Getting to Diversity: It Takes Data, Persistence, and a Willingness to Talk About It
BY nonatepper March 13, 2019Virtually all the leaders of Corporate America will tell you that diversity is an important goal. But that doesn't mean it's easy to talk about. “If you ever want a meeting to end early in your organization, bring up diversity. Everybody’s done,” quipped Tyronne Stoudemire, vice president of global diversity and inclusion for the Hyatt Corp. Bringing up the topic can be like "touching the third rail," he said, because it's so sensitive. But he added that it needs to be part of the conversation all throughout companies, not just in the human-resources department. “This is not work for the weary, this is not work for the meek. This is for the strong of heart and those who are going to fight for the end, to close the gap,” said Stoudemire, speaking last week on a panel on "Innovation in Inclusive Hiring" at the From Day One conference in Chicago. Underscoring the point, moderator Zoraida Sambolin, an anchor and reporter at Chicago's NBC 5 News, cited a new survey of chief diversity officers in which they said that they still don't get the power and respect they need in order to succeed in their mission. “It isn’t just the title or the role, you’re talking about influence," said Chad Nico Hiu, national director of diversity and inclusion for the YMCA. "Throwing someone in a room and saying, ‘Oh, you’re the chief diversity officer, go be a chief and be diverse,' it just doesn’t work that way.” Change has to come from procedural and structural innovations, which means that diversity has to be part of almost every conversation about a company or organization's future, the panelists asserted. “If it’s going to be something that you’re going to tackle, it can’t just be the conversation about how we get to be more diverse. It literally has to pervade everything that you’re doing,” said Sayar Lonial, executive director of marketing and communications at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Zoraida Sambolin, left, an anchor and reporter at NBC, moderated the discussion NYU Tandon's incoming class was 43% female this year, about twice the percentage of typical engineering schools, thanks to energetic recruiting and efforts to make young women feel welcome on campus. For both businesses and schools, the diversity effort can start when future students or workers are young. “We need to focus on breaking down all the barriers, and there’s certainly large barriers among African-American and Latino communities in engineering,” Lonial said. “If they don’t have the skill set, we want to create K-12 STEM programs so they can make the decision to go into STEM, as opposed to having that decision made for them by a public-school system that doesn’t support it.” Rather than take a subjective approach to diversity, companies can use technology to measure, implement and scale up. “Think of tech as simply a system that helps you say like, ‘OK, what are the data, what does that say my organization should do, how does that put a process in place?” said Lauren Ryan, vice president of new products at Greenhouse Software, which makes talent-acquisition software. Ryan added that, while analyzing data to identify hiring gaps is a good strategy for C-suite executives, those on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder shouldn’t wait for a CEO to take up the cause. Hiring managers should build a diverse pipeline by seeking out applicants with unique perspectives, even if their inboxes are already flooded with resumes, she said. “Then you can kind of prove that it works and start to get buy-in for building something more holistic,” Ryan said. Hyatt launched a program about three years ago called “Project Workforce 2025,” an initiative that outlines how the hotel chain will reach gender parity in terms of hires, promotions and exits over the next six years, Stoudemire said. The company championed the program after analyzing employee data and realizing that, while Hyatt was hiring women of color at a much faster rate than white men, those women were also leaving the company sooner. The problem? A lack of promotions among women of color. In an assessment of organizations in general, Hiu pointed out that hierarchical groups can be exclusionary merely by their structure. “The structure that starts at the top has systemic challenges: when meetings are held, how meetings are held, what is the agenda, who moderates them and where, and what’s the goal. We all love to meet just to meet, but that’s probably not going to work if there’s not the crucial conversations that need to happen,” he said. Edelman's Tamara Snyder offered highlights from the latest Edelman Trust Barometer “Organizations that really want to do this understand [that] this is not just the nice thing to do. There’s a business imperative,” said Stoudemire. “We gotta figure it out, so we have to engage everybody.” The YMCA emphasizes its commitment to diversity with the phrase, "For All," but not everyone understands the benefits right away, said Hiu. “I was leading a training [session] once and a 20-year-old program director stood up in the middle and challenged me and said, ‘For All, for what? So your pictures look diverse and pretty? What is the point?’ My sort of stumbling response was so that everyone can feel welcome," he said, asserting that organizations need to provide common ground because their members may differ in gender, ethnicity, politics, faith, and other ways. In an earlier presentation, Tamara Snyder, executive vice president of employee experience at Edelman, said that 78% of the more than 33,000 global respondents in Edelman’s annual “Trust Barometer” survey this year agreed that how a company treats its employees is one of the best indicators of its trustworthiness. And trust matters. The vast majority of respondents agreed that, while a company's good reputation may get them to try a product, unless they trust the company, they will stop shopping the firm. “The bottom line is, when employees talk about the company, the world listens,” said Snyder. Nona Tepper is a freelance journalist based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, MarketWatch, Crain’s Chicago Business and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter here.
