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Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 29, 2024

Where to Start: Making the Workplace Inclusive of Neurodiversity

It’s estimated that 15–20% of the global population is neurodivergent in some way, and growing awareness of diagnoses has people curious. They want to learn more about the term, what it means, and how they can support people who identify that way.Neurodivergence describes so many different experiences, but generally, people who are neurodivergent process information differently than most individuals. This includes people on the autism spectrum, people with learning disabilities, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome.Millette Granville is the VP of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at digital learning platform 2U. She’s seen the appetite in her company and has been pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm. “We have over 200 employees that are actively engaged in our abilities resource network. They were really, truly ready to get started building the community. I was not as prepared for the thirst for knowledge from our people, from leaders, as well as our employees about what exactly we need to do to make sure we are supporting our employees.During From Day One’s February virtual conference on getting to the next stage of diversity and belonging, Granville and her industry colleagues gathered for a panel discussion on neurodiversity in the workplace and how they’re changing their organizations to be more inclusive of neurodiverse needs.Neurodivergence can describe so many different diagnoses, experiences, and needs. It can also be invisible. “Neurodiversity is hidden in plain sight all around us,” said Hal Lanier, client engagement leader at accessible tech company TextHelp. So how does a workplace become inclusive if the needs can be hard to identify?An Inclusive Interview ProcessSome leaders begin with the hiring process. Monica Parodi, VP of talent acquisition at The New York Times, said she’s starting at the beginning, using tools to comb their job descriptions for noninclusive language. They’re also adding details about the hiring process to the company’s career pages so candidates can prepare in advance and avoid uncomfortable surprises.The panelists discussed the topic "How Companies Are Embracing Neurodiversity in Innovative Ways" at From Day One's virtual conferenceOnce candidates get to the interview stage, they’ll see other changes. “We know that the first 30 seconds [of an interview] are really uncomfortable for a lot of people who are neurodivergent. So we take that space and say, ‘we’re going to ask very structured questions to everyone, and we’re going to limit small talk,’” Parodi said. “We’re also making sure panelists understand neurodivergent behaviors and don’t penalize candidates if they don’t make eye contact, if they’re writing questions down, if they’re pausing, or if they’re asking you to repeat questions.”Building a reputation as an employer that is supportive of neurodivergent employees doesn’t happen by accident, she said. “There’s not one single place that you focus on; it’s weaved into every single part of your process in business and brand.”Designing Learning Opportunities with Neurodivergence in MindLearning and skill development programs often designed for the neurotypical employee are also getting a revision. Joshua Crafford is the VP of leadership learning and development at financial institution Synchrony. He said that his experience as a person with learning disabilities shapes his work. Crafford uses his personal point of view to design better learning experiences, often asking himself, “how would I have to learn the material?”For instance, Crafford talks to his audience to understand their learning styles, he teaches concepts, not just rote memorization. “It’s designed to be simplified. It’s built for all learners, divergent and neurotypical. We make sure that people can interact with the information through discussions and gain others’ perspectives.”At aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman, VP of talent management Jackie Reisner considers use cases when creating and evaluating skill development and training programs. Who’s going to be using it? Can you involve them in the design? Can you ask them what does and doesn’t work about the programs?Perhaps most importantly, does everyone have to complete the training in exactly the same way? Because neurodivergence represents non-traditional ways of processing information, it represents many different learning styles.“This is something that we have to be more open-minded about: there’s got to be more than one way to get to the goal,” said Reisner. When and how the training is delivered should be flexible and adaptable by the learner. The goal is that everyone learns, not that everyone completes the training in the same way.“I know from a compliance perspective, that feels challenging, because you want to just check ‘yes, everyone in my company took ethics training,’ Reisner said. “But if you can get more models, more ways people can get to that end state, then you’re going to see so much more success.”Don’t Assume, AskThe challenge for many who are neurodivergent is that they will prefer not to disclose their diagnosis at work–and others may not know they’re not neurotypical. That’s why many leaders are making these changes and accommodations available to all employees–not just those who openly identify as neurodivergent. No one should be forced to disclose neurodivergence if they don’t want to. “An individual should not be required to disclose to get assistive technology,” said Lanier of TextHelp. “There are a lot of organizations that make our product available for everyone.”The best practice is to simply ask employees what they need, panelists said, and be open to creativity. “Companies come up with all these accommodations, and it looks like a list to choose from. That can be great, but you have to remember to ask people what they need as well,” said Reisner. “At the end of the day, we have to ask, ‘how can we make your life easier? What are you seeing as challenges in the workplace, and what would be the ideal state to make this workplace a great place for you to work regardless of that neurodiversity status?’”At 2U, Granville leans on the neurodiversity resource networks for ideas and policy review, also considering parents and caregivers who are responsible for neurodivergent family members. “We rely on good communication and connection,” she said. “If leaders have questions, they can lean into our resource groups, myself, or our DEI team and also HR to make sure that we’re guiding people in the right direction, and doing what's best for them, not what we think they need.”To Lanier, it’s a matter of psychological safety, and high-performing teams feel free to be themselves. “Is it safe to take risks and be vulnerable and be fully known?” he said. A workplace that is psychologically safe is welcoming to all, neurodivergent or not.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, the Economist, the Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Mary Pieper | March 29, 2024

