Why Quick Fixes Aren’t Enough to Create Real Diversity
BY rachelsandler April 16, 2019In recent years, Corporate America has made increasing use of two words: diversity and inclusion. Both internally and in public, businesses have pledged to increase and retain the proportion of women and minorities in their leadership ranks. Still, progress has been slow. Major gaps still persist, notably in tech-driven industries. Part of the reason is that human behavior can be hard to change. For example, nearly three-quarters of executives choose protégés who look just like them, according to a recent survey of 3,200 white-collar workers by the Center for Talent Innovation. What’s becoming clear is that attempts at quick or narrow fixes don’t work. “I think one reason why this has been such a persistent issue is because when companies typically approach it, they treated it like a one-off program where you have a series of trainings and everybody goes back to their workplaces and nobody really pursues things until the next training,” said Phyllis James, the chief diversity and corporate-responsibility officer for MGM Resorts International, who spoke on a panel of experts at the From Day One conference on April 9 in San Francisco, moderated by Katy Steinmetz, San Francisco bureau chief for TIME. More often than not, there’s an urgency among executives to confront the issue, but making real progress calls for “behavior changes that are required every single day from every single leader, so culture becomes the most important thing,” said Michele Nyrop, senior vice president of human resources at Banana Republic and Gap Inc. “The level of accountability required to get that is a long, hard road.” James said she still has to explain to managers why diversity is important, both for business and moral reasons. “I know that we want to think the best of everyone, but everyone does not accept that as a basic premise,” she said. Talking About Systemic Issues Tyler Muse, founder & CEO of Lingo Live, which offers language coaching for multilingual employees, said companies shouldn’t just preach the gospel of D&I, but take time to listen to underrepresented groups talk about political and social issues that may affect them. These topics could include Black Lives Matter, #MeToo or the lack of an adequate pipeline for developing diverse talent. Talking about these larger news stories can create empathy inside the company, Muse said. “If you ignore the bigger picture, if you don’t talk about it as a company, then you’re going to be really limited in fostering that conversation about what diversity and inclusion really look like,” Muse said. “Being open with our data was a big win for us,” said Ernst Using Advanced Sourcing Tools Another technique that companies can use to boost diversity hiring is to use artificial intelligence and other technologies to help, for example in reducing unconscious bias on the part of recruiters. According to Rachel Ernst, vice president of employee success at Reflektive, a people-management company, the single biggest action that increased diversity at her company was using a sourcing tool requiring a certain number of candidates come from underrepresented backgrounds. After starting the practice last year, half of all new hires have been women, she said. Making Inclusion Part of Day-to-day Work Salesforce, the customer-relationship management giant, made equality a core value of the company, said Molly Ford, the company’s director of global equality, who said it’s a “north star” that guides the company when making big decisions. It also helps bring diversity to the daily work lives of Salesforce employees, Ford said. This involves keeping in mind details like having pronoun pins for employees to wear or gender-neutral bathrooms at Salesforce events. But it also involves creating actionable suggestions for employees who want to be an ally to people of diverse backgrounds. If an employee wants to go to a Salesforce-sponsored Diwali Festival, for example, they would need to sign up for training to learn about the cultural significance of wearing a Sari, Ford said. Salesforce also suggests that allies ask people about their journey to equality, listen with empathy, and speak up when they see something wrong, such as harassment or a racist joke. Additionally, managers at Salesforce receive a monthly scorecard with data about hires, attrition and promotions of women and underrepresented minorities. At MGM Resorts, the company’s 80,000 employees participate in an annual diversity-and-inclusion survey that asks questions about daily interactions with colleagues and managers. “It doesn’t matter how many platitudes or slogans companies give lip service to if it’s not really lived in the daily workplace of the organization,” James said. Reflektive, too, uses employee surveys, Ernst said. And it’s important that companies are transparent about the results of those surveys, so employees know their responses are being heard. “Being open with our data was a big win for us,” Ernst said. Similarly, Muse said Lingo Live uses a Slack bot called Allie that sends out questions about inclusion a few times per month. The biggest pattern gleaned from Allie was that employees felt alienated by the fact that there weren’t enough women in leadership. “We got called out for that,” he said. What Didn’t Work Reaching out to diverse employees and asking them for hiring referrals from their professional networks wasn’t successful, said Ford. Salesforce is just too big to follow up effectively with employees who referred someone for an open role. “We honestly felt like we disrespected you a little bit if we tapped your network and then you didn’t feel like it paid off,” Ford said. "The instant you look at a resume, you're biased," said Sloyan Everyone Is Responsible The lack of diversity in some fields, notably tech and finance, is often blamed on the so-called pipeline problem, which holds that companies don’t have enough qualified candidates coming though the educational system and workforce-development programs. Yet to some extent, that’s passing the blame, experts say. Changing recruiting strategy to focus on more geographically diverse areas may help, but companies should also look at employee experience, leadership behavior, and making sure diversity is reflected in marketing materials and product operations, each with their own set of initiatives. “It really has to be treated as a serious business imperative that has all of the complexity and dimensions of other business problems,” James said. “Your D&I team is there to be a catalyst to integrate diversity and inclusion into the core fabric of your culture. They’re not there to do few programs now and then, but achieving meaningful and impactful inclusion is the responsibility of every different part of the organization.” In a presentation following the diversity panel, Tigran Sloyan, CEO of CodeSignal, explained why the hiring process needs to move beyond the resume. CodeSignal produces industry-standard assessments of job applicants so that companies can make data-driven hiring decisions. “The instant you look at a resume, you’re biased. The proxies we use today,” he said, “are getting less reliable all the time.” Rachel Sandler is a freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She covers business, technology, local real-estate development and housing policy. Follow her on Twitter at @rachsandl
