do make exceptions–if it’s not necessary for someone to come in the office at all, then we work with that.” Judith Almendra, VP of human capital and talent acquisition at customer-experience giant TTEC, also saw her company turned upside down at the beginning of the pandemic. “TTEC has about 60,000 employees globally,” she said. “Pre-pandemic, about 5% of them were remote. Today about 80% are working remotely. So we had to develop different models. It was always very taboo to work from home. So one of the things that was very important for us was to develop a program where our employees have the option to work a couple hours here and there. Because I think to your point, flexibility is just more than just being at your home, it is really like being able to work from whatever you want, being able to work the hours that you need. So that for us is going to be very revolutionary in our industry. It creates a lot of complexities from a technology standpoint. But the digital transformation in this industry has been accelerated by the pandemic significantly,” Almendra said. Prior to the pandemic, Ball Corp., which produces aluminum products ranging from soda cans to space shuttle components, had a very in-office culture, says Danae Atkins, a director of HR business-partner functions for the company. “From the very beginning, there was a real clear acknowledgement and affirmation that our plant employees or aerospace employees working on classified projects were really our own frontline workers and heroes. So there is a lot of acknowledgment, a lot of very public recognition and private recognition there within plants, leader messages, leader visits, etc. For our plant population, specifically, we have a really big safety culture. So you'll go into any of our manufacturing plants around the world and you'll see signs–in different languages depending on the location–that will say, ‘I'll watch your back, you watch mine.’ So the whole thing is to go home safe every day, right? Like I value you, as an employee, you value me as a team member as well, and we want to make sure that we each go home safe to our families every day. So when Covid and safety precautions came along with that, it was very natural just to fold that into our overall culture of safety, which was already so important to us.” Continued Atkins: “What we've tried to stress is [that] culture is not just the four walls of a physical building. Culture is so much more than that: tangibles and intangibles. And so we’ve done some real concerted things during that time to build and strengthen our culture. And I feel like we’re coming out stronger, actually, in the final days of our employee-engagement surveys. And we’ll keep reinventing how we do this and keep going forward in that way.” Dowling agreed, adding: “With the current labor market, there’s no way that you can just dictate things anymore. It has to be different things that work for different employees. If your culture is dependent on the posters that people see in the elevator, that’s marketing, not culture. Culture is about the way that your managers interact with their teams every day. It’s the way your teams and your colleagues interact with each other. Every day you live in you breathe your culture, regardless of whether or not you’re onsite with each other or remote. So it’s a matter of investing and prioritizing it and the way that you are anchored your entire philosophy, and the core components of your culture around empathy. That’s huge.”–By Cynthia Barnes How High-Performing Workplaces Can Show Compassion, Too Back in 2017, in a foreshadowing of the work-from-home revolution, university professor Robert Kelly was explaining South Korean politics live on the BBC, only to be hilariously upstaged by his two exuberant toddlers and, eventually, by his frantic wife. In those pre-pandemic, primarily pre-video conference days, the innocent blooper went viral. Fortunately, the episode was greeted largely with empathy and compassion. Turns out, we were all soon to need a lot of both. Kelly suffered a little embarrassment, but when workers are regularly expected to deliver maximum effort in new circumstances, retention depends on empathy and compassion. What does this kind of sensitivity look like in high-pressure workplaces? To Anna Robinson, CEO and founder of the mentorship and leadership platform Ceresa, the answer is pretty simple. “A compassionate workplace is one that focuses on the human being before the human resource.” Robinson is excited about remote work because of its possibilities for underrepresented talent. “It should work, really, in the favor of greater diversity and representation. Yet, I think what we’re seeing is that it’s hard to maintain compassion in the same way when we’re remote. It’s so easy, when you’re on Zoom all the time, to just forget the small talk and the checking in with each other.” Robinson, along with four other experts, explored post-pandemic challenges in a panel conversation on balancing productivity with empathy, moderated by Denver Post politics reporter Saja Hindi. Donald Deas liked Robinson’s answer. Said Deas, a director and HR business partner for E.W. Scripps Co., one of the largest local TV broadcasters: “I would add to that and say from a health care perspective, we need to be high-performing in order for us to do that we need to lift our people up: Mind, body and spirit, every person, every neighborhood, whole and healthy.” Jennifer Fairweather, the chief HR officer for Colorado’s Jefferson County, said her definition of compassion is “when we see people as humans and not as things. Sometimes working in government, people see us as the government, or we sometimes might see our community members as ‘those people.’ But when we see each other as human-to-human, we recognize the differences and the challenges that we all have. And then we can have compassion and empathy.” Putting those precepts into practice, though, takes work, not words. Health care systems saw a huge strain on their resources during the pandemic, especially in staffing. For Amy Carris, director of people and culture development at Centura Health, this required revamping their talent acquisition. “We knew our folks on the frontline needed help,” she said. “We instituted a rapid hiring process, specifically for clinical roles. Our recruiters could extend an offer immediately to the candidate, provided they met expectations criteria and licensure for the role.” Leaders also needed support. “We saw that our leaders were investing so much in the care and the well-being of our staff that they were forgetting to take care of themselves. It was eye-opening that in addition to all of our benefits, all the resources, something that we really needed to do is give leaders permission to take care of themselves, in addition to taking care of our associates.” Speaking on compassion, from left: moderator Saja Hindi of the Denver Post, Anna Robinson of Ceresa, Amy Carris of Center Health, Jennifer Fairweather of Jefferson County, Jennifer Cockrum of Hertz, and Donald Deas of E.W. Scripps Car rental giant Hertz underwent major structural changes during the pandemic, laying off about 16,000 workers and filing for bankruptcy. Jennifer Cockrum, SVP of HR, and her team faced the challenges head-on. “Before the pandemic, we communicated with our employees largely through in-person meetings and town halls. Globally, we relied on management and union stewards who spoke our employees’ languages. The first thing we did was send postcards to people’s homes. Communicated through the mail, because that wasn’t shut down. We initiated translation services, focused on meeting our employees where they are. And we said, ‘Thank you.’ At Thanksgiving of 2020, we were in the depths of bankruptcy. And we gave everybody a gratitude bonus. We didn’t have money to do that, but we did it anyway. That came from a very genuine place, thanking our employees for helping us through such a difficult situation.” The news media played a huge role during such an unprecedented time, largely shifting to remote locations. “We had to re-engage with our employees from a totally different perspective of coming into brick and mortar on a day-to-day basis,'' said Deas. “Having people work from home, trying to put on newscasts, as well as doing stories out of their apartments or houses. And the folks that were in the field, we had to modify that as they engaged with the public with masks and have them fully protected with PPE so they could stay healthy. So we modified our way of doing business to suit that environment.” Although their diverse businesses modified in different ways–surgery can’t be performed remotely, rental cars essentially stopped selling–all the organizations drastically reevaluated metrics for performance reviews, shifted responsibilities and hours, ramped up personal check-ins and employee support, and communicated, communicated, communicated. Deas stressed the importance of engaging employees. “So where did the best ideas come from? Do they come from you, the ‘higher ups’? The answer is no. The best answers come from our employees.” Some policies and practices will eventually go back to business as usual, but some good changes will remain. “There are a lot of negative stories that can be told,” said Deas. “But there are also a lot of positive stories to be shared, and that’s the space that we’re in now. And that’s in those community stories. Our journalists and photographers could identify with those, because a lot of the issues that they were going through [during the pandemic] were the same things people in the community were experiencing. We wanted to capture that, humanize some of that broadcasting. And we’re going to continue capturing that humanity in the community, and showing that people are still doing great things during these times.”–By Cynthia Barnes Enriching Your Company culture With Allyship, Advocacy and Belonging “It all starts with listening,” VF Corp.’s Lauren Guthrie said of her role as VP of global inclusion, diversity, equity, and action (IDEA) in a fireside chat at the conference with Denver Post reporter Elizabeth Hernandez. Guthrie’s approach builds on the familiar term DEI with an added element of “action,” rooted in deep listening. Guthrie’s passion for storytelling an
Managing the Human Impact of Digital Transformation
BY the Editors September 11, 2022As the shift to distributed work speeds up the adoption of new digital tools, companies need to observe closely how workers use the new technology–and maintain a dialogue with them about its impact on their work lives. Are the new tools improving operational efficiency? Do they help employees focus more on higher-value work? Do workers have the right training to make the best use of the new tech? How many tools are too many? And what are the ingredients of a sound digital strategy, vs. pursuing new tech on an ad-hoc basis? From Day One gathered experts for a virtual conference in April. Among the highlights: Bringing HR, Tech and Real Estate Together to Make the Future of Work Possible Work teams are more fluid now than they’ve been in the past. “A decade ago, a lot of the teams were much more fixed, more based on functional groups,” said Loretta Li-Sevilla, who leads the future of work, collaboration, and business incubation at HP. “Now, increasingly, we’re seeing more agile teams, smaller teams that are based on the skills of people. They’re more autonomous and based on a project. It’s more time-bound. This rise of dynamic and agile teams is something that has been coming up more, and especially now, as we move into a hybrid work environment.” Li-Sevilla is in charge of making sure HP’s workplace reflects the future of work, that their dynamic teams can seamlessly collaborate, that they’re equitable, and that they succeed in a hybrid workplace. To open From Day One’s virtual conference, she spoke in a fireside chat about how to spark collaboration and engagement in a new work environment. Not only has where we work with each other changed drastically since 2020, so has the way we work with each other. In order to make the new way of work, well–work–Li-Sevilla believes three departments have to come together: HR, tech, and real estate. One of the most noticeable ways the future of work will be different is how physical office spaces are designed and used. First, the new workplace has to take into consideration the technology that’s needed to easily connect those in the office to those outside it. Before the pandemic, Li-Sevilla said she would often fly from her base in Palo Alto, Calif., to meet with management teams in Houston. “I didn’t want to be the one person who is not in the room, especially if I’m presenting.” But trips like those are rare now, so it’s necessary that the ones who aren’t in the room–and in a hybrid environment there will be several–feel like they’re on an equal footing. “There are 90 million conference rooms worldwide, but less than 10% are video-enabled. Right there is where we have a mismatch in equity,” she said. Universal connection with good audio and video can help. According to HP’s Future of Work report, 75% of people judge others based on their audio quality and 73% based on their video quality. “That’s why it’s so important, having those digital tools for enabling collaboration.” The tech that enables hybrid work is not helpful if the people using it aren’t trained on inclusive behavior. “You need to make sure that everybody is also trained up on the latest tools and the rules of engagement to ensure people who are remote feel just as part of a meeting or an engagement that’s happening in-office,” Li-Sevilla said. Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, left, interviewed Loretta Li-Sevilla of HP in the virtual conference (Image by From Day One) A healthy working relationship is built on trust, she said. Do you have a rapport with your colleagues that makes you comfortable reaching out? Can you trust your employer to include you in important conversations and meetings? We have to learn new behaviors for the hybrid environment. “You need to ensure that everybody who is remote can see and feel like they’re in the room, and then you need the people that are in the room to be inclusive of the people that are remote.” According to Li-Sevilla, community and collaboration have to be at the center of the new way of working. That’s where real estate meets culture to generate innovation. “We’re seeing redesign of spaces toward more social, more collaborative areas.” Because teams don’t look the way they used to, offices are changing too. “The role of the office is around making sure that we build that sense of community, that we have the spaces for them to collaborate, spaces that can enable hybrid collaboration where you can have people come in remotely.” Eighty-seven percent of people feel that the office is necessary for building a sense of community and collaboration, according to HP’s report. “The role of that office is around making sure that we build that sense of community, that we have the spaces for them to collaborate, spaces that can enable hybrid collaboration where you can have people come in remotely.” HP has added more spaces for stand-up meetings and quick huddles; they’ve created mobile video carts so teams can easily roll with their remote colleagues. Equally important is making the office a place where employees can achieve deep focus. Li-Sevilla says that it’s important that employees don’t feel like they have to sit at their desks all day. At home, we can work at the kitchen table, take a call on the porch, or answer emails while stretched out on the floor. Facilitating a dynamic office environment full of opportunities for what she calls “micro-mobility” is a big part of the future of work. “A key part of the office is enabling this agile, dynamic environment, and not just for collaboration. It’s also important to ensure that people are productive in the office, that they can find a desk, and when they find a desk, everything’s working and it has what they need so they can feel comfortable,” said Li-Sevilla. It’s about being just as productive in the office as we have been at home.—By Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza Helping Managers Surf the Hybrid Work Wave There’s no question that the digitalization wave can crash directly down on the human elements of work, impacting critical manager-team ties and leaving employees feeling untethered. But just as digital transformation can create risk for that manager-employee relationship, it can equally create opportunities–if you have the right tools. In a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference, Julia Markish, director of advisory services for Lattice, a people-management platform, discussed the perils of the digitalization wave and how managers can use technology to better connect with their team. “My professional purpose is to drive connection and belonging within organizations, which makes sense, because two of my top five strengths according to the Myers-Briggs strength-finding test, are inclusion and restorative,” said Markish, who also shared aspects of her identity, including her Soviet Jewish ancestry and membership in the LGBTQ community, in her introduction. “Why have I told you all of this? Not only is it relevant to the credibility of this talk, but it’s also really relevant to my manager. If she hopes to manage me well, information about my home situation, my background, how current events might be affecting me, and they are affecting me, my strengths, my passions, my career trajectory to date, my professional North Star going forward.” All of this information, according to Markish, is a collection of data that can and should be used to inform the types of projects an employee might or might not excel at. It also reveals where an employee might be able to lend expertise, and where they might need additional training or feedback for their role. It’s information that very well might be the difference between an employee feeling like they are cared for and belong at a company, and them looking for a new job. And, this is information that is revealed over time, by building a trusting a personal relationship over lunches and coffees and walk-and-talks. Julia Markish, director of advisory services for Lattice, a people-management platform (Photo courtesy of Lattice) “These personal relationships in the workplace have been slowly eroding with the introduction of technology,” Markish said. “Task management apps have replaced in-person goal check-ins. Recognition applications have replaced handshakes and high-fives. Messaging platforms have all but replaced the old swing-by-the-desk maneuver.” The result: The waves of digitalization have pummeled our capacity for real human connection. But Markish believes team leaders have the power to reverse this trend–without stopping the technology wave that is, in many ways, very useful. Markish’s No. 1 suggestion for surfing the technology wave with more finesse is personalizing workflow updates. Instead of relying solely on a task management system or update tool that collects standardized productivity information, employers should supplement that with personalized updates. Markish proposes asking people not just what they’re doing, but how they’re doing. “What if we asked questions like, ‘What might be helpful for me to know outside of your work life?’” she said. Or, “What’s one thing outside of work that’s taking up mind space for you right now that you’re open to sharing?” Even just, “How are you feeling this week?” Even seeding an update template with questions like these could give managers an idea of how they could get beyond the limits of the project-status update.” One-on-ones are an increasingly lost art in the age of digital tools. Why connect in-person when you can see everything your employees do over email, Slack, and Google Drive? And even if you do connect, there’s so much operational fodder to get through and so little time to do it. So how do you even get past those surface topics down to the deeper harder ones? According to Markish, this is a multi-layer challenge. The first layer is to ensure managers schedule and keep their one-on-ones with their team members. This may be a matter of training and communication, especially for new managers, but it's also a matter of rewarding the right behaviors. Markish suggests tracking where and when one-on-ones are happening in your organization with an integrated planning tool, a calendar plug-in, or an engagement survey. She also recommends influencing the content of these meetings with a one-on-one platform that reminds managers to check-in with their team members, and also suggests topics of conversation. “Having a culture of feedback is pretty much every company’s dream,” Markish said. “But as hard as it was for folks to give feedback in person, I think it’s become even less top of mind from behind the screen.” This is another area that technology can help with–both making sure it’s happening and that it’s done well.