How Managing Talent and Inclusion Go Hand-in-Hand

Mark Brown, senior vice president of talent and inclusion at Starbucks, knows what it’s like not to be seen in the workplace. “So many times throughout my career, the work I did got attributed to someone else, and someone else got recognized for it,” he said during a fireside chat with From Day One co-founder Steve Koepp at the organization’s conference in Seattle.Being overlooked is a reality that people from marginalized groups often experience and it prevents them from advancing within a company, says Brown. That’s why Starbucks helps those in charge of promoting people realize that “leadership comes in many forms,” he said.For example, when senior leaders get together to decide who could be moved into a VP role and what attributes they should have, someone might mention gravitas, according to Brown.“What does gravitas mean?” he said. “We have to interrupt some of those conversations.”Mark Brown, Senior Vice President, Talent and Inclusion at Starbucks spoke during From Day One's Seattle eventOnce team leaders get a new perspective on what terms like this mean, they might think of an employee that fits the definition but who they might not have considered before, according to Brown.“We're focused on inclusion and belonging,” he said. “Diversity just gives a sense of, hey, who's not in the room? Who's not at the table? Are we doing things when we're recruiting or promoting people, that we're not including populations? Talent is equally distributed and populations’ opportunities aren’t. And so, we want to make sure that we're casting our net wide.”But inclusive leadership goes beyond DEI, says Brown. “Inclusive leadership is just leadership,” he said. “If you have three people on your team, they’re all going to be at different development stages. And your role as a leader is to figure out where they are in those development stages, and then take them through a journey, which means you have to pivot to understand where they are to bring them through.”The first step to inclusive leadership is getting to know your employees. Part of that is finding out what they like to do when they aren’t working, such as fishing, camping or gardening. However, “it’s really just having a conversation about, ‘How do we work together? How do I amplify your successes? How do I coach you?’” he said.This is critical because “people have cultural experiences, they grew up in certain families, and they’re taught certain things,” Brown said.For example, Brown said some leaders in the past advised him to “go out there and tell everybody what you did, and I just knew I wasn’t going to do it because it wasn’t core to who I am.”Instead, an inclusive leader will take the time to understand how a particular employee operates and engage them accordingly.Some companies overlook the value of employee networks. He says having groups where the members have some shared experiences creates not only a sense of allyship, but also a way for leaders to better understand their team members and customers.“We want to understand how all the identity groups we serve in our markets are feeling, what they’re seeing, and asking, ‘are there things in our systems and our processes that are getting in the way?’” Brown said.“We want to represent the communities that we serve, and we want to innovate for all our different audiences. 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.”They don’t always get it right the first time, so the company engages its employee networks, or their partner networks, on business problems, says Brown.He said Starbucks’ partner networks give the company additional feedback loops and mechanisms, which are more important than ever. “Our partner networks get an opportunity within our heritage months to celebrate culture, to really say, ‘Hey, this is who I am and this is how I bring my authentic self to work,” Brown said.Mary Pieper is a freelance writer based in Mason City, Iowa.

Carrie Snider | March 29, 2024

Harnessing the Power of AI During Times of Change

As if the workplace hasn’t changed enough over recent years, it’s about to go at warp speed. The power of AI is touching industries, whether employees are ready or not. The thing is, many of them are scared. In a thought leadership spotlight, Bradley Wilson, principal consultant at Perceptyx, spoke to this at the From Day One’s conference in Seattle.“Loss aversion is a real thing,” he said. It seems a day doesn’t go by that a new headline reporting AI taking jobs pops up. So, what’s the future of the workplace where AI is concerned? Wilson says that two people with the same experience can have completely different outlooks. One will have fear, the other will see possibility. The trick is to help harness the power of AI in such a way that it creates opportunities for all.As a teenager, Bradley Wilson convinced his parents to let him hike the entire Appalachian Trail—a span of over 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine. At the time, the trail had an over 90 percent failure rate. The question was, who would stay and who would go home? What was that determining factor for success? Wilson averaged 26 miles a day and was only 50 miles to the end when he was talking with others who were so close to finishing. They compared notes and determined they all had the grit and determination required to do the hard thing. But they wondered: “Were these character traits that we had at the beginning that weeded everybody else out and we were left? Or were these things that developed over time?”Now at Perceptyx, helping organizations foster success-minded employees is what Wilson does for a living. With the help of AI, the company combines employee surveys and people analytics to drive organizations forward with happy employees. The biggest driver of employee engagement? The anticipation of success, Wilson says. Bradley Wilson, Principal Consultant at Perceptyx led the thought leadership spotlight titled, " Creating a More Engaging Workplace: Harnessing the Power of AI During Times of Change"The thing leadership needs to understand is that the definition of “success” can vary from person to person. Typically it includes achievement, affiliation, affluence, and autonomy. If anything coming down the pipeline threatens any of those, especially if they are important to the employee, fear sets in. Building the anticipation of success is key.“Unfortunately, a lot of leadership teams stop at achievement and affluence. They don’t understand the power of belonging, which is the affiliation component. And they don't understand the importance of autonomy.”At various organizations Perceptyx has worked with, the survey results were telling with regard to gender experience. At the individual contributor level, women reported higher scores on the DEI category. At the supervisor level, the scores for men and women were similar. But then at the senior manager and director level things change. Men continue to have higher positive association or correlation with job level. But for women, it drops and it never catches back up.“One of the executives asked, ‘is that evidence that men and women at these levels are being treated differently? Or could it be evidence that we’re treating them the same but the needs and expectations are different?’” Wilson investigated this question on a personal level when a CEO at another company had a female direct report who gave negative survey feedback. The CEO brought it up at their next one-on-one, making light of the situation and thinking things were fine.But the woman stopped and told him she had been job searching because she didn’t think he valued her opinion. She felt like an outsider and completely disconnected—totally the opposite from what the CEO had thought. “In that case,” Wilson said, “that would have been a difference in experience. That's tied to real behavior that now we can measure. It's not just employee perception, but it's actual behavior. Once we can manage that, then we can begin to measure it and bring out that meaningful change within the organization.” That is what AI can do, he added. What used to be lists of to-dos can now be personally tailored into actionable steps for real change, thanks to AI. “When you think about AI making work more human, it sounds counterintuitive, but the possibilities are incredible.”Looking at the future of the workplace, people want stability or certainty in any way they can get it. Yet, change is constant and the future is unknown. Much like the possibility of hiking the Appalachian Trail, there are unknowns, but there are plenty of knowns. Two people in the same situation can have completely different outlooks, but with the help of AI, organizations can harness survey feedback and analytics to help employees anticipate success rather than failure. “You all are uniquely positioned within your organization to help shape and guide the culture and experience that employees have,” Wilson said, “so they’re able to face an uncertain future with a sense of stability and predictability and that sense that they have so much control over their destiny.” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Perceptyx, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Carrie Snider | March 28, 2024