Speak up, Employees! Why Companies Need to Foster Feedback
BY rachelsandler April 15, 2019Disagreements inside some of America’s largest tech companies, including Google and Facebook, have made headlines in the past year, bringing up issues of inclusion, social justice and dissatisfaction with workplace culture. But before it gets to that point—and even during times of public turmoil—it’s important for companies to provide an outlet for employees to make themselves heard, according to panelists at the From Day One conference in San Francisco on April 9. What can businesses do to make that happen? Among other things, leaders should show a vulnerable side with employees, said Jack Altman, founder and CEO of Lattice, a people-management company. Leaders should talk about the company’s missteps and solicit employee feedback in earnest, he said. In the long run, it creates a culture where employees aren’t just “screaming into the void” and actually want to contribute their ideas. “I think vulnerability gives employees a sort of slack for the company that leads to forgiveness,” Altman said during the panel, which was titled “How companies can foster bold ideas—and dissenting ones” and was moderated by San Francisco Chronicle tech reporter Melia Russell. While employee-engagement surveys have become commonplace, there’s more that companies can do to encourage employees to speak out. In fact, companies should have multiple ways for people to express their grievances and concerns, said Nancy Vitale, chief human-resources officer at Genentech. Access to Leadership The larger companies get, the more intentional they have to be in creating instances when employees can talk to senior leadership about and bring up issues about the company. Altman said that since his company, Lattice, is housed in one office with less than 100 people, employees naturally interact with senior leadership frequently. In bigger companies, that just isn’t possible. At Genentech, a biotech giant with 14,000 employees in the U.S., groups of about 18 to 20 staffers meet in informal “coffee chats” with top executives, Vitale said. “We create a living-room-style format that’s casual and informal [and] gives people access to senior leadership. No agenda, just Q&A and dialogue.” Rajeev Singh, CEO of Accolade, a health-care benefits advisory firm, said he has begun implementing listening sessions where employees and management have a conversation about what they each need from one other, instead of just talking at one another. The sessions, Singh said, have often turned into emotional interactions. “That has been a profound change in the way our teams interact, which we would not have thought of prior to opening up some of these listening panels,” he said. Executives listen to every piece of feedback and respond, even if they don’t agree. Singh said. The hope is that by being transparent, even when times are tough or there’s tension, executives will be more credible in the long run. “Sometimes it’s a little sticky, but it’s a good kind of sticky,” he said. Once-a-year performance reviews, Singh said, can't keep up with the pace of business GE Digital, a software division of General Electric Co., has a 30-minute, all-hands meeting every other Thursday. The session has no formal agenda, and employees use a digital tool called Slido to submit questions for executives. Employees can also upvote other people’s questions they want answered. “This is something we started doing six months ago to deal with the fact we didn’t have a lot to share and employees assumed that’s because we were hiding things,” said Heather Whiteman, GE Digital’s head of people strategy, analytics, digital learning and HR. “But it gave us the opportunity to say, ‘Just ask.’ In harder times, there’s something to that, to let them know that every other week we’ll be here. ‘Just ask, we’ll answer.’” A Room of Their Own Before going straight to the top, employee-resource groups (ERGs) can be an avenue for employees to share experiences and ideas about company culture. These groups are typically centered around a shared identity, such as a women’s group or a Latinx group. “I think those play a really important role in terms of connection and communication within the organization,” Vitale said. She added that companies should also think about intersectionality when encouraging these groups, since employees have multiple aspects to their identities. An example would be a group specifically for black women, or for LGBTQ women. The most powerful outcome of Genentech’s ERGs, Vitale said, is that representatives from different groups have started meeting to discuss how to best support and be better allies to each other. Speeding up the Feedback Cycle Increasingly, companies are starting to move away from a once-a-year schedule for performance reviews and goal-setting. It’s just too slow, Singh said, and can prevent employees from knowing how they’re doing, and responding to feedback, in a timely way. “We believe that the old mode of annual coaching plans and annual objectives just doesn’t keep pace with the pace of the business,” Singh said. Shane Metcalf of 15Five, a people-management company Altman said that he’s seeing companies begin to implement reviews two or three times per year. “As we’ve made that shift, it’s been really liberating, it’s been fantastic,” Singh said. “People feel like they’re heard and that they’re getting a really clear sense of where they stand.” Another evaluation tool that can be helpful in some cases is the 360-degree performance appraisal. These reviews get feedback from everyone around an employee, including people who work for them, colleagues and supervisors. While labor-intensive, 360-degree reviews can highlight disparities in how employees seem themselves and how managers see them. At GE Digital, Whiteman said, employees consistently ranked themselves lower than their managers did, a disconnect that can be remedied. “It helps someone get a better view of their own skills. And to flip it around, sometimes a manager has no idea how good someone really is,” Whiteman said. In a keynote presentation right after the panel, Shane Metcalf, co-founder of 15Five, talked about how to build a culture of continuous feedback within a company. In 15Five’s system, employees take 15 minutes a week to answer questions, managers take five minutes to read and comment on responses, and feedback travels up the ladder to through all levels of management. Rachel Sandler is a freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She covers business, technology, local real-estate development and housing policy. Follow her on Twitter at @rachsandl