—By Jennifer Haupt Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this Thought Leadership Spotlight: Lattice. Teaching Managers Empathy and Good Judgement for the Hybrid Workplace An ongoing phenomenon that companies have been reckoning with is a workforce struggling to balance careers and personal lives in a hybrid workplace. And in many scenarios, direct managers are tasked with supporting employees both emotionally and professionally. The problem? Most corporate environments don’t train managers on how to be these vital lifelines in these new hybrid workplaces. The transition to remote life was particularly challenging for some companies. Melynda McConnell, head of HR for the U.S. and Mexico at the global transportation company Mammoet, describes a situation where 75% of the company’s workforce was in the field, with many working in rural locations or still relying on flip phones–highlighting cases where a broad remote-first plan simply doesn’t apply. McConnell spoke on a panel of experts, moderated by Bryan Walsh, editor of the Future Perfect section on Vox, on the need for helping managers get up to speed to handle this new work environment. For all the talk about preference to work from home, it’s clear that a significant demographic of employees who onboarded remotely have revisited the value of in-office interactions. Some people have viewed the return to office as a second on-boarding, as many were meeting colleagues for the first time. Still, others acknowledge the proximity bias that exists with in-person interactions, and how managers recognize the need to understand that the absence of a person’s physical presence does not translate to a decrease in productivity. “You just have to get intentional about how you connect at the hiring stage and give them a solid onboarding experience,” said Amrita Bhaumik, an HR leader at Valvoline, the supplier of automotive products. But because the onus is now on managers to uplift work communities, how can HR leaders support them in their newfound role responsibilities? Chantal Veillon-Berteloot, a VP of HR at pharmaceutical maker Bristol Myers Squibb, said it became immediately clear that the role of manager was central to everything. “The angle through which we’ve been supporting our managers is through the lens of empathy and psychological safety. She added that the ability of her company’s leadership team to be vulnerable about their personal experiences–discussing it at town halls, fireside chats, andglobal team meetings–has helped lift the pressure from a lot of the managers who were worried about making mistakes. Katasha Harley, the chief people officer for Bravely, an employee-coaching platform, said the learnings that managers developed over the past two years induces a level of natural empathy. Her company cultivates space for managers to share what they are struggling with, or need to learn more about from a team or peer, for the purpose of equipping them with the skills to become better at managing. But with these novel work settings in flux, how do managers accommodate for the different needs and working styles of employees? Speaking about managers and their role in hybrid work, top row from left: moderator Bryan Walsh of Vox Media, Anna Marie Lannon of the E.W. Scripps Co., and Chantal Veillon-Berteloot of Bristol Myers Squibb. Bottom row: Katasha Harley of Bravely, Amrita Bhaumik of Valvoline, and Melynda McConnell of Mammoet (Image by From Day One) “We put a new focus on around career conversations and being intentional about talking to people about their journey,” said Anna Marie Lannon, and organizational development leader at the media company E.W. Scripps. “Our job is to educate those managers–not just how to have those conversations, but think about nontraditional paths. We miss opportunities to connect people with a passion if we don’t know it exists.” Mammoet’s McConnell said she takes a slightly different approach. “I wanted to know why people were staying,” she said. “I started creating ‘stay’ interviews and making story podcasts so people can see why some stayed and what their journey has been. When you’re not in the office, you don’t get to meet people or hear those stories.” Young people at the start of their careers have had a particularly tough time starting a new job in a remote-first environment. As far as career advancement prospects, Harley shares that it is critical to “build in elements within the framework to think about what those paths look like for hybrid and remote employees, and not just give the advantage to the employee who you can grab a coffee with next door.” At Bristol Myers Squibb, employee support groups (ESGs) are important for focusing on the work habits of different generational groups. “They’ve done a lot of work bridging across generations and understanding that not everyone is operating the same, not everyone has the same career aspirations,” said Veillon-Berteloot. In many corporate environments, the idea persists that innovation occurs in a room where people are bouncing ideas off of each other. But now, companies are tasked with setting up workflows in a hybrid environment that enables innovation via new approaches. At Valvoline, said Bhaumik, said the company took direction from organizations in countries that experienced the devastation of the pandemic early on. When it was time to transition back to hybrid, the organization took into account elements of projects and determining whether there was a need for certain days that team members should unite physically. She added that successful workflows and project completion is a two-way street: “Managers are definitely learning the skills and changing the way we can manage our teams with empathy and intention. Since employees get the flexibility of working from anywhere, they are also responsible for ensuring that they deliver and show up wherever they’ve committed to.” Lannon said that at E.W. Scripps, professional development is an intentional aspect of its career-structuring program. She caveats this by adding that it can be a bit hierarchical in this way, as such structures can lead to groupthink, “as opposed to organizations where conversations are happening at all levels, regardless of your role,” she said. “We’re not trying to make the old thinking work in a new situation. This is our environment today: let’s look at what the situation actually is and what our needs are and leverage our technology and people to help us achieve our goals.” That being said, the debate between who can work remotely versus hybrid remains as fierce as ever. How can companies navigate this terrain with caution without alienating either side? For McConnell, the answer was clear: don’t try to make the old type of thinking work in this new environment. “We didn’t go out of business in the last two years, so obviously our workers kept us going. To have these conversations that people must be in the office just doesn’t make sense,” she said. She serves as an advocate for employees to be a proponent of pushing conversation forward for senior leadership buy-in–and on the flip side, needing employees to be able to communicate well-articulated reasoning for their continued desire to work remotely, and define transparency and accountability, McConnell said. “We still have a business to run, we still have to make some hard decisions. But we can at least open the doors to have thoughtful, well-constructed conversation, understand where both sides are coming, and try to figure out best path forward.”—By Tania Rahman The Covid-19 Experience: What We Can (and Can’t) Learn from It Fifty years ago, women entered the American workforce in record numbers and, this time, they stayed. The resulting change to workplace culture was seismic, and continues to inform the ways everyone works. Today, we may be on the precipice of another shift with potentially equal impact on labor. “If we really adopted some of the hybrid [work models], this would be the biggest change in a couple generations,” said Peter Capelli, professor of management, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and author of The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face. In a fireside chat with Bryan Walsh, Capelli provided insight into the challenges people managers face as employees demand work-from-home arrangements, as well as predictions on how companies may approach them. In helping to set expectations and policies, Capelli called HR folk the “frontline workers” of Corporate America’s dash toward amenable solutions. While the majority of employees today desire some remote-work options, many don’t want to work from home all the time either. Therefore, “hybrid work models” has become the buzziest of buzzwords because, as Capelli noted, “it could mean anything.” Speaking on the future of the office: author and professor Peter Capelli, left, and moderator Bryan Walsh of Vox In addition to having to choose from any number of solutions–viable to some, abhorred by others–what further complicates things for people managers is that every individual worker wants to have a say in their schedule structure, Cappeli said. In turn, he continued, HR teams will have to be flexible and open-minded to employees taking on that responsibility. “That’s about the only way I could see this working,” he said of remote-work arrangements. He added that, usually, empowering workers to develop their own schedules “works pretty well.” However, he warned, “you do have to trust the team to do it.” Companies have increasingly turned to employee scheduling software for assistance in this area, which can help make the process move along more smoothly, optimizing both communication and transparency. Research shows that, in spite of the many benefits remote work has for both employees and employers, it does make some things that are essential to workplace operations more difficult. Onboarding, for example, has suffered during this recent time period where virtual arrangements were required out of safety concerns. With fewer people in the office, Capelli predicted onboarding procedures might get worse before they get better, unless companies boost investment in the process, and ensure that efficacy rates for all-remote, hybrid, and in-office workers are equal. Another issue with remote work is that employees who do not report to the office on a regular basis often do not get recognized for their work at the same rate that in-person workers do. Work-from-home employees also have fewer opportunities to get promoted. Rectifying this problem, Capelli said, “requires a lot more from supervisors to basically keep hybrid workers who are out of the office in the loop as to what’s going on and trying to treat people equally.” Not doing so, he said, could easily lead to class-action lawsuits. As the prospect of a return to the office became more imminent, many began to speculate that companies would revert back to an office model made popular during the dotcom boom called “hoteling.” In the hoteling concept, some workers clock in on given days and lay claim to desk space, while the rest of the employees work from home. They switch places other days of the week, allowing companies to maintain smaller office spaces, while not cutting personnel. But according to Capelli, “employees hated it,” and by about 2007 it was a largely abandoned format. “Back in the office, 20 years ago, you needed to plug into the IT system,” Capelli reminded the audience. “You don’t need to do that now. The reason I want to be back in my office is to talk to my colleagues and coworkers, but there’s no reason to think that they’ll be there the day that I go there, and if I am there in a hoteling environment, there’s no reason to think I will be near them. I could be anywhere in the building.” Work-from-homers in close proximity to each other can simply meet in, say, a cafe if person-to-person collaboration is necessary. So Capelli thinks any consideration of hoteling will be short-lived, and he’s observing that many companies are instead investing in larger spaces with wide-open floor plans and numerous desks. “So if you need to be in that day, fine, you pull up a chair,” Capelli said. “The problem is that bumps right up against the continuing pandemic fears — we’re going to have everybody in a big room, right next to each other. So I don’t know if that’s going to work, but we hear a lot of companies saying that that’s what they’re thinking about doing, so we’ll see.”—By Michael Stahl
Enhancing Total Rewards to Fit the Workforce’s New Expectations
BY the Editors August 06, 2022As many employees talk with their feet, what have we learned about what encourages loyalty? While compensation will always be a factor, which benefits and features are most important to workers in the post-pandemic era? From student-loan relief to job flexibility, what have been the most effective changes that employers have made? What innovations are on the horizon? From Day One gathered experts for a virtual conference in March. Among the highlights: Who Benefits? Rethinking the Status Quo With the Employee in Mind Traditional benefits came from a different era. Today workers have new needs and new attitudes, especially with the changes in the workforce that the Covid pandemic has brought. Marco Diaz, SVP and global head of benefits for News Corp., recommended rethinking the status quo of benefits in a fireside chat with Seattle-based broadcast journalist Josephine Cheng. According to Diaz, the pandemic has brought a lot more attention to questions about how employers compete for top talent. How do we attract people? How do we retain employees? Are we shrinking or growing as a company? What does the workforce want? The concept of total rewards is a key piece to answering these questions. That encompasses everything from traditional compensation and benefits to career development, job flexibility, and even free potato chips in the kitchen. “Most importantly,” Diaz said, “is that the expectations around an employer taking care of someone’s holistic social and emotional health are much higher these days. So it’s even how an employer communicates with his employees, flexibility within work, where you’re working, how you’re working. All of these things are part of what would today be considered a total-rewards package.” While compensation starts the benefits dialogue when attracting new talent, it doesn’t necessarily clinch the deal, Diaz said. He spoke about a rapidly changing paradigm in benefits packages with reward immediacy, flexibility, mental health, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at the forefront. A fireside chat with Marco Diaz of News Corp., left, and moderator Josephine Cheng (Virtual conference images by From Day One) Diaz pointed to reward immediacy as one of the biggest trends coming out of the past two years. “Historically, benefits packages were all designed to bring people in and keep them forever,” he said. That meant the payday for a particular benefit was often retirement. “There was, a lot of times, a very long graduated scale, where the value of a program would increase over time. But now, people want it all. And they want it right now,” he said. Diaz believes it’s important for companies to look at legacy vesting, waiting periods, and time scales, to see if this system makes sense anymore. Particularly since some companies are, in fact, offering more upfront to job candidates. “The idea originally was, ‘I want you with us for five years, so I’m going to dangle this in front of you,’” he said. “But unless everyone is doing that, it becomes a competitive disadvantage. There are some arenas, like inequity, where that might still make sense, but there’s other places where I just think it’s a holdover and something we need to look at and re-examine.” “Workplace flexibility wouldn’t have been in my wheelhouse three years ago,” Diaz said. “But now it’s probably one of the bigger benefits the company can give.” He went on to say that surveys show flexibility tops health care and retirement benefits as being important to employees and is right up there with pay. Flexible hours and work-from-home options to address childcare, elder care, and other work-life balance issues are all key. The degree of flexibility differs from industry to industry, and it’s a matter of finding a balance that works for the employer and employees. Diaz pointed out that while benefits packages used to focus primarily on physical health, that has broadened to include social and emotional well-being over the past two years. “We’re in this weird nexus of both being less connected and more connected than we’ve ever been,” he said, pointing to the rise in virtual meetings and global workspaces. While mental health benefits used to mean coverage for a psychiatrist or therapist, that’s now expanded to a continuum that includes mindfulness and relaxation initiatives, and even policies limiting weekend emails and mandated overtime. In terms of DEI, Diaz said, there are two equally important components to a reward journey: the portfolio of programs offered as benefits, and connecting with employee resource groups (ERGs). “For me, it’s almost like thinking of a restaurant menu,” said Diaz, who emphasized that benefits managers shouldn’t pretend to know every one of these cohorts or make assumptions about them. The menu of possible benefits is presented to the customers, the group leaders. “We are increasingly trying to leverage our groups to find out what resonates and matters. And by the way, if there are any gaps, we can know about that, too. And then our hope is they will put that message forward to their cohort, and they can package it in a way that may make more sense for that particular group.” “I feel like the set of expectations about what is an employer’s responsibility in the life of employee is very high right now,” Diaz said. He sees a future with a much broader idea of what is considered as benefits, partially aided by emerging technology that allow for creating customized profiles of employees and their benefits needs.