How to Create and Sustain a Growth Mindset to Nurture Talent

When Dr. Mary Murphy was working on her PhD at Stanford, she was mentored by Carol S. Dweck, best-selling author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, a book that covers the potential of individuals. Now a social psychologist, Murphy has taken the mindset concept a step further and for over a decade has studied how the “fixed” or "growth” mindset affects not only individuals, but groups of people. Murphy discussed research from her book, Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations, and how it can help teams during a fireside chat at From Day One’s March Virtual Conference.Those with a fixed mindset, Murphy says, believe in being born with skills that can’t grow any further. While those with a growth mindset believe they can learn and grow into new abilities. When talking about teams, organizations, families—there is a similar mindset culture.In a fixed mindset culture, or a “culture of genius” as Murphy called it, the focus is on the star performers. The opposite is a “culture of growth” where there is a focus on continuous learning so anyone can grow and contribute. And it’s that culture of growth that organizations need.Idea SparkIn 2005 during her PhD program, Murphy clearly recalled when this group application of mindset sparked. She was at a grad student seminar supporting a friend, where a professor voiced his opinion about what the fatal flaw of this student’s work was. Another professor chimed in and disagreed, saying the fatal flaw was something else. In essence, it was a battle of which professor was right.“I saw what it was doing to my friend,” she said. “All of a sudden, he lost focus. He wasn’t able to answer questions.” Unfortunately, the experience was so painful that months later he hadn’t continued his work.Two weeks later, in a different seminar, she witnessed something else. Rather than critiquing the students about what was wrong, the professors offered ideas on how to grow the project. The effect was clear. “The students were able to respond totally differently,” Murphy said. “They were able to actually engage in the brainstorming, answer the questions, and they left motivated to dig in.”Reflecting on those two experiences or environments, she realized how much a group can impact an outcome. The harsh approach was not motivating at all. On the other hand, the mentality of growth and how we can all contribute really turned things around for the better.Dr. Mary Murphy discussed her new book Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations in a fireside chat moderated by From Day One co-founder Steve Koepp (photo by From Day One)Murphy presented the idea to her new mentor, asking what if mindset is more than just internal? What if it’s baked into culture and influences the cultivation of talent? She blinked a few times and said, “No one's ever thought of mindset this way. But we should do it together. And that began 15 years of work on reconceptualizing the mindset, as not just in our head, but also as this cultural feature.”Time to StudyNow with 75 studies in her back pocket, Murphy has seen firsthand just how deep mindset goes. Murphy and Dweck looked at the mindset of teachers and faculty members in K-12 and college and how they practice that in the classroom.“We look at how that impacts student experience. We’ve created apps that actually measure student experience in the moment looking at their sense of belonging, whether they think their teacher has a growth mindset, belief for them or not, their sense of self efficacy, their trust of the teacher.”What they found was that even if a student has a growth mindset, when set into a fixed mindset culture, they won’t have the opportunity to benefit from their growth mindset. The group trumps and stilts their progress. In the National Study of Learning Mindsets, a randomized control trial of more than 12,000 students around the country underwent a growth mindset program to see how it would impact their grades and if they’d be willing to take challenging courses. As expected, it had a positive effect. Their GPA was higher and more of them enrolled in the challenging courses than the control group. They also looked at where the program didn’t work.“The answer was two places,” Murphy said. “It was with teachers that had more fixed mindset beliefs or engaged in fixed mindset practices, then giving students that personal growth mindset. The effect was zero. It had no impact. It wasn't even a small impact – it had no impact.”The other place it didn’t work was when peers didn’t engage in challenge seeking, then students were less likely to want to work hard. But when there were teachers and peers who relished a challenge and supported each other, the growth mindset helped students flourish.Organizational CultureWorking with companies of all shapes and sizes, Murphy saw similar results. The mindset of a team at large has a huge impact on creativity, collaboration, and innovation. In one study in particular, they looked at the difference between a psychologically safe environment and a growth minded environment. They found that psychological safety is the baseline for any other growth to take place.“Psychological safety just means that you're willing to speak up when something’s gone wrong. But growth mindset culture really is being vigilant about how to improve what you’re doing, your interactions with others, the outcomes and the strategies that you’re trying. You’re proactively looking for improvement opportunities.”In fixed mindset cultures, they search for the narrow genius prototype to come up with all the answers. When in reality, a growth culture would open up the spectrum of recruiting, looking more at positive values. As Murphy says, a growth culture helps organizations naturally look for more diversity. “What’s most important is the extent to which people are willing to develop, grow and learn.”Changing Company CultureIn her book, Murphy goes over four common mindset triggers which can help individuals understand where people are on the fixed to growth spectrum. In turn, those who work with those individuals can help them shift. For example, one trigger is praise. If someone else gets praise, how does the person react? Are they happy for them, or are they jealous, thinking they are less than? One way to help foster a growth mindset is how praise is given. Rather than a “good job!” which doesn’t offer helpful feedback, Murphy suggested managers repeat what the person has done so well, so they can replicate that and others can encourage.When Satya Nadella first came to Microsoft as CEO, he described Microsoft as everyone thinking about their own silo. He read Dweck’s book and wanted to help Microsoft become the first growth minded culture and company. Kathleen Hogan, head of talent, asked how things needed to change so they could recruit and onboard people that would help shift the company’s culture. She implemented changes, but success didn’t come right away. Some bragged they had the biggest growth mindset in the room. “She had to really talk to people about what a growth mindset actually looks like. And to bake that in to some of the incentive systems and also some of the mentoring and sponsoring and support systems so that people could take on challenges could make mistakes, and actually get points for the learning and the growth from those mistakes and the communicating of those mistakes across the company, so that the whole company can learn at the same time more rapidly.” That’s when things picked up. Slowly but surely, the culture was changing. It became okay to make mistakes, but putting out ideas and taking risks and being open to failure became the norm. And that’s how they got cloud computing. Was the culture change worth it? No doubt about it.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Keren Dinkin | March 28, 2024