Do You Have a Healthy Workplace? It Matters in More Ways Than You Might Think
BY nonatepper March 12, 2019A healthy workplace today doesn't just mean a physically safe place, with proper ventilation and fire escapes. The concept has steadily evolved into a much broader idea of employee wellness, including such issues as mental health, sexual harassment, office conflicts, work-life balance and much more. When companies take an enlightened approach to a healthy work environment, it's not just employees who benefit. The companies do too, because they have a stronger hand in recruiting and retaining good workers, as well as helping them be more productive, said a panel of experts last week at the From Day One conference in Chicago, moderated by John Pletz, who covers technology for Crain's Chicago Business. One of the hardest things for workers to deal with is change—and there's a lot of it going around these days. GE Capital, the financial-services arm of General Electric, has gone through drastic restructuring since the financial crisis of a decade ago. “We had to train our leaders to have one-on-one conversations about feelings, which in financial services doesn’t happen,” said Rohini Shankar, senior VP of GE Capital Industrial Finance. “We’ve been going through such a tough time, but because leaders care, employees feel that they are valued. They’re willing to stay and go the extra mile. That translates into business results.” Allstate's Harris spoke about the challenges of talking about mental health in the workplace For GE Capital, the whole dynamic of the business was upended. “When you’re going through a business struggle, when the mood of the business is no longer held by the momentum of the growth of the business, how do we retain employees to make sure the work gets done, and to go on this journey?" GE Capital's leaders asked themselves these questions, Shankar said. Among other things, the company decided to create a feedback system so employees could respond to management's announcements of new developments. When layoffs were going to occur, the company told employees up to a year in advance, so they could prepare emotionally and financially, and contracted with an outside agency to help them find new positions, she said. One of the reasons that companies need to take increasing responsibility for worker health and happiness is that many people don't have the support systems earlier generations had. “We used to rely on families and churches and communities. We find that those aren’t supporting them—and organizations are feeling the pain of employees,” said Kenneth Matos, leader of people science at Culture Amp, an employee-engagement firm. “They’re breaking down physically, mentally, financially. So [companies are] getting ahead of some of these issues and trying to make for more sustainable and enduring employees.” Sensing that employees want more community involvement, the leaders of Quantum Health, a company that helps employees navigate the health-care system, sought to build on that sentiment. "One of the things I learned was how many people join us because they see our community awareness and how many partnerships we have, which we treat as a benefit," said Tony Callander, senior vice president of human resources. "We support a lot of different groups, but didn’t realize what a great driver of talent that was. So we shifted our recruiting efforts to community involvement, being more available, being there, taking resumes, taking applications at events." Rachel Ernst, VP of employee success at Reflektive Companies that trust employees with more information, rather than being overcautiously reticent, are likely to foster more trust in return, the experts said. For example, if a firm implements a policy that allows employees to work from home, it should explain why it's doing that and how it will benefit various workers—and allow them to voice their opinions about it. “When there isn’t trust, you spend more time and effort on control systems,” said Matos. “All the layers that slow down your business, that drive everyone out the door, that can create complications.” Getting employees to speak up about painful issues isn't easy. Matos said companies should start the process by polling employees on small, actionable issues and then reacting to the feedback. “The thing that can go wrong is that they’re going to go into a room of people who’ve felt their voice has been silenced for years and expect suddenly to get them to be talkative,” Matos said. Mental health is one of those issues that many people dread to talk about, especially in a work environment. Christy Harris, the Allstate insurance company's vice president of talent management, benefits and inclusive diversity, said she was talking with a friend recently who shared that she had suffered from depression and had attempted suicide. Her friend’s willingness to open up about her mental-health struggles inspired Harris to take a step in favor of more openness on the issue. After “a little bit of perseverance” getting the idea through senior management, Harris said that last year, on World Suicide Prevention Day, Allstate screened a video of employees who had been affected by suicide talking about their experiences, as well as an expert who outlined warning signs and support services. “We weren’t sure how it was going to be received and we were really sort of nervous about the reception of it,” Harris said. “But I’ll tell you the number of emails I got thanking us for being bold and being courageous and leading with this example really gave us momentum to really bring those issues out in the open.” Employers need to recognize when certain jobs are more than typically stressful. At Quantum Health, many workers are advocates for people undergoing health problems, which can be stressful for Quantum's people as well. "Our mission is built on caring for people," Callander said, "and how do we care for people who are on the other side of the phone and are our employees?” One of the biggest drivers of employee well-being is hope for the future, a sense among employees that they're going places with the company. Lori Healy, CEO of Chicago's Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA), noted that retaining young people is a challenge for the public organization since older employees “love their job so much, the benefits are fantastic, nobody ever wants to leave.” Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO of BetterUp As a way to attract and retain young talent, MPEA has instituted a new maternity policy for growing families, which included installing Mamava lactation rooms "all over" its McCormick Place convention hall. Among other retention-oriented benefits, the MPEA started reimbursing employees up to $10,000 per year to complete their college or master’s degree, she said. “Our finance department, which is 11 people, ten of them have used that tuition-reimbursement program and we have kept every single person in there. It is one white male and everybody else is diverse,” Healy said. “It’s been a great way to encourage people’s education and keep them as employees of the organization. It’s been really incredibly fulfilling.” In earlier keynote presentations, Rachel Ernst, VP of employee success at Reflektive, a people-management platform, spoke about how to manage gender pay equity through the employee lifecycle, and Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO of BetterUp, a company that integrates behavioral science and employee coaching, addressed the importance of a sense of purpose in the workplace. Nona Tepper is a freelance journalist based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, MarketWatch, Crain’s Chicago Business and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter here.