—By Jennifer Haupt 8 HR Predictions and What They Mean for You We all wish we knew what’s coming at us around the next bend, and we all know people who seem to be adept at prognostication. Joe Burton, the CEO of Whil, a Rethink Division, is one of those. In a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference, he talked about what he sees coming at HR this year, and what you can do to meet those challenges head on. Burton culled his predictions from sources as diverse as Deloitte and IBM to the Society for Human Resources Management. “There are so many things for us to stay on top of,” he said. “We can fight against the trends or build up skills and insights to manage the changes coming our way.” His predictions: 1.) In the corporate world, HR is at the center of everything. From diversity, racial divisions, politics, and culture–it all runs smack into HR at some point, Burton said. “When you think about all the functional domains that fall under HR, you can see the complexity this ecosystem, from talent acquisition to people analytics, to performance management, to compensation and benefits, and learning and development, on and on. Not every company understands that. Too often, C-level executives don’t understand what is going on in HR. There is lot of barking and demand, but no real understanding.” His advice: Educate them on the complexity of the job and the resources you need to serve and support what just about everyone says is the biggest asset of a company: its talent, said Burton. “In the absence of that [education], we find that too often, HR becomes a dumping ground.” The connection of the well-being and happiness of your talent is related to every single aspect of your business, from sales and operations to product development and customer service. “If your most important asset isn’t happy, trained, supported and feeling cared for, that’s a problem.” 2.) Mental health impacts culture. Pandemic fatigue has shown that mental health care isn’t just something nice to have as a benefit, but is a must-have, he said. The company Whil was founded in 2014. There have been other events that have impacted mental health in that time, but the pandemic has “pulled back the curtain” in a new way, said Burton. It has highlighted issues like depression, anxiety, insomnia, and stress. Those are epidemics already, without the added stress of a global pandemic. “Add in an inflationary economy, a war, politics, and you see there is a lot that is feeding harm to employees.” During the pandemic, Whil found that people were at 40% to 60% higher risk of clinical depression; there was a 90% increase in depression rates compared to pre pandemic; and a third of U.S. adults reported suffering from anxiety or depression. “These rates get worse the younger you go, which means your Gen Z employees are showing up at their first job with the weight of all of this on them.” These employees can’t show up and be their best, most collaborative selves if they are unable to take good care of their mental health. “The recommendation is to double down on programs that help employees,” said Burton. Check the value of some big-ticket items like EAPs. They may tick a legal box, but are they providing employees with the benefit they need? “If only 3% of employees ever access that, is it really helping employees?” It’s better to focus on programs that provide skills to employees to manage everything going on around them and create a culture of well-being. 3.) It’s all about skills. “Change is the new norm, so building up the right skills is vital. No one has a job description anymore. No one has a job anymore. They have projects. Sometimes we are leading them, sometimes we are being led. And there is a constant need to build up new skills for new situations,” Burton said. Employees may tell you they are wearing five or ten different hats, when what they need is to be trained to think in a more project-based manner. “Don’t fight it. Build the skills you need to manage it.” 4.) Employee experience becomes a focus. Burton says that employees increasingly have an expectation of modern collaboration, where everyone has a voice. “This isn’t just your Gen Z employees, either. Everyone is expecting this idea of the consumerization of the workplace. How do we want it to be? How do we want to feel? Shouldn’t it be easy like all the apps I have that make my life easy?” This is wildly different from the management decision making experience of yore. The skills of emotional intelligence, relationship management, and conflict management are all important. “Do we have the right experience and are people getting the right training so that they are equipped to manage the constant change?” he asked. It’s a difference between a business-centered versus a human-centered workplace. Employers are moving away from the goal centered, KPI-centered management. While goals and numbers are important, “doubling down on what kind of culture we want to have, enabling people to be a part of creating that, having the kind of organization that attracts people and makes them feel great about being here,” is taking center stage. Joe Burton, the CEO of Whil, a Rethink Division (Company photo) 5.) DEI is about action, not talk. Burton says it’s not just about gender, or race, or disability. “It’s about whether we are inviting employees into an experience where the first call to action is to be yourself.” Research has found that diverse organizations outperform non-diverse ones by as much as 40% in every conceivable measure: top line, profitability, bottom line, employee retention. “There has been a whole lot of talk but not a lot of action. Here, we are doubling down on the kind of training and learning skills for understanding neuro diversity, relationships between ethnicities and genders, and how diversity drives innovation.” Younger employees will be especially vocal that diversity is a wonderful thing. “Don’t fight it. Embrace it.” 6.) Financial stress will soar. About half the country feels stressed about money right now, Burton says, and that won’t decline while we are in an inflationary economy. “Think about how to enable employees to manage this. There are a lot of players in this space, and new solutions that are coming out from being able to borrow against your salary, or to get cash advances in what amounts to be on-demand pay–you work a few hours, and you can withdraw that money immediately. These solutions are popping up out of necessity.” But many of them only exist because the people using them are not paid enough, he said. They have multiple jobs or side hustles to make ends meet. “Productivity is plummeting as people are half-engaged in figuring out how to make money elsewhere while they are on the job.” Benefits and coverage can influence whether someone stays in a job that doesn’t meet their economic needs. “These are canaries in the coal mine. There’s a bigger issue here around helping employees manage their own financial well-being starting as early as possible in their career. It’s a whole new training area for us here at Whil, and we know it's critical based on what's going on.” 7.) Getting your tools to work harder. Most HR professionals spend a lot of time choosing the tools and technologies they and the employees they work with make use of. “The problem is, not enough of them work together.” Employees don’t have a single place to sign on to know what benefits are available and how to use them. “In the Whil platform, we think a lot about integrating our corporate wellness platforms and learning management systems. The idea is to make it easy for employees to find support for their personal well-being, professional resilience, parenting, and caregiving skills. If I have to go looking, well it’s easier not to. Ask yourself: With everything we have paid for, is it working together? These things absolutely should.” 8.) Analytics in the driver’s seat. HR analytics that look at how employees are feeling, where they are focused, the skills they need, and where they feel overwhelmed will be driving the business going forward, says Burton. “How can they improve relationships, emotional intelligence skills? How can they manage stress and learn techniques around mindfulness, sleep training–all these soft skills that are needed for them to show up and perform at their best, while still managing home life.” These soft skills have data attached to them which can be harnessed to recommend tools to employees before they need it in the moment. “This treasure trove of data and insights that every part of the organization is looking for should be coming through HR,” he said. “That can sound scary, but it’s also incredibly exciting. This kind of advanced people analytics, where you understand what’s going on with the whole person create a significant business opportunity from a competitive advantage standpoint and being more likely to create a sense of belonging, more likely to be named a great place to work, more likely to hire and retain employees.” Burton says you should use these eight predictions as measuring stick for your organization. “Are we being very thoughtful about how we roll things out and how we implement? Are we giving people the training they need to feel to feel cared for with all this change going on? And are you giving them a voice? If they don’t get a vote, they may not be there that long. Use this as a checklist and to change the conversation at your company.”—By Lisa Jaffe Why Fertility Benefits That Cover All Genders Are a Must-Have Conversations around fertility benefits usually focus on addressing female infertility, but people of all genders need support from fertility and family-forming resources. “Men, trans and non-binary people all pursue parenthood, and they need support for it,” said Kirsten Ferro, associate VP of sales for Carrot Fertility, in a Thought Leadership Spotlight about how employers can provide inclusive fertility benefits that cover all genders—and ages. In fact, for about 30% of different-sex couples experiencing infertility, male-factor issues are the primary cause. Trans and non-binary people also have specific fertility needs and struggle to find physicians with the right experience. A slide from Carrot’s presentation (Image by Carrot) Ferro encouraged the audience to start thinking a little differently about fertility health and go beyond the most common piece of the puzzle: IVF for women. What, men experiencing infertility? “IVF is a route that they might go through,” she said. “But they might also speak with a urologist first to find out about other options such as diet and lifestyle modifications to help increase the likelihood of conception.” And, she asked, what about same sex-male couples whose fertility health means getting a fertility assessment to understand the health of their sperm, followed by working with a gestational carrier, commonly known as a surrogate? Or what about people who are just starting to explore their fertility, baseline health or have reached menopause and andropause, and your medical guidance on how to move forward? “These are just a few examples of what fertility health can mean to different employees within your workforce," Ferro said. ”Which is a major reason why it’s time to challenge the way we all think again about fertility, health and what it means.” According to Ferro, first-rate fertility benefits are a must-have for employers to compete for top-notch talent in this tight job market. “Fertility benefits are becoming more and more common to help improve access to fertility health care, and more job seekers are actively looking to join a company that offers this type of coverage,”she said. Fertility and family forming is also incredibly stressful. “People who experience infertility indicate that it’s one of the most stressful or upsetting experiences of their lives. Through financial support and care navigation, the right fertility benefits can help to reduce stress and improve productivity for your employees.” Still, despite fertility care becoming something that employers are paying more and more attention to, many companies are still focusing only on supporting IVF for women. “Limiting the definition of fertility health to cisgender women excludes an immense number of employees, and it means your company will miss out on making an impact on more of your team members,” said Ferro. Kirsten Ferro, Carrot’s associate VP of sales How can employers implement an inclusive solution that actually meets the needs of employees of all genders? The first step, according to Ferro, is fertility testing and fertility preservation for female, male, trans, and non-binary employees, because that's the first step many people take when starting to think about their fertility health. One consideration is that trans and non-binary employees have some very specific and nuanced needs, and difficulty finding knowledgeable medical providers. For example, it's common for trans men to hear from medical providers that they can’t get pregnant because they’ve been receiving testosterone, but that often isn’t the case. Another problem Ferro mentioned with traditional insurance is that infertility diagnoses are usually required to access fertility care. And infertility is defined as a heterosexual couple trying to get pregnant for six to 12 months without success. A same-sex female couple or single intending parent would need to try to get pregnant using donor sperm six to 12 times at their own out-of-pocket expense–that’s tens of thousands of dollars to prove infertility. “To have inclusive benefits, the definition of infertility must be removed, and you must provide access to donor assisted reproduction, such as donor sperm, donor eggs, and gestational carrier services just commonly known as surrogacy,” Ferro said. This is just a starting point of implementing an inclusive fertility-benefits program.—By Jennifer Haupt How the Definition of Total Rewards Is Changing It’s more incumbent on employers to get compensation packages “right” than ever before. But given the current wave of American worker empowerment, the employee of today is thirsty for more intangibles than higher pay, traditionally the go-to tool for keeping workers on staff, while attracting the best talent. This shift in ideology on the part of employees is changing the definition of a desirable total-rewards program. “Looking at the entirety of the employee, especially in the last 24 months, has just accelerated so dramatically,” said Matthew Tremmaglia, VP of customer success at Achievers, an employee recognition and engagement platform. “It’s strategically catapulted the rewards conversation.” One significant element of any employee’s degree of contentment in their job, Tremmaglia has seen, is the sense that they “belong” on a given team. The “main drivers of belonging,” like feeling “welcome,” “included,” “known to the people around you,” and “supported by your manager,” he said, have proven to be valuable concepts around which a mindful employer can craft more profound, attractive compensation packages. He made his remarks as part of a panel discussion among HR leaders on how they’re approaching total rewards programs to give them a leg up in what has become the most tumultuous, high-stakes job market in recent memory. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation, moderated by journalist Siobhan O’Connor: When asked what’s changed in worker expectations and the adjustments leaders can make to meet their demands, Jesse Welsh, VP of total rewards for Southeastern Grocers, a large regional chain of supermarkets, said, “It’s really trying to meet the associates where they are.” When constructing total-rewards programs, he said Southeastern Grocers considers the employee’s stage in their career, in terms of both “timeline” (on-the-job experience) and “level” (the type of work they do). Southeastern also organizes their benefits into what Welsh called “five well-being strategies or competencies” that support worker well-being in terms of finances, health, social considerations, career path, and generally within the larger community. “It’s bringing all these different moving pieces together and trying to make sure that our associates understand what they have, can share what they have with their co-workers, and actually can enjoy the benefits as the user,” Welsh said. Another key to retaining talent is promoting them. Actively helping employees move up the ranks not only ensures they’ll be better compensated monetarily over the years, but they’ll also be challenged to learn new skills—something else workers crave in their jobs—and feel like a valued member of the team. A panel on total rewards, top row from left: moderator Siobhan O’Connor, Emily Heckaman of Primoris Services and Julia Cohen Sebastian of Grayce. Bottom row: Jesse Welsh of Southeastern Grocers, Gloria Estrada of Keysight Technologies and Matthew Tremmaglia of Achievers Emily Heckaman, director of total rewards at Primoris Services, a construction and infrastructure-development company, said her company recently launched a paid career-training program for the company’s emerging, most promising leaders. She said the “high-potential employees” are being treated to a “signature experience” in the program, and that “it’s just been a great way to get our leaders together and to talk about change and how we can make the organization better,” she said. “We are talking about: What is that employee experience? What does that experience mean for the employee? How do we recruit, retain?” Heckaman continued. “In every aspect of the organization, with 10,000 employees, we have to have all our leaders out there, recruiting those employees and keeping them here. So it’s been a great advantage for us.” The sudden shift to work-from-home arrangements due to the pandemic shed a brighter light on the employee need for caregiving, most prominently of children, but other relatives and loved ones in need as well. “A lot of people carry very different loads in caregiving that prevents them from being able to thrive at work,” said Julia Cohen Sebastien, CEO and co-founder of Grayce, a platform that generates rewards packages centered around caregiving. “If you can’t thrive at work, you’re more likely to leave your job, of course, and caregiving tends to be hard and unfamiliar for most people.” Cohen Sebastian observed that work schedule flexibility and leave are important considerations for employees, helping them to address caregiving concerns, but they may do so only temporarily. Flexibility and leave also don’t necessarily help workers advance professionally, she said. According to Grayce data, when it comes to caregiving, people struggle most with the “emotional stress of the role,” Cohen Sebastien said. They also worry about “having the knowledge of what to do and having the time to do it,” as well as simply being able to afford whatever care they must help provide a loved one. “Employers are going to win when they’re addressing root-cause stressors holistically and offering more active caregiving support programs,” Cohen Sebastien said. Companies must do so, she continued, “for all employees’ families, so not just young families, or people trying to have a family, but literally every associate’s family. And that also includes not just supporting American employees, but also global employees for those employers that have families around the world.” Workers also want to see their companies prioritize diversity and inclusion, while seeing to it that more employees have job equity as well. Boosting DEI in the workplace helps employees feel safer, more respected and connected. When considering the “entirety of the employee,” which Tennaglia mentioned is an advantageous trend for all parties, there are few more vital feelings that leaders can deliver their workers than a sense being safe, respected, and connected to each other. DEI and total rewards are “totally connected,” said Gloria Estrada, VP of total Rewards and HR services at Keysight Technologies. She suggested that leaders get granular with data analysis, looking at compensation and other considerations, not on a company level but within departments and perhaps even on a job-by-job basis. “That’s where it looks different,” Estrada said. “And if the female or the underrepresented minority is the lower paid, you should have a good reason for that. That shouldn’t just be because you didn’t know.”—By Michael Stahl How to Create a Mentally Fit Workplace A few years ago, Shannon Hopkins was told a piece of medical news nobody wants to hear. She had cancer, an aggressive form of leukemia that usually came with a poor prognosis. “I was terrified,” Hopkins, who is now a regional VP at BetterUp Care, a comprehensive mental-health platform, told From Day One in a Thought Leadership Spotlight. She was swiftly admitted to a cancer institute and was told she could not leave for 30 days. By enduring three rounds of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, along with overwhelming support from her family, she learned early on how important it is to have a strong mental health foundation. “When my mental health was strong, I was better able to handle setbacks,” she said. A slide from BetterUp Care showing the prevalence of “languishing_x001B_” With the widespread mental health crisis in the workplace accompanied with the pressure to act like everything is OK, while there’s no indication of things ever reverting to the way they were in 2019, having a mentally fit workplace is of utmost importance. Mental fitness, it should be noted, is different from clinical management of mental health. “Despite the effort in investing in clinical mental-health services,” Hopkins said, “common offerings are not for everyone. Therapy is not for everyone.” Everyone needs help, especially getting ahead of stressful triggers. Mental fitness means learning how to “press pause in our personal lives, break free of the old patterns that are holding us back, and to rise to a new challenge.” Data collected by BetterUp shows that the majority of the workforce is languishing, which has been described as “a sense of stagnation and emptiness.” An estimated 60% of wo