Showing Care for Employees in a Growing Business

Understanding what motivates employees is crucial for businesses looking to ensure their employees remain engaged and productive amid growth. At From Day One’s Seattle event in a fireside chat, Andy Schneider, senior vice president of people at Alaska Airlines, shared how they keep their employees engaged and motivated, even in times of change.One of the challenges that employers may face amid difficult times is losing their employees’ trust. For Alaska Airlines, employees didn’t feel like there was a lot of trust in them because the company was turning to outsourced talent to keep the lights on, Schneider says.Building Mutual TrustIt was a turning point for the business, which made it important for them to get the message across that they trusted their employees’ decision-making and that the company had their back. And so, they launched an empowerment framework that centered on decision-making and safety, such that employees were trusted to use their discretion in any given situation as long as they decided in favor of the guests.“We let them know that if they follow this decision-making framework, and they do something for the guests, whatever they need to do, we will have their back, [and] that they have the full right of decision,” said Schneider.Schneider says this empowerment framework acknowledges the fact that the employee has a better grasp of the situation than anyone else. And also that this kind of agility and autonomy works to improve customer experience as well.Showing Appreciation and CareThe airline industry was perhaps one of the most badly hit by the pandemic. Not only did many industry workers lose their jobs, but those left behind had to stay on the frontlines to facilitate critical travel.In the post-pandemic era, the resurgence of travelers left airline workers overworked. To support their workers, the airline instituted a care retreat for employees, which they started after the pandemic, says Schneider.Joey Thompson, reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal, interviewed Schneider in the fireside chat “The whole goal behind the care retreat was to really let employees know that it was important for them to take care of themselves, and to take care of each other before you could even get around to taking care of guests,” shares Schneider. For Alaska Airlines, it was an experiential retreat with quiet areas to listen to soothing music and sounds, good food, and a sensory bar to help employees relax.Implementing Robust Development ProgramsTo keep up with demand and build a better pipeline, Alaska Airlines also implemented a pilot development program to offer scholarships to aspiring pilots. “One of the things people might not know is if you want to be a commercial pilot, you cannot get student loans for that kind of work. And that’s one of the problems, it’s very expensive to become a pilot,” said Schneider.In developing the program, the company birthed the Ascent Pilot Academy, a full pilot school that guides scholars from start to finish. “If you want to get there, there are ways to make it happen,” Schneider said.Finding the Right PeopleIt’s important to note that for frameworks of employee empowerment to work, you have to hire the right people. “We work to hire people who are people for others, and people that have a spirit of adventure,” said Schneider.This way, staff and leaders alike are aligned in their values of safety, care, and empowerment — almost creating a loop of understanding and compassion that allows everyone to work conscientiously toward common goals.Schneider also notes how important it is to establish clear lines of internal communication that leaders and employees can run to in times of distress. When you have a source of truth, such as your corporate values and communication channels, it’s much easier to cut through the noise even amid the challenges of a growing business.Keren's love for words saw her transition from a corporate employee into a freelance writer during the pandemic. When she is not at her desk whipping up compelling narratives and sipping on endless cups of coffee, you can find her curled up with a book, playing with her dog, or pottering about in the garden.

Wanly Chen | March 27, 2024

Crafting Employee Journeys with Career Growth in Mind

Today, employees crave transparent career growth in their organizations, with an overwhelming 73% stating that they want visibility about these opportunities. In contrast, 61% of employees are more likely to leave their jobs if there is no visibility, showing how career growth can have a direct impact on employee retention and engagement.For Hannah Lucille, vice president of people and culture at Warner Bros. Discovery, transparency on career growth needs to begin even before an employee enters the company.“Career expectations start as early as when recruiters reach out to candidates. Recruiters need to understand what these candidates’ career ambitions are and make sure that we’re feeding that back into all the conversations,” Lucille said.At From Day One’s Seattle conference, Lucille and other leaders joined From Day One’s co-founder Steve Koepp in a discussion on career growth, highlighting how leaders can effectively support employees in finding their next steps.Leaning into Mentorship, Networking, SponsorshipCareer growth often relates to tangible goals like promotions or upskilling. However, career growth is hard to exist without the invisible parts of career development, said Dave Wilkin, founder of Ten Thousand Coffees.85% of jobs are filled by networking, underlining the relationship of strong connections with future job opportunities. “Your network is your net worth. If we can create networks, we create more opportunities and more opportunity lattices,” Wilkin said.But knowing someone isn’t enough to get someone their next job or career movement, Wilkin said.“Competency around how to turn networks into impact is non-existent. To make opportunity happen, you need to create a conversation that turns connections into impact,” Wilkin said. “We want to make sure that when we’re creating conversation pathways, we’re being declarative on whether that relationship is a sponsorship, connection, or an onboarding buddy to help new hires accelerate.”The panelists spoke to the topic "How Career Growth Can Be a Part of Employee Experience from the Beginning" Relationships like mentorships and sponsorships can be beneficial to employees in navigating career growth and opportunities. In a study on mentorship, researchers found that while 76% of employees believe mentorship is important, only 36% had a mentor.To Ambra Benjamin, vice president of tech recruiting and operations at software company Datadog, debunking some common perceptions about mentorships can help people find those crucial relationships.“People look at mentorship and think they have to find a senior employee who’s at a place in their career that they’re not,” Benjamin said. “But my first and best mentor at Facebook was significantly more junior than me. He was having success, and I wasn’t, and I asked him to mentor me. Mentorship can just be helping you with a certain skill or an area where you’re not proficient and having someone more proficient than you be in that role.”Building a Safe Culture to Talk About Career GrowthLeaders who hold frequent check-ins with their employees on career growth opportunities can find themselves reaping the benefits. In one study, researchers found that 82% of employees who have career conversations with their manager more than once a month were highly engaged at work compared to 53% of those who only talk about their career once a year or less.Having conversations is only a part of the equation, Lucille says. To effectively support employees, leaders need to allow employees to discuss their career goals in a safe environment.“Verbalizing career growth sometimes can be pretty intimidating because people fear the repercussions of those conversations, thinking their managers won’t be as invested anymore or they won’t give them the top reward because they know they are looking for other opportunities,” Lucille said. “But it's important to build it into the culture with hiring managers to ask about career goals and make it a two-way conversation so that there's no surprises. We’re far more likely to be able to co-create another opportunity for employees that way.”For the first time five generations are in the workforce, signaling a change to traditional mindsets to career growth and the approach to conversations about career growth. To Roz Francuz-Harris, vice president of talent acquisition for real estate marketplace Zillow, leaders need to adapt their strategies accordingly.“One person’s question about those next steps is not the same with a different generational person but it doesn’t mean that their value is any less; it just means we all want the same things but ask those things are different,” Francuz-Harris said. “As HR professionals, we have to build a program for hiring managers to run this type of process to seek out career growth for their employees, and then help them navigate which avenues to find it.”Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.

Wanly Chen | March 26, 2024

The Keys to Employee Engagement in Today’s Workplace

A positive company culture can power strong engagement with employees, with business yielding benefits like higher productivity and profitability. As senior director of talent management and organizational effectiveness at The Home Depot, Joe Garcia knew the secret to strong employee engagement came with finding the right employees first.“When we start to go deep into trying to understand what drives engagement, we often think about the environment, the effectiveness of leaders, and the work-life balance,” Garcia said. “But we don't always spend a ton of time thinking if we are selecting folks that are likely to be a good fit for the role and the culture of the company.”With approximately 475,000 associates, Garcia discovered his high-performing associates had distinguishable qualities such as having a high desire to help others and openness to learning.“That propensity and desire to learn was a big predictor of success so we built assessments and structured interview guides with questions that are attempting to measure not only your experience but also your culture fit with clear anchors,” said Garcia.At From Day One’s March virtual conference, Garcia and a panel of other leaders joined Lydia Dishman, senior editor of growth and engagement at Fast Company, in a discussion on how to effectively drive employee engagement in today’s workplace.Providing Employees with Learning OpportunitiesWith a remote workforce, vice president of human resources and recruiting at Allied Universal Security Services, Kimberly Ardo-Eisenbeis knew she would have to find creative strategies to engage her employees.After trial-and-error of different strategies, Ardo-Eisenbeis found offering small micro-learning opportunities was the sweet spot for her employees.“We have an amazing talent and development team that puts together these small micro-learnings that are five to ten minutes long. These nuggets are meaningful and can help engage our employees because these are not just checking-the-box learning, but information that somebody can then act on,” Ardo-Eisenbeis said.For Ardo-Eisenbeis, the key was to value the quality of engagement over quantity. “Rather than sitting someone in a classroom or having virtual learnings where there’s not much appetite, we learned that these small micro-learnings can still fill the bucket,” Ardo-Eisenbeis said. “When it comes to learning, it’s not always about quantity but about the quality and the intention, and what somebody can do with that information.”The group of leaders spoke on a panel during From Day One's March virtual conference about energizing workers (photo by From Day One)Learning and development can also be powerful drivers in employee engagement, with 80% of employees reporting that learning and development opportunities would help them feel more engaged at work.Wielding learning as a form of engagement can also help benefit other areas of the business, Shawn Overcast, chief insights officer of Explorance said.“Learning matters as a driver of engagement and career development. Not only does learning aim to help us build skills and help to inform somebody's career development, but it also allows us to listen,” Overcast said. “As we formally bring people together and ask them questions about their experience, [learning] acts as a listening hub and an opportunity to network which can support functional collaboration, relationship building, and further build trust and psychological safety in the organization.”Charting Different Career PathsThe shift from traditional linear career paths to non-linear paths is increasingly more common, with 52% of U.S. workers having considered a job change, and as many as 44% having actual plans to make the change last year. The finding is in line with what commercial real estate company, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, currently is seeing.“We lean into internal mobility and allow people to move from one function to an entirely different one. So, we’ve seen big bold moves, like people moving from finance to IT or people moving from marketing to sales,” Isobel Lincoln, senior vice president of human resources, said.Allowing workers to explore different career paths can prove beneficial to companies as it allows employees to continue to grow and learn new skill sets while remaining at a single organization. Workers who have moved internally have a 64% chance of remaining with an organization after three years, according to LinkedIn data. In contrast, only 45% of employees who haven’t moved internally have a smaller likelihood of staying with the company after three years.Lincoln already sees the benefits of internal mobility in her company. “More than half of my HR team have come from other parts of the business so it's working for us because we get to retain those employees for much longer.”Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.