Beyond Diversity: Bringing Substance to Inclusion and Belonging
BY the Editors August 05, 2022What happens after a surge of commitment to hiring for diversity? Only with the follow-through can progress be sustained. How can companies embrace their increasing diversity? What are the best ways to disrupt the old corporate culture without breaking what is still productive? According to employees, what specifically gives them a sense of belonging? And what are the benefits to the company? From Day One gathered experts for a virtual conference in February. Among the highlights: Believe: Building a Corporate Culture of Trust and Transparency Depending on whether you're consulting Psychology Today, Healthline, the Merriam-Webster, or other resources, you are unlikely to find a cut-and-dried definition of trust. Psychology Today defines it as “the belief that someone or something can be relied on to do what they say they will.” The Merriam Webster dictionary offers: “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” That’s because, as pointed out by Alexa Teare, the chief people and coaching officer at the coaching program LingoLive, trust rests on the multiple levels: self-social-systemic, which translates in work parlance to individual-team-organization. “As humans, it's essential for us to have trust in our organization,” she told Courtney Connley, senior editor of the women’s membership network Chief and the moderator for a panel titled “Building a Culture of Trust and Transparency.” Teare sees this multi-faceted and multi-layered definition of trust both as a challenge but also an opportunity. It is, for instance, an opportunity for leaders to talk about mutual accountability. “A leader is charged with creating trust. Someone in corporate is charged with creating trust,” Teare continued. “There's something to be said about reciprocity in trust amongst all individuals, starting with the definition of what it means to us, and talking about what role each of us is going to be playing.” A core tenet of a culture of trust is curiosity. “Even though you're remote, don't lose sight of being curious,” said DeShaun Wise Porter, the VP and global head of diversity, equity, inclusion and engagement at Hilton. “Don't lose sight of the experience of building the relationships.” For instance, it's unadvisable to start a conversation jumping directly into work. “Practice active listening,” said Porter. "Seek to learn and grow beyond your inherent beliefs." Where there's social and racial tension, for example, one must lean in and ask questions, and stop and check in on people: to create a culture of accountability, start within yourself. "It's not one singular, big training session," warns Porter. “It's day to day, moment to moment action. So many of us have things that we know or thought we knew.” Speaking on trust, top row from left: Moderator Courtney Connley of Chief, Annie Rosencrans of HiBob, and DeShaun Wise Porter of Hilton. Bottom row: Joy Dettorre of IBM, Sheryl Battles of Pitney Bowes, and Alexa Teare of LingoLive (Images by From Day One) A strong sign of accountability is transparency, especially in terms of salary. Annie Rosencrans, who is leading the people and culture division in the North American expansion of the HR software company HiBob, has always been about establishing policies where there hadn't been any, and while the margin of error is quite narrow, she sees it as a possibility for improvement and positive evolution. “Make sure you're developing policies that are fair and make sense for your business,” she said regarding a matter of salary transparency. “Understand your business and make policies that don't have arbitrary rules.” When it comes to compensation, though, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. “But,” said Rosencrans, “it’s important that the philosophy is articulated and based on benchmark data and internal analysis. Make sure that when decisions are made, you abide by that [analysis.] The second you undermine it, you lose trust.” Despite the climate of reckoning following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, leaders working with a multinational workforce know that diversity goes beyond ethnic heritage. Sheryl Battles is the VP of global diversity and inclusion at the global shipping and mailing company Pitney Bowes, where in the last year she spearheaded the rollout of a customized inclusive-leadership training program for managers at all levels. A particular success story involves a Midwestern manager, an older white man, who had a direct report who was a woman from Africa. Whenever they spoke, she averted her gaze. “In some work we were doing in advance, there was a discussion on culture,” said Battles. “In her culture, this was an act of deference to an elder, and the manager had an aha-moment.” Similarly, Joy Dettorre, EdD, the global head of diversity, equity and inclusion at IBM sees empathy and storytelling as core tenets towards a more comprehensive understanding of diversity. IBM, a pioneer of remote work practices for the past two decades, had to take this into account when interacting with the Indian workforce: most of them, in fact, always went to the office. When they got sent home early in the pandemic, one of the local managers explained to her that in her multigenerational household, her need for an at-home workstation was invading on her family’s home space. “Culturally and socially, that's not where she worked,” said Dettorre. “We needed to be sensitive about that.” In the mental-health conversation, leaders tend to be forgotten. They’re as exhausted as their employees, yet they’re most often called to provide support. “You can't pour from an empty cup,” said Teare. “As a leader, I think there's a certain level of responsibility we hold ourselves accountable for. Many leaders hold that burden: I think there’s a space for us to be intentional with when to charge the trust battery.” One of the upsides of the past two years, she reflected, is folks feeling more comfortable being vulnerable. “What it taught me is how to share the burden in a transparent way,” she said. “Think about what drains us and what fills us up and be very intentional about that: mental health and wellness talk can be nebulous without a tangible practice–take what's nebulous and apply it to a daily practice.” Vulnerability also means openly acknowledging one’s own shortcomings. Dettorre, for example, recalls that once she was tasked with creating materials for an experience titled “Gender Transition in the Workplace.” “We thought we were good at it, my heart was in the right place, but my knowledge was not there,” she admitted. She then reached out to transgender [colleagues], simply asking help me: will you co-create this experience with me? “It’s OK not to have all of the answers: I am not afraid to say, I am sorry I made a mistake, I want to get better,” she said. People are usually receptive. Overall, what matters in building trust is consistency. “Trust is a thing that takes months to build and moments to crush,” said Porter. “Consistency in actions and behaviors is the one thing people will have to look to and rely on heretofore.”–By Angelica Frey Maintaining Momentum After the Moment of Reckoning “There’s a 71% increase in DEI globally: it’s huge,” said Tanya Odom. Friends jokingly refer to Tanya Odom, director of the equity and inclusion program at the Walton Family Foundation, as an encyclopedia. She has the habit of citing or quoting academic articles, data, and statistics when making a point. A former management consultant and an educator, she sees it as an effective tool to get her message and method across. “There’s a robust amount of research about some of this work, both what works and what gets in the way,” she told Erica Licht, the director of research projects, at the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at Harvard’s Ash Center. “And I think sometimes, we don’t really respect the diversity, equity and inclusion space or the research around what it takes to do this.” Odom sees the main drivers of equity culture in leadership, communication and, mostly, education and accountability. She mentions Valerie Rainford as an authority on data collection on what she and her peers are trying to do. “The willingness to face the data is integral,” said Odom. Since May 2020, she has constantly been asked the same question: is there a blueprint on how to move past this “excitable moment” pertaining to maintaining momentum after the great reckoning? Recently, she was on the phone with George Floyd’s aunt, talking about what happened in the aftermath of his murder and the overly enthused push for DEI in corporate America. “The reality is that there are people who are continuing to do the work, there have always been these people. When we look outside of philanthropy, I see the work of diversity leaders: They haven’t stopped, and are now working harder than ever,” she told Licht. “The challenge,” Odom continued, “comes when we think where the end point is.” It’s not about one incidence, one moment in time. She is sure that, out of the many organizations that called her in “to do the work,” some just did that to check a box. On a positive note, younger generations are seen as a critical component in the effort, as many of them believe that diversity is the norm. “There’s an expectation for it, there’s a concern and a real desire for companies to address some of these issues,” she said. Tanya Odom of the Walton Family Foundation, left, and Erica Licht of Harvard University Still, good will and hard work bring short-lived results without knowledge and education. “The challenge that many of us are facing internally is that there is no set of shared competencies around what someone would want a DEI director to have,” she explained, noting that in her role, she is not dealing with HR issues like talent retention and recruiting. “I don't feel our skillset is recognized: We're the ones, often, if someone cares about belonging, we're the ones they come to. We're the ones that, when something happens in the world, we have to think how to talk about this internally. One day we'll see it, but at this point we still don't understand the scope and depth of people who inhabit these roles.” In fact, Odom observed a lack of thoroughness in appraising past research and authoritative figures in the field led to “sort of stopgap measures.” Prior to this fireside chat, Odom was in touch with a professor around creating an inclusive workplace and helping people understand racial economic inequality. “But this exists on a university’s website, you know. It’s there,” she said. While a resource such as this needs to be actively shared and made readily available, Odom sees a good practice industry-wide: organizations are looking for coaches, namely people who have both DEI backgrounds and coaching experience. “It's the shared accountability, it’s the continuing education,” she said. “I continue learning, I don’t stop going to webinars. I don’t feel like I’m in a position of I know everything, and I'm done. And in fact, I feel a sense of responsibility to continue my own learning. Since my job, my role, my passion is to help others learn as well.”–By Angelica Frey Easing the Emotional Burden of Representing a Rising Identity The modern workforce is seeing employees from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds exhibit increased signs of stress–more than peers who do not share these backgrounds. At the From Day One conference, a panel professionals with backgrounds in mental health and DEI delved into the matter in a panel titled “Easing the Emotional Burden of Representing a Rising Identity.” The rise in stress levels can be attributed to both a blurred work-life balance as well as said individuals carrying a heavier emotional load than most due to the varying inequalities that intersectional identities tend to bear. The combination of this reckoning and the heightened focus on supporting employees from marginalized backgrounds have led companies to the forefront of a revolution advocating for equitable, safe environments where people of all backgrounds can feel secure. The question is: are they delivering? Singleton Beato, global chief DEI o fficer at McCann Worldgroup, illustrates what a workplace that misses the mark on inclusion cultural sensitivity looks like. “It’s consistent behaviors that look like a lack of consciousness on the part of the dominant group of a workplace in the day-to-day exchanges, interactions and decisions, and create an environment where underrepresented groups don’t feel valued,” she said, adding that the impact results in a loss of talent and rich perspectives of employees. “We spent decades telling people, ‘bring your full selves to work,’ but weren’t prepared to deal with the messiness of humanity,” said Khalil Smith, VP of inclusion, diversity and engagement at the digital content-delivery service Akamai, noting that in the wake of the pandemic, traditionally underrepresented groups carried the weight of losses more than others. Regarding the oft-referenced lines barely separating personal lives from work lives, the truth behind just how intersectional identities lead to unique challenges and struggles has become more apparent as mounting video conferences shed light into people’s private worlds. Speaking on rising identities, top row from left: David Thigpen of the University of California, Berkeley, Khalil Smith of Akamai, and Idit Aronsohn of Amdocs. Middle row: Renu Sachdeva of Talking Talent, Nick Ferraiolo of Elm City Coaching, and Mercedes Studio of Maven. Bottom row: Singleton Beato of McCann Workgroup. “As many organizations are there out there, there’s so many stages where they’re on their own DEI journey and on the way to building a culture of inclusion,” said Renu Sachdeva, an executive coach at Talking Talent. She makes it a point to note that there are companies that have been committed to DEI from the start, and others that received a wake-up call after the murder of George Floyd that sparked the mass social-justice movement of 2020. “The first thing any organization needs to do is take a good hard look at where they are on their journey and where they aspire to go, and then map out how to get there,” she said. Beato points out that there is a marked shift in interpretation behind the message of encouraging employees to show up as their authentic selves, acknowledging that the current climate has driven a different approach that companies are not equipped to manage. And then of course, the concept of mental health and its correlation with encouraging employees to show up authentically. For many folks, boiling down the exacerbated burnout in the last two years to simply overworking doesn’t illustrate the full picture. In the case of many groups, it is the lack of community or availability of contexts that embrace identity, such as employee resource groups, limiting the spaces for marginalized groups to be themselves. Historically speaking, society has only recently begun to take mental health seriously, recognizing a healthy mindset as a core tenet of well-being. The corporate work environment is not far behind, playing catchup in determining how best to leverage resources to support employees while sustaining Odom business as usual. “We take technical leaders and ask them to be mental health professionals, people that are really strong as individual contributors, and say ‘Hey, go do that and teach other people.’ It’s not just the individual, it’s the system. We’re asking more of each person at work than ever before, and with fewer resources. But we’re starting to see how the system and the rhetoric are matching up.” Apart from the fact that many companies are finally jumpstarting overdue efforts in supporting diversity and inclusion, the flip side is in contending for the exhaustion of groups who have long fought for equality and acceptance for all underrepresented groups, no matter race, religion, physical disabilities, and mental health, only to be met with little success. The renewed conversation around race that began in 2020 and the many issues around diversity and inclusion exasperated those who were all too familiar with these intersectional issues that were now making headlines, as though existing for the first time. Mercedes Samudio, LCSW, a mental-health parenting coach forh Maven, the family health platform, sums up the experience of long-time proponents of change in one word: fatigued. She points to the emotional burden that marginalized groups have always shouldered, such as pointing out microaggressions and passive-aggressive behaviors, or constantly having to explain their perspective or educate their peers. Before diversity and inclusion became a corporate issue, affirmation of this invisible burden was virtually nonexistent; over time, the compounding experience of microaggressions and feelings of invisibility inevitably impacted the productivity and demeanor of affected individuals. Panelists agreed that the biggest hurdle in supporting marginalized employees lies in the lack of infrastructure built to accommodate for mental health and wellness, leaving well-intentioned leadership professionals struggling to adequately help their teams. In addition, a meaningful aspect of reconfiguring organizational approaches to supporting employees with different needs lies in paying attention to greater cultural and political context in society. This can mean individuals must learn to identify unconscious bias and beliefs in themselves and others, and how to work towards resolving them. “It has to be systemic in order for us to lift that burden off of supervisors who aren't mental health professionals, but want to be able to bring mental wellness into their workplace,” Mercedes said.