Mary Pieper | March 26, 2024

For Hourly Workers, Building a Culture That’s Motivating and Gratifying

Monigo Saygbay-Hallie, Ph.D., is the chief people officer at Checkers & Rally’s Drive-In Restaurants. She reflects that at 15, she cried on the first day of her first job at Mr. Jim’s Pizza due to stress because the telephone was ringing off the hook as a steady stream of customers called in their delivery orders.However, by her third month on the job, she was an assistant manager closing the restaurant by herself on Sundays. The woman who owned that Mr. Jim’s Pizza franchise “believed I had more potential than I thought I had,” she told moderator Lydia Dishman in a fireside chat at From Day One’s March virtual conference.“She gave me more responsibility each and every day. That’s what I love about the restaurant industry. They take chances on many people,” she said. Saygbay-Hallie would then go into HR because “I learned that I really love the human element of what drives businesses in developing and growing people and making them better leaders.”Motivating Hourly WorkersWhen it comes to motivating employees, managers should remember that “at the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, whether you are frying fries at the grill or developing a marketing strategy,” she said. “You want to be heard and valued, and you want an opportunity to grow.”In the back of the house of a Checkers and Rally’s restaurant, “we have huddle meetings every day where we talk about how we’ve made sales,” Saygbay-Hallie said. “It’s like, ‘Great job, thank you.’ It’s high-fives.”The company’s IT team sends an email every week to the manager of each restaurant to let them know which employees at that store have upcoming birthdays or anniversaries. The email also offers ideas on how to celebrate the milestone, such as cupcakes.A Sense of BelongingWhen workers feel like they belong, “they put that extra effort in, that extra love in your food,” Saygbay-Hallie said.Lydia Dishman interviewed Monigo Saygbay-Hallie of Checkers & Rally's during the fireside chat (photo by From Day One)Checkers and Rally’s does a quarterly survey, asking employees if they feel like they belong, if they appreciate their supervisor, and if their supervisor appreciates them.“That measures our culture,” Saygbay-Hallie said. “And from that survey, we then go back and develop action plans, talking with each of the employees about what we can do more or less in order to make this a place where they want to stay.”Communication is KeyMost of Checkers and Rally’s management hires are internal promotions, “so they were once a team member in that very store,” Saygbay-Hallie said.These fledgling managers need to learn how to communicate with the employees they are now supervising, she said. For example, they must be able to instruct team members on how to do their jobs and have conversations with them about their performance. Therefore, Checkers and Rally’s created the Leadership of the Future program, which teaches all these skills.One thing Checkers and Rally’s teaches its managers is how to recognize when a team member might be struggling with something in their personal life that is affecting their job performance.“You want to have grace, but you also want to have standards,” she said. “So, it’s really communicating if you see someone come in late constantly, or if they’re not giving their best effort, it’s a one-on-one conversation.” This allows managers the opportunity to offer support rather than blaming the employee.Encouraging Career DevelopmentShift managers and assistant managers at Checkers and Rally’s restaurants do quarterly check-ins with their team. Saygbay-Hallie says 75% of those discussions are about employee performance, while 25% is centered on career development.“In my visits to the restaurants, I’ve talked to women, in the spirit of Women’s History Month, about them moving on to be a keyholder, where they're a general manager,” Saygbay-Hallie said.Some hourly employees who speak English as a second language say they don’t think they have the English skills to communicate as a manager, she said. That’s why Checkers and Rally’s offers free language classes.“We don’t want any barriers to anyone,” Saygbay-Hallie said.Mary Pieper is a freelance writer based in Mason City, Iowa.

Keren Dinkin | March 26, 2024

Sleep Care Done Right: Transform Employee Health and Lower Total Cost of Healthcare

Increasing healthcare costs and the rising burden of chronic conditions are projected to increase by 6% in 2024 compared to 2023. Interestingly, some of the most expensive chronic conditions are closely associated with sleep disorders. In a recent From Day One webinar, experts from Nox Health discussed how companies can enhance the overall health of their workforce by promoting sleep care.In this post-Covid workplace, the complexity of roles has increased, driven by an accelerating prevalence of concerns around behavioral and mental health. The general consensus, says Steve Cohan, EVP of commercial markets at Nox Health, is that we’re all facing a general kind of point solution fatigue.So, how do organizations improve the overall coordination of care? Promoting sleep care “as a kind of a soft approach to a very hard issue,” is part of the solution, says Cohan. “Sleep is the golden chain that binds health and our bodies together,” he says, citing a quote from English dramatist Thomas Decker.“If you look at the totality, about 50 to 70 million Americans actually have a chronic sleep-wake disorder,” Dr. Jason Ong, behavioral sleep medicine director shares.The most common disorder is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a condition where there are pauses in your breathing that cause a sleep disruption. This causes people to generally be very, very sleepy or fatigued during the day, he says.Chronic insomnia is another prevalent sleep disorder. It covers trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and even waking up too early and not being able to get the full amount of sleep.Another common sleep condition is restless leg syndrome, a neuromuscular sleep disorder characterized by discomfort and a need to get up and move around. Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders are also common. This is where there is a misalignment between your body's natural clock and the time when you're trying to sleep or trying to be awake.Dr. Jason Ong spoke during the webinar about sleep care (company photo)So, how do sleep disorders affect other chronic health conditions? And what are the consequences when you have one of these leading disorders? According to Dr. Ong, when you have sleep disruption, it affects the body and the systems within the body. With sleep apnea, for example, the body can suffer from elevated levels of cortisol and blood sugar, creating a cascade of reactions like heightened heart rate, blood pressure, and insulin levels, among others.“So if you take a look at all these things that happen when our sleep is disrupted, it affects hormones, it affects cardiovascular systems, [and] metabolic systems,” said Dr. Ong. “And so you can see how all together this can really exacerbate chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.”Many healthcare members with sleep disorders cost double that of the average member, while members with two or more chronic conditions cost 46% of total healthcare costs. And yet, sleep-related costs account for less than 1% of total healthcare spending. So what can be done?Cohan advocates for a whole-person approach. As people enter into a solution, the provider takes total ownership of the patient experience throughout all iterative steps from education, evaluation, testing, diagnosis, and then, importantly, value care.The patient is then only billed once they have a diagnosis.“So all of those iterative steps around making people aware, going through a very detailed evaluation, testing and diagnosis, including interaction with our sleep care specialists,” Cohan said. “Those all occur at no expense to the patient, no expense to the plan sponsor, only if the patient agrees to go on therapy, and then continues on therapy, is their billing incurred.”At the moment, there are certain barriers to members adhering to and persisting with their treatment, says Jennifer Lindskoog, Nox’s SVP of client success. The first is a lack of understanding that they may have a sleep disorder. Second, upon diagnosis, the processes are typically uncoordinated and unsupported by an underlying clinically integrated care approach, leading to limited adoption of care.For Nox Health, holistic care encompasses working with clients to build out an entire awareness campaign that’s not just dependent on a physician or on-site clinic referral.This also includes an easily accessible app that includes a simple 13-question checkup that enables a member to understand the duration, timing and quality of their sleep. From here, members with potential sleeping disorders are automatically made eligible for medical intervention through their health plan. The system will then pop up a schedule of appointments with a board-certified sleep physician, only for their area and the times available.This ensures the patient does not have to scroll through a list of physician appointments that may not even be for their area. From that physician's appointment, which is a visual telehealth appointment, the patient is often then recommended for a home-based sleep test with a very small kit that includes a device for diagnosing sleep apnea, insomnia, or restless leg syndrome.After this comes an interpretation and appointment with the patient with a clinician to explain the results of the sleep testing, along with the recommended treatment plan. The result is an end-to-end solution that makes sure patients are supported from the initial diagnosis to treatment, promoting better sleep care and overall health.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Nox Health, for sponsoring this webinar. Keren's love for words saw her transition from a corporate employee into a freelance writer during the pandemic. When she is not at her desk whipping up compelling narratives and sipping on endless cups of coffee, you can find her curled up with a book, playing with her dog, or pottering about in the garden.