–By Tania Rahman Ensuring Equity in a Hybrid Work Environment As the shift to hybrid workforces becomes permanent, how can DEI professionals support employee engagement and ensure that virtual workers don’t get left behind? Felicia Robinson, chief people and inclusion officer at the child care provider Bright Horizons, addressed this question in a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference. Her presentation focused on how Bright Horizons thinks about reimagining employee engagement, benefits programs, and employee well-being. “When we think about the hybrid workforce, folks working remotely, folks working in the office, folks deciding to move away to different locations that are not in the same city as their organization. How do we think about engagement, retention, onboarding, leadership development and, frankly, employee burnout?” Robinson asked. “When we think about DEI through the lens of the hybrid workforce, there are actually some positives and some not so positives.” Flexibility is at the top of Robinson's list of positives, especially for people of color, parents with childcare concerns, and people with disabilities or chronic health issues. Greater job opportunities outside of the area where one lives, as well as lower impact on the environment and time saved by working from home, are other pluses of the hybrid workplace. But remote work environments also have the potential to promote inequity. According to Robinson, people of color are less likely to be in remote-friendly jobs. One reason, according to a 2021 Pew Research study, is that Black and Hispanic adults are less likely than white adults to have the needed equipment and high-speed internet arrangements at home. Pre-Covid, when less than 30% of all workers could work from home, only 16% of Latino workers and 19% of black workers had remote flexibility. That’s compared to 37% of Asian workers and 30% of white workers. Those figures are much higher now. At Bright Horizons, 30% of employees worked remote in 2019, and that figure post-pandemic is up to 45% of employees working from home. Felicia Robinson of Bright Horizons “Employees who put more face time at the office might be more likely to receive various opportunities, promotions, and the hallway conversations where sometimes business gets conducted," Robinson says, "while remote workers can unintentionally fall behind because proximity bias is actually a major challenge." "Engagement looks very different in a hybrid work environment,” Robinson says. “Since the pandemic, we've asked for representatives from employees with different work schedules to participate in our Better Together engagement groups to make sure we keep all of our employees connected.” Bright Horizons also reimagined their employee value proposition (EVP), which is called Passion, Purpose, and Possibilities. The questions they asked: How do you bring that to life in a hybrid workforce? What is the contract? How do we look at EVP through all angles of the various employee schedules that we have available? “When you think about DEI, a hybrid workforce and making that work for all employees, we have to take to step back and think about inclusion,” Robinson says. “It can be a form of exclusion, to only have a mindset of ‘How do we engage if people are physically together?’ The good news is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you can just look at your current engagement offerings and activities and actions that you're taking, look at your talent development strategies, and reconsider those through that new lens of the workforce that you’re supporting.” Employee benefits and employee assistance programs also need to shift with the changing landscape of hybrid work environments. Robinson points to offering a wide range of flexible childcare, elder care, and healthcare benefits to level the playing field for people with varying work schedules and varying degrees of working remotely. “Companies have been in this one-size-fits-all mode when it comes to benefits. We need to take a step back and think of the different personas we have, and what benefits actually align to optimize the various employee experiences.” “There are a lot of folks who are frankly fatigued, and they’re burned out,” says Robinson, referencing the two-year pandemic. “So as DEI professionals and HR talent leaders, we have to make well-being a priority.” One step Bright Horizons took was to relaunch its employee assistance program and a new partnership with Spring Health that offers employees 24/7 support and unlimited access to a life coach and a navigator.–By Jennifer Haupt How Your Culture of Inclusion Benefits the Communities You Serve The American Cancer Society (ACS) is a prime example of an organization with a DEI focus that aligns its internal culture with a campaign to address health disparities among marginalized groups. A big part of this non-profit’s mission is to improve the lives of cancer patients and their families. Thinking about that purpose through the lens of DEI means recognizing and addressing that many communities bear a disproportionate burden of cancer. “We're working very diligently and intentionally to ensure that we’re developing initiatives and interventions that really get at critical issues around access to care, providing education and resources in ways that are culturally appropriate, and just being a presence in diverse and multicultural communities across the country,”said Tawana Thomas-Johnson, SVP and chief diversity officer at ACS, in a fireside chat with Spencer Whitney, digital editor at KQED in San Francisco, about how a culture of inclusion benefits the communities you serve. According to Thomas-Johnson, the challenges she faces are deeply rooted in systemic racism and structural barriers that prevent equal access to health care for all. Addressing that inequity involves recognizing that communities are made up of different groups of people from all walks of life and backgrounds. That means looking at how to adapt interventions and strategies to make sure they are appropriate and relevant for different populations. It also involves developing a workforce of staff and volunteers that's reflective of the communities served. Thomas-Johnson had the opportunity to sit down with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., when she first came to ACS. She asked him how to get into the Black community and help people really understand the importance of cancer screenings. His question to her was: Who can say it to them? Who should the messenger be? A fireside chat on inclusion: moderator Spencer Whitney of KQED and Tawana Thomas-Johnson of The American Cancer Society “One of the things we know is that when you use leaders from within the community, respected individuals, trusted messengers, the message is delivered and received in a way that’s very different than when it’s delivered by someone from outside of the community,” Thomas-Johnson said. She pointed out a shining example: ACS recently trained 2000 members of the Lynx Incorporated, a national African-American professional women’s organization, to serve as community health workers. These women at the height of their profession, who are dedicated to community service, are trusted and respected in communities that ACS typically wouldn't have access to. As a result, they can go into these communities to deliver ACS messaging around prevention and early detection of cancer. Overcoming mistrust is just one piece of the puzzle. The other piece, according to Thomas-Johnson, is around provider education. “Our providers have to do better,” she said. “We've got to educate our clinicians; they’ve got to understand the populations that they're serving. We have to help them be more culturally competent, more sympathetic and empathetic and sensitive to the needs of people from different backgrounds. So, there's a lot that has to happen both at the clinical level with providers, but then also at the community level where you're trying to engender trust.” Whitney asked about the problem of diversifying clinical trials. “The clinical trials piece is about education, both with the community and with the providers,” said Thomas-Johnson. “But it’s also about workforce. The more diverse researchers we have, the more we have a workforce that reflects the population that we’re trying to engage in clinical trials.” ACS has donated about $20 million in grants to medical schools at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and the organization is also placing HBCU interns at the college level in ACS-supported labs across the country. Thomas-Johnson concluded her conversation with Whitney by saying there are many barriers for marginalized communities in getting cancer care and treatment, including access to healthcare in their neighborhoods and transportation to treatment centers in other parts of town. “We're fortunate at the American Cancer Society that we're working in partnership with wonderful organizations,” she said. “We’re also addressing some of the barriers through the policy work that we do with our ACS Cancer Action Network, which is the legislative arm of the American Cancer Society.”–By Jennifer Haupt A Road Map to Creating a More Diverse Future of Work The world of HR is broad: people-and-culture professionals are responsible not just for hiring and firing, but employee engagement, employer brand management, learning and development, coaching, and especially now, retention. In a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference, Zack Nunn, the director of diversity, inclusion and social impact for Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey), talked about some of the key methods for ensuring success of another of HR responsibility: DEI. It is a relatively new area for HR to venture into, he said, but one that is bringing increasing pressure to bear. It is coming not just from internal stakeholders like employees and potential employees, but also government regulators. Efforts in this area will have to be more transparent, and pledges will need to be shown to be more than words. People are also willing to go public when the words don’t match actions. “As you think about the workplace today, diversity and inclusion are the future of your workforce and culture,” Nunn said. Nunn said there are some key elements of HR work, each of which can be instrumental in the success of a DEI program. “What is your talent acquisition plan?” he asked. “How do you differentiate it at different levels–for the entry-level talent, your junior executive, your C-suite level? The strategies will be different, but they need to be cohesive. You need to engage historically excluded groups in each aspect of your talent acquisition strategy.” Job descriptions and messaging also need to be inclusive of a diverse talent pool. “Your messaging on your company website has to be clear so that people know what you s
Attracting Skilled Talent: Ideas for a Competitive Labor Market
BY the Editors July 31, 2022With candidates gaining the upper hand, how can talent acquisition leaders and their companies respond? What innovative techniques can give an employer a competitive advantage? The answers lie in what workers say is most important in choosing employers right now: better compensation, to be sure, but also personalized benefits, an inclusive environment, and a sense of social purpose. Plus: How can technology help recruiters find non-traditional candidates with potential? From Day One gathered experts for a virtual conference in January. Among the highlights: What Makes a Company Attractive to Early-Career Talent Ever since she was a student, Giselle Battley, the global head of early-career talent at the commercial real-estate firm JLL, has been observing the ebbs and flows in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruiting. “As an HBCU student, I saw when we were hot and we were not. The truth is, if you’re going to go out to new sources, it’s a long-term game, it’s not a short thing. You can do more damage by showing up, and never showing up again once you hit your numbers,” she said in a panel discussion on attracting early-career talent, moderated by Shana Lebowitz-Gaynor, a correspondent for Insider who covers career development and workplace culture. As Gen Z has now entered the workforce, and will constitute up to 27% of the workforce by 2025, companies find themselves having to adapt their culture and their pitch to attract new generations. DEI appears to have solidified into an integral value for companies eager to attract early-career talent. “They want their workplace to be inclusion forward,” said Alesandra McLean, head of North American campus and early-career programs at Wayfair. “They want a lot of autonomy, they want to have the possibility to make an impact.” And while the demands of early-career workers have not changed that dramatically in recent years, the attitudes did. “What changed is that you always have to stay on top,” said Battley. “Gen Z is making their demands—and DEI is at the top—and corporations have to meet those.” And these demands are more about attitudes than about specific benefits or management practices. “I don't think we’ve seen change: the real (development) is the agility and flexibility by individuals, but not from jobs as a whole,” said Crystal Lannaman, head of talent acquisition and university relations for the chemicals company BASF. “We created a grid to help decision-makers decide what can be in-person and what can be remote,” she said. “Being able to showcase it eliminates the risk of dividing things between haves and have nots. With the pandemic, people are really starting to assess where they want to be and why, for the greater good.” Speakers on early talent, top row from left: moderator Shana Lebowitz Gaynor of Insider, Giselle Battley of JLL, and Tom Brunskill of Forage. Bottom row: Alexandra McLean of WayFair, Jake Burke of SkillSurvey, and Crystal Lannaman of BASF (Image by From Day One) In addition, more companies have started offering rotational programs, both for college students and for early-career workers. BASF has a talent marketplace where, for example, a chemical engineer who wants to move into business management can take advantage of the program that allows them to test the waters in a real work environment. And while there’s a modicum of accountability, it’s less anxiety-producing than jumping into a completely new role you haven’t done before. “You have to continuously create a new and exciting experience,” said Battley. “It's incumbent on the employer to provide the experience of growth. It's an undervalued or overlooked insight.” A candidate can possess as many notions and skills as they can muster, but often they’re unprepared for the way the interview process unfolds. Wayfair instituted workshops on interview preparedness. “We took a deep look at their recruiting funnel, where we see a big drop-off in the process. Where in our process were people slipping up?” said McLean. “The data was really what led us: we now see a lot of success in students that go through that.” McLean sees skill-building initiatives offered by companies as more relevant than standard on-campus career fairs. Building these skills can curb early-career attrition. “Sixty percent of students said they won’t be at a job for an extended period of time, and 66% said they applied to a role mainly to improve their chances of employment,” said Tom Brunskill, the CEO and co-founder of the learning platform Forage, who observed that the company’s partner employers face a 50% to 70% attrition rate. “Retention has always been a challenge, but why is it difficult?” he pondered. “Fundamentally it comes back to this idea that our education sector is great, but does not set people up for success in terms of career. [Industries can] provide the confidence, sensibility, and so on, to bridge that gap.” In all, employers have to do their part in being upfront with talent. In fact, the data surveyed at SkillSurvey, a talent-intelligence platform, indicated that if a student does not know where they fit in a company from a skill standpoint, it’s going to be a challenge for them to find a real match in that company. There are, for instance, eight competencies that are the most sought after by employers, said Jake Burke, SkillSurvey’s VP of sales. “Students and early talent don't know where they stand because they’ve never been measured on these important things,” said Burke. “The No. 1 required, or preferred, competency is critical thinking. What students are really good at is equity and inclusion, but critical thinking is No. 1. Equity and inclusion is No. 8. So, what companies want is the inverse of where students are. There are these gaps between what students are bringing, or what early career talent and applicants are bringing to the table, and what employers are valuing.” If expectations are clearly set, that’s half of the battle. “Gen Z is very pragmatic, technically nimble and entrepreneurial,” Burke continued. “We have to make sure employers’ expectations match with what was posted in the job post. If you do that well, the retention goes up, disappointment goes down.”—By Angelica Frey How to Expand Your Business Globally, Ethically, and Equitably (Sponsor Spotlight) Expanding digitization of work means companies can access talent anywhere. What often stands in the way are the logistics of global expansion. For every new state, for every new country where a company wants to hire, it has to establish a presence there—legal, tax, HR, operations. So even if a company in Baltimore finds a great engineer in Bucharest, that’s not a hire they can easily make. During From Day One’s conference, I had a one-on-one conversation with Nicole Sahin, CEO and founder of Globalization Partners, which helps companies solve this problem and expand into new states and new countries without setting up their own infrastructure in those jurisdictions. Globalization Partners acts as an employer of record, and growing businesses can hire talent through their platform. Speaking on globalization: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz Esparza, at left, and Nicole Sahin, CEO and founder of Globalization Partners (Image by From Day One) My conversation with Sahin, titled “The Democratization of Opportunity: Bringing the Dreams to the Dreamers,” addressed the effects of expansion and the obligations of companies that do so. “I always found it sad that people had to go to these really expensive communities far away from home,” said Sahin. “Now people can stay in their home community. It’s better for families, it’s better for communities, and it spreads opportunity to everyone everywhere, which is just unbelievably compelling when you think about that on a global scale.” Don’t confuse what Sahin does with offshoring. The goal is not work at a discount, but responsible and ethical employment. “Our business model is not driven by the company’s desire for low-cost talent. It’s driven by the desire for companies to be able to access the best talent they can find, anywhere they can find it, and the elimination of geography as a core feature of that.” Sahin has a unique perspective on what it means to help a wide range of companies hire and retain workers around the world. What it takes varies by country, but what is universal, she said, is the desire to work for a company with an inspiring mission. To that end, people are looking at sites like Glassdoor to get a sense of whether the company walks the talk. With this in mind, expansion can be a means of supporting the local community as much as the business doing the hiring. Communities get access to more jobs, workers get access to better pay. “It’s part of our job to make sure that those employee rights are respected,” she said. Sahin believes the person living in Montana should have the same job opportunities as the one living in Silicon Valley. And with the workforce largely in control of the job market, they’re demanding those opportunities. “Those employees are now saying, ‘I want a global salary. I’m worth as much as your employees in California, and I want to be paid accordingly.’ And if their current employer won’t give them that type of pay increase, they'll switch jobs.” One of her goals is, indeed, to foster pay equity. “The idea is that we would build a global platform that enables companies to hire talent anywhere in the world quickly and easily, while still honoring, importantly, the employment laws in that location and making sure that people get paid the way the law is designed to protect those employees.” Sahin is sympathetic to business leaders who are apprehensive about going global. “We always want people to carry forward our own mission. We want to make sure we hire the right person for the job and that they love and care for our own business the same way we do.” For those on the fence, her advice is to take the leap. “It’s not easy to navigate, but it’s totally possible to navigate. And the benefits are so tremendous, of working with a truly diverse workforce that inherently comes along with building a more global team.”—By Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza Building an Inclusive Culture That Keeps People on Board–and Attracts Their Peers Today’s workforce is characterized by record departures, a demand for flexible work policies, and an understanding that inclusive company cultures are a priority, driving organizations to build effective strategies that address these needs to keep employees and attract new talent. Judith Harrison is the EVP of global DEI at Weber Shandwick, a leading communications firm. In a fireside chat moderated by Sam Blum, a reporter at HR Brew, Harrison shared how her company evolved its internal strategies in response to the changing times. According to Harrison, building policies that encourage employees to stay with the company should be thought of not just from a policy perspective, but from a strategic one, too. “In the past, we had the luxury of having a little more focus on getting work done,” she said. “We worked hard to get a great culture, but we had a tremendous focus on work and not enough on work-life balance, which is huge now. We want to make sure we are giving people the support they need.” Weber Shandwick, which operated with a 100% remote workforce during the pandemic, is moving toward a hybrid model, the goal being “work-life balance and flexibility.” Harrison acknowledged some key differences, however, when it comes to a significant demographic of the workforce: Gen Z and Millennials. “There is a sense of social responsibility and idealism that was not seen in previous generations as it relates to work,” she said. “In the past, there was no expectation that an organization would share employees’ social values or that it would stand for a particular mission or objective, but these things have changed, and Weber is looking to change with them.” In addition, many employees desire more opportunities to stay connected with one another. “People are being hired through Zoom and managing teams they’ve never met face to face. We’ve lost something in the way we connect,” she said. “What people are asking us for is to be proactive in ways to connect with one another. They want a sense of culture and community more than ever. They want more of an ability to build and steer their career–they want more agency.” This led the company to move away from a dated evaluation model and begin talking about processes that cultivated careers more organically. The firm developed a “Talent Compass” to facilitate and foster customized career building, and created Juice, a program intended to address work-life balance through discounts on, and access to, premium services related to health, nutrition, fitness, and mindfulness, enabling employees to participate in multiple activities to help bring them back to a balanced sense of self for work. Judith Harrison, the EVP of global DEI at Weber Shandwick (Photo courtesy of Weber Shandwick) The firm found that employees were initially reluctant to separate themselves from work due to uncertainty around job security that the pandemic introduced, on top of balancing external situations regarding children, family, and housing. But it didn’t mean they weren’t experiencing growing levels of overwork as a result of the evaporated lines dividing work life and personal life. Harrison highlighted how leadership made it clear that it was okay to “not be okay,” citing herself as an example. “There have been times with all of the things going on the news and social unrest that I have been exhausted,” she said. “We really want to be sure that they understand that it’s okay to not be okay.” When it comes to her own career, Judith shared how she got her start working in public relations. Throughout her experience in the space, she recognized glaring issues surrounding DEI that existed across the industry, not just at one company. People were not conscious about issues regarding diversity, she said, pointing to an example of a company she worked at where the HR manager decorated her office with a large Confederate flag. After some time, she observed that things were getting better, but that co-workers were not actively working on specific areas to improve diversity. This realization inspired her to begin steering her career toward a role that equipped her to take action as it related to advancing DEI in the workplace. The last two years, marked by significant political and civil unrest, have shed light on inequality and racism in the workplace, as well. In response, many corporations publicly pledged to enact policies to support diversity and inclusion. But when it comes to efficacy of newfound policies, Harrison asserted that companies could do better, mentioning how many organizations talk about the necessity of DEI, but fall flat when it came to taking action. “At Weber Shandwick, we’re working to bake that into everything we do,” she said. “DEI is not HR’s job. It’s not the leadership’s job. It is everybody’s job. We want to inculcate that as part of the culture. We want to make sure that people feel supported and heard, especially people from marginalized backgrounds, who are maybe having an even more difficult time feeling seen and heard in an environment where you’'re not even seeing people in person.” She shared the steps that her company has taken in the past couple of years aiming to further progress in DEI. The breadth of conversation and action around social issues like racism and mental health has expanded tremendously, with the company hosting regular conversations where employees are free to openly share their thoughts and personal experiences. The organization also launched four business resource groups (BRGs), the name being a distinction from employee resource groups (ERGs), she said, to indicate that the groups are aligned with business objectives. In addition, DEI education was introduced to employees, with biweekly classes dedicated to exploring and understanding the Black experience in America. “This is what helps people feel super connected to one another,” she said. “It creates this level of trust that I don’t think I’ve ever seen.”—By Tania Rahman
How Employee Feedback Can Bridge the DEI Gap
BY the Editors May 18, 2022There’s a yawning gap between companies’ aspirations when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and how their employees expect they will actually perform. That’s the takeaway from a survey of more than 2,000 HR professionals conducted in late 2021 by Momentive, the maker of SurveyMonkey. Nearly nine in 10 respondents said their organizations had made DEI commitments over the prior 18 months, but only 20% expressed confidence that their companies would achieve those DEI goals. The gulf suggests that at many companies, employees doubt either the sincerity or capacity of their organizations to meet their commitments. That suggests a culture problem. Antoine Andrews, chief diversity and social-impact officer at Momentive, calls it a “confidence gap.” At From Day One’s March conference in Chicago, Andrews said the disparity could speak to a serious issue in the way employees at those organizations think about their jobs, and about how serious their employers are about the values they espouse. “What does it look like for your employees to have that [skeptical] lived experience around the commitments you’ve made?” Andrews asked. When combined with another Momentive statistic—that nearly 80% of workers say it’s important that their companies prioritize DEI—Andrews said companies have a powerful incentive both to ensure that they follow through on their DEI commitments, and that they work with their employees to bring them to life. That last piece is especially important, said Andrews, but can prove elusive. DEI conversations can be delicate, which means its especially important to keep close tabs on employee sentiment and experience, to ensure that the organization’s efforts are on-track and having the intended effect. “That feedback is a gift,” Andrews said. Given the sensitivity of the subject, as well as the value of frequent communication with a broad range of staff members, companies can benefit from working with an external partner such as Momentive, said Andrews. “You have to make sure you ask the questions in a way that provides some sensitivity and some nuance.” Even more important than asking the right questions, said Andrews, is that leaders show that they’re taking the feedback seriously. “Make sure you listen,” he said. “Once you get that information, you’ve got to learn about what you've been doing, and how you've been showing up for your employees.” The final step for companies is to translate that employee insight into action by refining their DEI efforts based on the feedback they’ve gathered. That’s the trickiest part, according to Andrews, and its success depends on how well companies have handled the asking and listening phases. “That feedback is a gift,” Andrews said. “But your employees say, ‘If I’m giving you that information, I need you to do something with it.’” Editor's note: From Day One thanks the sponsor of this thought-leadership spotlight, Momentive, an AI-powered, experience-management platform.
Peer Coaching: Unleashing the Potential for Better Performance
BY the Editors April 30, 2021Did you put employee career development on the back burner during the pandemic? What will happen to coaching and training in the new normal of hybrid work environments? Numly, a company dedicated to improving employee engagement through peer coaching, offers an innovative SaaS solution to those challenges by pairing coworkers as coaches and learners, based on self and organizational assessment of critical skills. From Day One spoke with Numly’s founder and CEO, Madhukar Govindaraju, about the concept of peer coaching, how it works in practice, and the benefits it can bring to employees and businesses. Excerpts: Why aren’t corporate managers devoting more time to coaching and developing the skills of their employees? Employees always complain, whether the complaint is official or during water-cooler conversations, that their managers are not supporting them in the area of career growth. There are two reasons for it. One is that the managers are not really sure where to start, what skills to work on, and how to work with the teams to really help them grow–which means they don't have a strong coaching culture within the companies. The second reason is that the HR leaders and organizational-design experts at all the big universities have been talking since the 1990s about flattening the organization. Over time, organizations have actually become flat. Now you don't have enough managers–less than 15% in every group of 100 people. You can't expect them to have enough time for coaching. So people aren’t getting the support internally–and meanwhile the culture has become one of all work, work, work. Have the pandemic and remote work made the situation more critical? What’s happened is that the need for skills that we thought were critical before the pandemic is expanding today at a much faster rate. Every company is feeling the same pressure. They need to put the focus back on reskilling and upskilling their teams. Gartner released the results of a survey of HR leaders’ priorities for 2021, and the No. 1 priority was “building critical skills and competencies.” Critical skills are not just hard skills. For a software engineer, for example, programming is a hard skill. But for a person becoming a leader, you must have a lot of soft skills, including written and oral communication, and leadership skills. With everybody working from home today, you need a program to develop skills like time management and working together from a position of trust. How can corporate leaders figure out specifically what skills are needed–and in which roles? Every CEO wants to address the skills gap. But no one knows what the gap is. When you ask an HR leader, “Hey, tell us the three areas where you have a gap,” their immediate reaction is, “We sort of know; we have a hunch,” but there is no quantified view or detail to actually bring that together. At Numly, we measure and quantify the skills gap through self-assessment and coach evaluations and help organizations get started on a peer coaching program that spans the course of three to six months, so we can demonstrate progression on the skills. And it’s not just a set of five skills or ten skills–we have a very deep database of hundreds of soft and hard skills that we can help them build across. Numly CEO Madhukar Govindaraju (Photo courtesy of Numly) How did you catalog what skills are needed–and for what roles? We funded research to gather data from HR professionals. And we asked them what skills are important for your career growth. We interviewed over 18,000 professionals worldwide, from different career stages and different industries: high tech, retail, education, insurance, pharma, automotive and manufacturing. The sum total of that mega-research effort is our crown jewel: the ground-truth data sets that we have. We actually have a set of over 350 skills, but when we took out anomalies and looked at what skills really matter, we brought it down to about 185 skills. How is peer coaching different from traditional executive-coaching programs with external and expert coaches? What we mean by peer coaching is literally a coaching network within your company. When people use the term “coaching,” they tend to think about bringing in external experts. That's still valid. But for most companies, that's a very expensive effort. And most companies do that with only the top 8% of the executives and senior leaders, which doesn’t benefit the bottom 92% of your organization. What we’re trying to do is pivot it back to the critical mass of the entire organization and develop a strong bench or a very resilient organization with peer coaching. How does peer coaching work between the coach and learner? The key definition of peer coaching is that it’s about two individuals within the company. They reflect on current practices, what's happening, and what the challenges are. They refine and share ideas. And eventually they’re solving problems. It could be something like, “Hey, my manager is not helping me,” or “What do I need to do to get a promotion?” You develop a trusted connection between the two. That's the first step. And it’s a private conversation. All the conversations that the platform will guide between a coach and learner would be entirely private. The idea is to create a safe environment where a coach and a learner can openly discuss issues, without the learner having any kind of fear that something they say might lead back to HR. It's almost like my conversation with my physician, whom I’ve been seeing for over 15 years at Stanford. When I go there, I say, “Here's my problem, what do I do? Please give me a solution.” Now, if that conversation came back to my manager at work, or my HR team at work, and there's no privacy, I wouldn’t be opening up to problems with my physician. We want to bring in privacy to enable trust. Trust enables us to connect and share knowledge with each other. How do you match the peers for a peer coaching partnership? We have algorithmic ways to identify coaches according to their rating on a set of skills. Companies can bring in their managers and other talent into the system. Then once you identify the coaches and learners, we put them together with a set of skills to be learned, a coaching program. You can pick different sets of skills for different audiences. And we give our customers a dashboard of analytics showing the distribution of where the skills are and where the gaps are. In these one-on-one coaching situations, what’s in it for the employees doing the coaching? Everybody in the company wants to be a Leader, but the first skill you want to master before you become a leader is how to be a coach. Coaching helps to develop leadership skills. That’s a big thing: As humans, we want to grow, we want to feel that we are contributing, that we are impacting others. It also helps coaches to expand their network. Today, what leaders typically do is mentoring programs, say connecting a VP to a Senior VP, but the networking connection could be superficial. In contrast, we’re connecting for skills and development, within and across teams. Those lateral network connections strengthen your organization and are a lot more powerful compared to external coaching. So the investment that companies make with our tool is not a one-time thing, it's an ongoing process. What are some of the other benefits? It also drives employee engagement. In a peer-coaching platform, skills development and engagement become natural and foundational. Right now companies are pivoting from the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion, to one of inclusion and belonging. You need to create a sense of belonging in the employee experience. And we’re not just connecting them, we're helping them with developing the skills they need, which is a much better employee value proposition (EVP). We empower employees to help each other. What better way to motivate and energize your team than to say, "Hey, we want you to help us get there." Can it help with the burnout factor, which seems to be widespread? Yes, and that’s what every company is facing. In an article I recently wrote for Forbes, I said that work-from-home burnout is real. Whether it is Zoom fatigue or because everybody's scrambling throughout the day, work-life balance has evaporated because there's nothing that differentiates work from life. Employee well-being is becoming a big issue. Of course, there are tools that make your life easier and more productive, which is where Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex and Slack are going. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is recognizing there is a role for the manager to help with work-from-home burnout by understanding employee problems and issues. Peer coaching can help because it is highly personalized and contextual, rather than being an out-of-the-box solution. These programs have been designed to bring people together in a guided, customizable process so that they can engage and feel connected again–and not just to each other, but to the company as well. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story: Numly.