Ellen Stark | March 25, 2024

How to Respond to the Day-to-Day Financial Stressors of Your Workforce

A unexpected car repair. A large medical bill. A broken furnace. For millions of American workers, these kinds of sudden expenses can be hard to handle—if not impossible. As major expenses like housing, education, and medical care increase, 59% of workers report that their compensation isn’t keeping up with the rising cost of living, according to PwC’s 2023 Employee Financial Wellness Survey; nearly half find it tough to cover household bills every month.“The cost of living has increased at a greater rate than wages for decades,” said Rachel Schneider, founder of CEO of Canary, a company that enables employers to offer emergency-relief grants. “So there’s a real need for financial solutions that help people to manage that.” In a From Day One Webinar, “How to Respond to the Day-to-Day Financial Stressors of Your Workforce,” Schneider spoke about the financial pressures workers face, how money stress can seep into the workplace, and what employers can do to help.Prior to founding Canary, Schneider spent years researching the finances of ordinary Americans and co-authored The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. “That really informed the work that I do today at Canary,” she said, “because for so many people, what we saw was this story of volatility.” Many of the families she spoke to made enough to get by—until there was a disruption. And then what?With little or no emergency savings, workers may resort to high-rate borrowing or retirement-account withdrawals, or simply go without a car or forgo needed medical care. And they don’t leave their troubles at home. “Employers are losing $4.7 billion in productivity every week because of the financial stress that workers are bringing to work,” Schneider said. If the lack of a car means the employee quits, that’s another cost. “We know that, at a minimum, it’s $7,000 to replace a person, even a fairly low-paid person,” Schneider said. “If I could have spent $2,000 to help this person fix their car instead, it’s a huge win for everybody.”By providing access to health insurance and retirement-savings plans, employers have already taken on an important role in their workers’ financial lives. Recognizing the financial pressures their employees can face, many supplement these benefits with programs to address financial wellness, including education and coaching. And thanks to a recent federal law allowing employers to automatically enroll workers in an emergency savings account tied to their retirement plan, more companies may add that benefit. Schneider encouraged employers to embrace a wide range of solutions: “There’s an incredible need for employers to keep the lens on what is the financial role they play with their workforce as broad as possible.”One way to do that is by providing employees facing an emergency with cash, something that can happen informally in an office via a GoFundMe campaign or more formally through a pay advance. A few companies have gone so far as to offer formal relief programs, such as Levi’s Red Tab Foundation. “Employers are responsive to this need because it's a basic human desire to help each other,” Schneider said.Journalist Ellen Stark interviewed Rachel Schneider of Canary during the recent webinar on responding to financial stressors (photo by From Day One)It was a recognition of that desire to help that led her to found Canary and make employee emergency grants more widely available. “A lot of people are really living at breakeven, without much cushion to save or to pay back a loan with interest,” Schneider said. “So I was looking for ways that we could efficiently get people additional money in that moment of crisis.” Emergency grant programs can be a major undertaking, involving establishing a nonprofit to disperse grants and a staff to administer them. “How do we make it possible for all employers to do it?”, Schneider recalled thinking.Canary makes it possible by handling all aspects of the program. Once employers fund a nonprofit relief fund, employees experiencing a financial hardship can apply for small grants online (employers set the maximum size) and submit required documentation. Canary reviews the application and disperses the money, often within days, allowing the worker’s need to remain confidential within the office. The grants—most commonly related to a car or healthcare—are not considered taxable income for the worker.Of course, a one-time grant may not solve an employee’s financial fragility, so Schneider encourages companies to consider grants as part of a larger financial wellness program, including education and advice. “I think that an emergency fund like ours is really most effective at a company that is thinking holistically about how it can help employees,” she said.Beyond helping individual workers get past a short-term crisis, this kind of program can have a deeper impact on the workplace, Schneider noted. “People on our platform who’ve received money say things like, my employer has proven that they walk the talk of our core values,” she said. That good will can spread further. Younger workers in particular want to feel a sense of purpose and care about the corporate brands they align themselves with. “The reality is that most of your workforce will not experience a crisis this year that causes them to apply,” Schneider said. “But everyone will know it exists and feel good about it. And that's really powerful.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Canary, who sponsored this thought leadership spotlight.Ellen Stark is an executive editor with Foundry 360 at Dotdash Meredith, where she creates relevant and engaging content for major financial services companies. Previously, she spent more than 20 years as a writer and editor at Money magazine and Money.com.(Featured illustration by Erhui1979/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 25, 2024