Does Your Team Have a Healthy Climate? Here's How to Tell
BY the Editors April 15, 2021Businesses today focus a lot of attention on their overall corporate culture, yet research has shown that the most influential environment in a workplace is at the team level. SSCA, an executive-leadership consulting firm, puts a particular emphasis on what it calls the “climate” among workplace groups. From Day One spoke with Stephanie Tran, a partner and executive coach at the firm, about the concept of climate, the behavioral science behind it, and the practical ways in which leaders can promote a healthy workplace. Excerpts: How is climate different from culture, and who creates the climate? If we want to observe culture, we would walk into an organization and see how they make decisions, see how they operate, and we would able to define their culture. Climate is a subset of culture, a smaller component within the organization that's directly controlled or created by the leader you report to. If we want to understand the climate that's created by the leader, we would interview the team and ask, “How does it feel to work for him or her? Describe the environment and what a meeting looks like.” Then we would get at the climate. I like to compare it to arriving in Guam, where I spent three years. Getting off the plane, what do you feel right away? You feel the heat wave, you feel the humidity. In a workplace, you can just walk into a meeting room and understand the climate. Is it a fear-based climate? Is it a climate that actually nourishes people to create psychological safety–people challenging one another in a healthy way? From the research that’s been done, what are the elements that create a climate? There are six components. One is all about the perception that we don't have rules that are unnecessary. We don't have to jump through hoops to get our job done. We’re empowered and enabled in a way that we feel that we can take risks. Therefore, we take full responsibility for our role, which is the second component of climate. We feel we can own our job and not have to check in with our boss all the time. But we know when to do it–we understand our guardrails. Third, we have a high standard on our team, we push for excellence, and there is a continuation of growth on our team. Fourth, we get rewarded, acknowledged, appreciated, and encouraged for doing a good job. We feel supported; our leader has our back. Fifth, we understand the big picture. We know the vision, the purpose of the organization, and how that links to our department or function and how that links directly to our role. We have clarity about what is expected. And finally, we have great pride and ownership of the team that we are part of. We're better as a whole. We have a team identity, we have trust. Stephanie Tran, a partner and executive coach at SSCA (Photo courtesy of SSCA) Did your company invent this concept? That would be taking too much credit. It actually was from two gentlemen, Litwin and Stringer, who were students of the psychologist David McClelland, one of the key contributors to the understanding of human motivation. We teach a ton around human motivation, because a large component of leadership is about motivating people. If we know what motivates people, we as leaders create conditions where people will flourish. Litwin and Stringer came up with this concept of climate, which we teach almost daily in our coaching practice. How has this era of pandemic and remote work affected workforce climates? We get less clarity within our jobs and less alignment and connection points with peers or other departments, the kind of thing that happens organically when we're in a common space. We’ve lost the drive-by conversations where we just stop by someone's desk or cubicle to check in to see how life is and then, “By the way, what are you working on? And can I get some information on this?” The research also says that we're not losing connection with our “A” players, meaning relationships we've already built over time. We naturally reach out to them even in a virtual setting, to check in. Yet it's the “B” players or the relationships where we don't have a strong connection–it takes more effort to reach out to those. What can leaders do about recreating a positive climate in a remote or hybrid work situation? Clarity is one of the key components of climate. As a leader, are you being crystal clear about what the expectations are? Are you creating opportunities for people to speak to you? The reward component of climate is not about monetary rewards, it's about acknowledgement, appreciation and recognition. It is about holding space, whether virtually or live, for people to feel seen, heard and valued, given the challenges of today. So leaders need to spend time asking how people are doing, not in a quick transactional way, but letting people share the humanity of the change that we're all experiencing from this global pandemic. As a leader, expressing vulnerability and being authentic helps your people not have to compartmentalize their life. And the best way to do that is to model it. How does diversity fit into the concept of a healthy climate? The beauty of having diverse teams is that we have multiple angles, multiple perspectives, different experiences at play. Therefore, we're solving problems holistically, looking at angles that you wouldn't see by yourself. The challenge with diversity and inclusion is truly embracing the diversity–being able to park your own perceptions and make space for other perceptions to exist and truly be inclusive of that. It’s difficult to achieve, because leaders get rewarded and promoted for having an opinion, for stating an opinion, for having some conviction around their opinion. And then you get to a level where, oh, I have to actually embrace others’ thinking and entertain it in a way that maybe their ideas are better than mine. You have to be truly self-aware in order to act upon that–and not treat diversity and inclusion as just buzzwords. How does the arrival of so many technological tools, and wholesale digital transformation, effect the stability of a workplace climate? Technology is meant to be utilized as a tool to enable you to do your job. It's never, in my opinion, the strategy. I think technology can get in the way if we're not good at having it enable us, to help us work from anywhere, anytime. Technology actually inhibits climate if it’s not used to best effect. For example, some clients of ours don't turn on the camera when they’re on Zoom. So they’re inhibiting us from connecting as humans, face to face, which isn't ideal. Humans are meant for social interaction with one another. If we discount the importance of that connection, it will hurt the team dynamics. In fact, can the use of technology sometimes create more workplace friction and frustration? What is the terminology–keyboard warrior? If you think that in hiding behind a keyboard, you're not accountable for your behavior, you're wrong. People will still formulate an opinion about you, whether it's virtual or live. But I think it's even more pertinent that you manage that in a digital setting, where you need to be super-accountable, to make more effort to connect and bond with people, versus just the hit-and-run. I personally have to stop myself too. It's just too easy. Say you're going to the doctor's office or you're picking up your kids. You might want to check your email for five minutes and you want to just type up something on your phone to respond so you can check that off your list. But if your goal is to connect and relate to the person who's writing to you, you probably don't want to spend just five minutes. You probably want to be more thoughtful. Because at the end of the day, people don't follow organizations, they follow people. In terms of the recognition aspect of climate, you talk about the platinum rule. How does that work? Recognition for you might not be the same for me. The best way to know is to ask. On a team, I might say, Lisa, what's your favorite compliment? What is it about your job you enjoy most? What would you improve? I want to understand that, so that when I see an opportunity to appreciate you and encourage you, I would do what you would prefer. If the golden rule is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the platinum rule is to do unto others as they would have it done unto them. You might like public recognition, for example, while others like private recognition. They might appreciate you just spending time with them, developing or coaching them. OK, to put your suggestion into action, what compliment would you most like? I've been fortunate to receive some wonderful compliments in my life–and I think that's what keeps me going and makes me love my job so much more. It would be somewhere along the lines of, “You've made a difference in my life.” When I hear those words, I’m like, “OK, I'll work tirelessly another 40 years for that.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story: SSCA.
At Tax Time, a Few Helpful Tips for Your Employees
BY the Editors April 15, 2021Taxpayers got good news last month when the Internal Revenue Service announced that the deadline for filing their 2020 returns would be pushed back a month, to May 17. While estimated taxes are still due on April 15, the later filing deadline gives taxpayers more time to adjust to the disruptions of the pandemic–as well as consider the impact of changes in the tax laws. What should they be thinking about? For some tax tips, From Day One consulted with Moses Balian, HR Consulting Manager for Justworks, the payroll and benefits platform. His suggestions: What’s the situation with unemployment benefits, based on the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief legislation? The first big chunk of unemployment benefits, $10,200, will be excluded from taxation by the federal government. So a lot of money that folks might have been budgeting for their tax bill will be relieved, which is fantastic. This could apply to plenty of employees who were unemployed for parts of 2020 and later went back to the same employer when they were rehired. Millions of people who worked from home might be thinking for the first time about taking the deduction for home-office expenses. What should they know? The home-office deduction is probably the No. 1 most misused tax deduction by individuals–and has the least impact on your overall tax burden for how much trouble it can cause. My general guidance would be not to attempt to take the home office deduction for people who have remained in an employment relationship. If you got laid off and started your own business and started doing freelance work, then by all means, you could write that off on your Schedule C. But for those who remain in a traditional employment relationship, the deduction might not be appropriate and you probably won't have enough deductions across the board to file an itemized return anyway. Unless you’ve been directed by your tax advisor to take the deduction, in the event of an audit, you might be unhappy that you tried to take it. OK, that one’s tricky, but what are some key deductions that individuals might miss or shrug off? A big one is the special charitable deduction. There's an above-the-line, $300 tax deduction that applies at the federal and state level for donations to qualifying charities, even for taxpayers who don’t itemize their deductions and are taking the standard deduction. There's an exhaustive list of tax-exempt organizations on IRS.gov if they want to look. This applies to cash donations made before the end of 2020. What other ones should they keep in mind? There's the perennial option for lowering your tax burden: contributions to a traditional IRA. If your income is low enough, you can qualify for a deductible IRA contribution. That’s always worth consideration. The irony is that folks might not have as much extra money in their bank accounts to save for retirement after the difficult year that they experienced. But if at all possible, any contributions that you can make to your 2020 deductible IRA will lower your tax burden. Moses Balian, HR Consulting Manager for Justworks (Photo courtesy of Justworks) Looking ahead to taxes for 2021, what can people think about doing now? One consideration is the Flexible Spending Account (FSA) for health-care costs, if your employer provides access to one. In some cases, existing balances in FSAs from 2020 can be rolled over into the next year. So you might have some money in your FSA this year that you didn't know was there, that maybe you forgot about. As for open enrollment in 2021, FSAs would normally have been closed already. But the IRS changed that rule because of the pandemic. Workers can make midyear changes in their FSAs, as long as their employer allows it. So if you're looking ahead and your budget allows you to increase your contributions up to the maximum of $2,750 for an individual, that's extra special because, unlike a 401(k) or IRA, the FSA is not subject to taxes for Social Security and Medicare. So that is really a tremendous above-the-line savings if you can swing it. If you don’t think you’ll spend your whole balance on regular check-ups, FSAs can also be used to cover the costs of talk or text therapy, a range of over-the-counter products that can be purchased at a pharmacy or online, and elective eyeware like contact lenses or a new pair of glasses. Let’s talk about tax prep. What should you consider when choosing an accountant or tax firm? I’d say look for value. In my experience, a lot of the independent offices will be more affordable than the higher-tier individualized services that an H&R Block offers. I've had great experiences with independent shops. If you have only W-2 income, you can file yourself and use a self-service, online version of TurboTax or H&R Block, and you'll be in good shape. But a lot of people might have sold investments in 2020, and some services will upcharge you $50 or more for your federal and state return if you have a Form 1099-B, for example. Or if you have rental income. If you have sources of nonwage income or do freelance work, I'd say look for an independent, small shop. In the new era of remote work, it is worth moving to a lower-tax state? If you have a remote-work arrangement that's been extended indefinitely, you should consider moving to an income-tax-free state like Washington, Tennessee and Florida, or even some of the more rural ones, like Wyoming and South Dakota. If you have the freedom of movement, and your employer will support a remote-work arrangement in the state you hope to move to, you can get upwards of a 10% raise just for relocating across state lines. If you’re an employee who gets hired by a company that uses a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) like Justworks, how will your conversation with your accountant be different this year, especially if you make the switch midyear? From a tax-filing perspective, it shouldn’t be different from any other time you’ve changed employers midyear. You’ll still get two W-2s: one from your prior employer, and one from your new employer. The difference is, the W-2 from your new employer will give the name of the PEO as the employer of record as well as the PEO’s EIN. This has to do with the co-employment relationship between PEOs and their customers. Rest assured, it doesn’t change how you, as an employee, are taxed in any way. Just don’t wait to file your taxes because you’re still waiting for your employer to send you your W-2! If they use a PEO, it’ll come from the PEO. (Fun fact: Employees who move from one employer to another that both use the same PEO will only get one W-2!) Let’s talk about benefits for a moment. What are some corporate benefits that people should consider taking advantage of, especially now? The first is short-term disability insurance (STD). A lot of employers provide employer-paid coverage, but if they don’t, they usually will offer the opportunity for employees to enroll. It's not free, but it is not expensive–usually anywhere between $20 and $40 a month. But it's just such an incredible safety net. (A few states do have statutory disability coverage, like in California, that’s on par with most private policies. But for most American workers, STD is well worth it!) As Covid reminds us, you can be a perfectly healthy individual and you just don't know when you might be afflicted by something you never could have anticipated. So having a short-term disability insurance in the event you're unable to work due to illness or injury is really crucial, especially for anyone who has a family. Another one is the Health Savings Account (HSA), which is very similar to an FSA in that contributions are exempt from income tax as well as Social Security and Medicare. However, the HSA is only compatible with a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), so employees usually look at them and say, ‘Oh my god, a $5,000 deductible. No way!’” And they don't give it a second thought, but what they often don't realize is that these plans are very special, because they are the only ones that can be paired with an HSA, which have very high contribution limits–almost $4,000 for individuals. And when the deductible is higher, the premiums are typically going to be much, much lower. When you take advantage of an HDHP, the money you would have been spending on premiums for a lower-deductible plan can be contributed to your HSA and invested like a retirement account. Investment gains are tax-free, as long as the funds are used on qualifying medical expenses. And HSA balances roll over indefinitely. Don’t worry about accruing too high of a balance, because funds can be withdrawn penalty-free for any reason once you turn 65. Any other kinds of insurance to keep in mind? Life insurance isn’t fun to talk about, but it’s one of the surest investments you can make in your family’s financial security. If you're young, basic coverage will be a negligible expense. For young parents, especially, it’s a no-brainer. Premiums tend to increase with age, but so might the importance of the cash benefit being available to your family in the event of your untimely passing. We've all probably thought a lot more about death in 2020 than we were used to. To effectively navigate some of these more emotionally triggering ideas, it helps to think pragmatically. We’ve seen how a health crisis can sweep the country. You can be healthy and careful, but that doesn't necessarily protect you. Life insurance is as good of an idea in 2021 as it was in 2019, but maybe people now can be more receptive to just how wise an investment it might be. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, legal or tax advice. If you have any legal or tax questions regarding this content or related issues, then you should consult with your professional legal or tax advisor. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story, Justworks, which offers a resource center with timely tips on running a business.
Developing Leaders in a Growth Economy: Strategies for Now
BY the Editors April 09, 2021As businesses look forward to an economy emerging from the pandemic, a large majority of HR leaders expect their corporate revenues to grow over the next 18 months, according to a new Stewart Leadership survey of more than 300 HR leaders in more than 15 industries in the U.S. With an accompanying growth in demand for skilled labor, the HR executives said their top strategic imperatives will be engaging and retaining employees, building an inclusive culture, and aligning strategic direction and goals. Their top leadership-development priorities will be to promote development conversations and action plans, as well as using virtual tools to develop all levels of leaders. Are business leaders ready to follow through on those goals? While the majority of HR executives in the survey, conducted in partnership with From Day One, felt their company’s leaders were prepared to deliver on their business and people priorities, a notable minority (35%) said their leaders may not be prepared. In a similar vein, respondents were nearly evenly divided about whether their organizations have a leadership-development strategy in place–and only 41% were confident that their current strategy will produce the leaders needed in the next 18 months. In terms of leadership-development investing, the employees getting the largest shares are at the manager and director level, the survey showed. Among the factors holding back more leadership-development solutions, the respondents said, are competing priorities, along with a lack of budget and internal resources. What needs to change, the respondents said: better alignment of strategies and goals, as well as three related factors: engagement, listening, and communication. The results of the survey were the focus of a From Day One webinar. The Survey Participants: The survey included 310 respondents representing more than 15 industries, including health care, professional services, technology, education, finance and government. The participants represented five levels in their organizations, with 80% at the manager level and above. Among generations represented, Gen X was the most numerous, at 55%, with Baby Boomers (23%) and Millennials (21%) in nearly equal proportions, and Gen Z coming in at 1%. Most of the participants work for companies with more than $50 million in revenues, with 17% in the $1 billion-to-$10 billion range, and 6% at more than $10 billion. Daniel Stewart, president of Stewart Leadership, will be exploring his firm's newest survey in a From Day One webinar (Photo courtesy of Stewart Leadership) The Growth Outlook: Like most economists right now, our HR leaders are expecting a boom. Twenty-five percent of participants say they anticipate “significant growth” and another 55% are looking forward to at least some growth; less than 5% anticipate negative growth. Key insights: Senior managers and above were more bullish on growth compared to other respondents; growth expectations were consistent across all generations; and employees at larger companies tended to be the most confident about future business activity, with 88% expecting some growth or significant growth. Top Strategic Imperatives: With expectations of their businesses expanding and calls for diversity, equity and inclusion ringing in their ears, HR leaders said their top five strategic priorities will be to engage and retain employees (19%), build an inclusive culture (18%), align strategic direction and goals (15%), find the right workplace balance between remote work, in-person and hybrid (12%), and upskill managers to lead change and transformation. Key insights: C-suite respondents put a particular emphasis on engaging and retaining employees, while directors and senior managers tend to focus on building an inclusive culture, as do Millennials, for whom it was the top priority. Leadership Development Priorities: When the survey asked participants to choose among several priorities for the near future, 78% of the responses chose one of these four: promote development conversations and action plans (22%), acquire micro learnings and virtual tools for all levels (20%), create cohort development programs for specific audiences (18%), and get back to the basics (17%). Key insights: Respondents put a higher priority on cohort programs vs. targeted ones; all levels of management put an emphasis on promoting development conversations and action plans; and smaller companies tended to focus more than larger ones on getting back to the basics of leadership development. Are Leaders Prepared to Deliver Results? Corporate representatives in the survey said they agree (49%) or strongly agree (16%) that their leaders are prepared to deliver on their business and people-related goals. However, that leaves 35% with leaders who may not be prepared. Key insights: Among generations, Baby Boomers are most optimistic about their corporate leaders, with more than 67% saying leaders are prepared. In terms of company size, the largest companies are most optimistic that their leaders are prepared, vs. 40% of representatives of organizations with revenues of $500 million to $1 billion feeling neutral or pessimistic on the issue. Do They Have a Plan–and Confidence in It? In short, not so much. Forty-seven percent of respondents believe their companies have a leadership-development strategy and plan in place for the next 18 months, which leaves 53% either neutral or believing they don’t have a plan. Put another way, respondents were asked whether they have confidence that their organization’s leadership-development plan will produce the desired leaders in the next 18 months. Only 41% said they were confident about this, leaving 59% neutral or unconfident in their strategy and plan. Who They’re Investing In: Asked where they’re putting the most dollars in leadership development in a range of levels from individual contributors to C-suite executives, respondents said they’re investing the most in managers (28%) and directors (23%) and at much lower levels for vice presidents (10%), senior leaders (11%), and C-suite executives (6%). Key insight: Organizations of all sizes were consistent in this focus on managers and directors. A slide showing results of the survey notes that a minority of participants were confident in their company's leadership-development strategy and plan (Graphic courtesy of Stewart Leadership) Desired Future Leadership Style: By strong margins, participants favored trusting, collaborative, and active-listening approaches to leadership. On a scale from micromanagement (“driving an employee’s work by providing detailed day-to-day directions and guidance”) vs. a more holistic and trusting approach (“supporting employee’s work by providing feedback, recognition and support”), more than 88% supported the latter approach. On another scale, participants were asked whether the leadership style needed to “drive results through a focus on leading functional priorities and goals” or, at the other end of the scale, if leaders should be “influencing results by breaking down silos, collaborating across functions and overcoming obstacles through clever approaches.” The collaborative approach won out, with 76% support, though a significant portion of participants (24%) put an emphasis on goal-setting. On a third scale, participants were asked which was the better approach: “ensuring employees are completing work on time,” or “supporting employees by actively listening to their needs and working together to understand the actions needed to resolve problems.” The latter approach was favored by the vast majority, 84%. The strong sentiment in favor of these desired approaches may be influenced by calls for greater flexibility and empathy at a time of remote work and the disruption of family life. Critical Leadership-development Skills: Participants supported a broad range of skills that will be needed, but some stood out: communication (12%), engaging experience (11%), connection (8%), and inclusion and belonging (8%), all of which showed a pattern of a need to build closer bonds among team members. Another pattern was about the importance of leading change and transitions (8%), developing self and others (8%) and leading culture (5%). Key insights: Responses putting a priority on employee experience and communication was consistent on all levels of management and across all generations. What Prevents Leadership Development? The obstacles appear to be “other priorities” (22%), a lack of sufficient budget (18%), and lack of internal resources (11%), according to participants. Key insights: All generations and representatives of all sizes of organizations identified “other priorities” as the No. 1 issue getting in the way of more leadership development. A significant number of respondents (11%) said there is a “need to assess current needs first,” a point made most often by respondents at the director level or below. The Best Leadership-development Approaches: Developing leaders through projects, assignments and job positions was judged to be the best overall approach to developing leaders. Key insights: This approach was supported consistently at all organization levels and all company sizes. Workshops, webinars and other approaches that can be done virtually were also favored, with Baby Boomers in particular citing virtual workshops as their preferred approach. What Can Be Done Differently: When asked what needs to change in the organization to boost leadership development, 28% of participants said “strategy and goal alignment,” 19% endorsed better engagement, 16% put an emphasis on communication, 14% said teamwork and collaboration, 13% said more listening, and 10% called for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. As workplaces wrestle with remote work, social-justice issues, political unrest, mental-health challenges, and the increase of digitization, organizations will need increasingly strong leadership–and they need to do a candid self-assessment of whether they have an effective plan in place to develop those leaders. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight: Stewart Leadership. You can watch our April webinar exploring the survey here, and please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events.
8 Marks of the Best Employers for Working Parents
BY the Editors December 14, 2020With its lack of mandated support for working parents, the U.S. has a competitive disadvantage–it has trouble keeping talented women in the workforce. An estimated 43% of new mothers leave their jobs within a year of giving birth. And that was before the pandemic created a full-fledged child-care crisis. “What was a leaky bucket is now a waterfall of talent leaving the workforce,” said Katherine Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven, the world’s largest virtual clinic for women’s and family health. For enlightened companies, however, it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, the best employers for working parents, who offer them better benefits and greater flexibility, tend to perform better overall. These companies see 5.5 times more revenue growth, thanks to greater innovation, higher talent retention and increased productivity, according to a comprehensive new survey, “Parents at the Best Workplaces–The Largest-Ever Study of Working Parents,” from Maven and Great Place to Work, an authority on workplace culture. “The results make a strong business case for employers who support working parents,” wrote journalist Lydia Dishman in Fast Company. The report, based on a survey of more than 850,000 employees, including 440,000 parents across 1,244 U.S.-headquartered companies, explores what sets parent-friendly workplaces apart and how they’re responding creatively to the challenges created by the pandemic. Remote work, remote schooling, and the stresses of front-line work have created a crisis of burnout and disengagement in the workplace, but also an opportunity for innovative companies to rise to the occasion. “Employers need real, proven strategies and solutions, and they need them now,” said Ryder. “The best solutions are not perks. Instead, what stands out are real investments in stretched populations that help attract and retain perspectives at all levels of a company.” What do the best companies for working parents have in common? Among the survey’s findings: They Provide More Parental Leave: The companies who ranked as best workplaces for parents typically offered more days of maternal and paternal leave. Working mothers lose nearly a month of income on average when they extend their allotted maternity leave, adding a financial burden to the challenges new parents face. Providing more maternal leave helps close the gender pay gap, since fewer new mothers wind up sacrificing income and dipping into unpaid leave. Working fathers need more management support to take parental time off, since they are using only 30% to 50% of the leave offered. They Offer More Help for Parents Returning to Work: These workplaces offer benefits that support parents when they need it, including telemedicine for pregnant and postpartum families (49% of best workplaces), return-to-work career coaches (48%), and breast-milk shipping for traveling moms (52%). Other benefits include lactation consultants, infant sleep coaches, and parenting coaches. They Give More Support to Parents-to-Be: One in eight U.S. women of childbearing age are affected by infertility, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And it’s expensive when they are, with patients often spending more than $50,000 on treatments. Eighty-one percent of best workplaces for parents are providing reimbursement for fertility treatments. Over the last three years, nearly half have increased their coverage. They Provide More Help With Childcare: Childcare has always been critical for working parents–and it has become even more important during the pandemic as parents have had to navigate changing daycare and school protocols. Among best workplaces for parents, 78% offer support finding childcare, 56% offer backup childcare, and 61% support parent employee resource groups (ERGs). University of Chicago Medicine, for example, has offered employees reimbursement for 15 extra days of backup childcare, on top of the 15 days a year already provided. They Recognize That Supporting Parents Aligns With Their D&I Efforts: Since underrepresented racial groups are more likely to be working parents than White employees, better support for parents helps employers address the different needs of a diverse workforce. For example, the survey indicates that 33% of Black mothers are experience burnout, in comparison to 25% of White mothers. When working parents are free from burnout, they are 20 times more likely to intend to stay at the company. They Engage Non-Parents as Well: Since extra help for parents can create questions of fairness, the best companies create a culture of cooperation between parents and non-parents, especially around issues such as meeting times, deadlines and workloads. They’re Looking for Better Mental-Health Solutions: Many major employers, including Starbucks, Target, McDonald’s and Salesforce, have increased their mental-health offerings in response to the pandemic. PwC recently introduced well-being coaching sessions in which employees can talk with a counselor about whatever may be causing them stress, according to Business Insider. On Maven’s platform, there was a 320% spike in mental-health appointments in the month after the pandemic arrived. They Offer Creative Solutions: Many employers in Corporate America have responded creatively with programs to help parents with issues ranging from remote learning to childcare. Marsh & McLennan, the global insurance giant, built the digital Marsh Kids Korner to offer activities and exercises categorized by age groups up to high school, plus yoga and meditation for kids and adults. The National Basketball Association organized a virtual take-your-child-to-work day, while Allstate Insurance helped parents produce original learning content. To provide more job flexibility, McDonald’s empowered workers to negotiate directly with their managers to accommodate their schedules. Providing these benefits and options for working parents apparently doesn’t just help just the employees with children, but it provides a halo effect throughout these companies. Compared with other workplaces, the best places for working parents get higher grades, vs. other companies, when it comes to perceptions of fair pay, management involvement, benefits and opportunity. Editor's Note: From Day One thanks our sponsor of this story, Maven.