Boosting Employee Motivation by Focusing on Internal Mobility

The Great Reshuffle may have officially reached its end. The labor market is tightening, voluntary job quits have been steadily declining over the last year, and large-scale layoffs have spooked some would-be job hoppers. Recruiting firm Robert Half found that 36% of workers plan to look for a new job in 2024. Last year, that figure was 49%.Workers seem keen to stay where they are for the moment, yet there’s no indication that employees are willing to put the brakes on their careers. They may stall anyway. According to a 2024 report from Gartner, 89% of HR leaders say career paths organization are unclear, and fewer than one in three workers say they know how to progress their career in the next five years.Shannon Flynn is VP of corporate human resources at global industrial tech firm Fortive Corporation. She’s worried about employees’ lack of direction, and wonders if HR could be standing in the way.“We have so much opportunity to move people around, but the employees don’t see it,” Flynn said during From Day One’s March virtual conference on energizing workers. “The starting point for all of us should be, ‘what’s getting in the way of our employees having visibility into that, and what can we do to remove it?’”Turning Networks into Opportunities“A lot of the CHROs and heads of talent we work with are starting to help their colleagues think more like a career lattice than a career ladder,” said Dave Wilkin, founder of digital networking platform Ten Thousand Coffees, who joined Flynn and leaders for the panel discussion. But a career lattice doesn’t form by accident, Wilkin said. Landing those next moves–whether vertical or lateral–has a lot to do with who you know. “Ultimately, opportunities are found through networks.”The panelists discussed the topic "Boosting Employee Motivation by Focusing on Internal Mobility" during the virtual conference (photo by From Day One)Opportunity networks aren’t necessarily equitable; they are often sorted by race or gender or and especially seniority. According to data from LinkedIn, in 2024 internal mobility rates are up 30% since 2021, yet it’s people at the manager and director levels who are most likely to move–more than twice as likely as individual contributors. To extend opportunities to all, Wilkin says, networks cannot be accidental. Employers must help workers form relationships across the organization.Envisioning New Career MapsTo help workers see what they can reach for, companies once relied on career mobility maps, but those quickly expire, said Sarah Waltman, VP of talent management and organizational development at dental products maker Dentsply Sirona. Waltman’s answer to rigid maps is a flexible exploration tool. “We provide a template that [employees] can use to explore the organization through networking, through conversation, through the tools we have in place for sponsorship, mentorship, or coaching. It’s almost like a treasure map, where they can explore different methods to discover other things that they could do.”Fortive, which is the parent of more than a dozen companies, did give career mapping a go, but the company wasn’t concerned about traditional models. “The arrows were pointing everywhere,” said Flynn, describing the final product. “If I start here as a financial planning and analysis person, my next move could be a senior person in the same role at the same size company, it could be the same role at a larger company, or it could be this other thing. What we showed was movement up, down, back and forth, and diagonal.”Flynn based the maps on the real paths its employees had taken, then invited leaders to share their stories at work functions, “and it quickly demonstrated that none of them took a purely vertical path,” she said. “All of them had taken some kind of diversionary role that allowed them to get experience, it made them better in that new role.”Building the ExperienceWaltman encourages those wanting to climb the ladder to look for extracurriculars to build their skills. Employee resource groups, or ERGs, have at times been criticized for being non-promotable work, yet Dentsply Sirona considers them leadership skill-builders. “We have a large participation in employee resource groups,” Waltman said. “So what I encourage you to do is, if you’re trying to build management skills, but you’re not a manager, why not become a leader of one of these groups?”Merck’s global head of integrated learning experiences, Teresa Zeller, surveys employees three to four times per year about the learning and development opportunities they’ve sought. “We have stressed in our organization that the breadth helps you to ultimately get to a higher altitude,” she said. The message is reflected in the survey answers. Merck’s workforce uses everything from company-sponsored learning and external training programs to gig and short-term assignments, mentorship, sponsorship, knowledge-sharing, conferences, and ERGs to build careers.“As people start to see that the individuals who are going broad are actually moving in the organization, not only does it broaden their experiences, but it gives them meaningful work, it gives them bounce,” Zeller said. “Oftentimes they find an area they would have never stumbled into before, then they decide, ‘this is actually the career for me.’”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Matthew Koehler | March 25, 2024

Navigating the AI Revolution: Transforming Workforces for the Future

"What we’re going to do is talk through the impact of probably the two scariest letters when it comes to thinking about workforce and transformation: AI. But specifically the impact of these new tools on your workforce," said Akhil Chauhan, senior solution consultant at Orgvue. Chauhan spoke in a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Houston event. Chauhan spoke about how Orgvue helps organizations strategize, prepare, and move towards an AI future.When people think of automation, they generally have robotics in mind – the sort of technology that can automate physical tasks. But the way society is now thinking about automation is more in terms of knowledge work. Chauhan cited research from Goldman Sachs indicating that 25% of the tasks people do today are at risk of automation in the near future.“What this tells us is that even though a large number of roles and a large portion of the workforce are going to be affected in some way, it’s actually more likely that small portions of people's day-to-day roles are going to be affected,” Chauhan said. Strategizing For a More Automated FutureThe key to success for any organization that isn’t already looking into these changes, would be to identify where that 25% is, then start building out resiliency from there, says Chauhan. This change, though, isn’t just affecting any one team at an organization, or a professional field, it impacts “everything from office and admin to legal.”"We’re seeing this as a transformational change across a broad range of your organizations. And that’s good news." Chauhan says companies that can adapt quickly will "see an uptick in productivity uptick in economic output.” Others that can’t adapt quickly, however, will be left behind.Chauhan laid out ways to prepare an organization’s workforce for the impact of AI.First is benchmarking, or mapping existing benchmarks to your own data to determine the impact of AI on your organization. To create a benchmark, you would look at similar roles across the industry and look at skill sets, salary, and other attributes.“There’s loads of different benchmarks that are available. Some focus more on roles, others focus on skills or industry. But there's a lot of information that can give you a very quick insight into what the impact of automation is on your workforce.”Not all similar benchmarks, like engineers for example, are going to be the same across the board. “A software engineer at Lyondell is going to be very different from a software engineer at Southwest Airlines, which may again be quite different from a role defined in a generic benchmark,” Chauhan said. Akhil Chauhan, Senior Solution Consultant at Orgvue led the thought leadership spotlight in Houston Another way is by organization modeling, or modeling your future organization based on work that will be affected by AI. Chauhan says that if you know what role might be needed more in the future (and less of), then you can “build out team structures that can account for that type of change, and build out the different operating models aligned to different processes and technologies that those teams might be using.”Another is finding skills gaps, or understanding the skills you have today, which will be most impacted by AI, and the gap between the two. You might “have a look at the different skills that we need in the workforce today. What might be less prevalent tomorrow. And then how do we adapt our workforce through re-skilling and upskilling programs to make sure that we have a resilient workforce in the future," Chauhan added.None of these areas of preparation are prerequisites or contingent on one another. They might be complimentary but every organization has their own jumping off point, he says. Guiding PrinciplesTo achieve any sort of success with these models, Chauhan offers some guiding principles: rapid assessment, detailed analysis, and design and implementation.First, you have to have good data. Consolidation of data and keeping it up to date will also help the organization make better informed decisions. “We know that data is messy, it sets in all sorts of different places, and is never going to be 100% accurate,” Chauhan said.Not every organization goes through all the pillars. Some stop at the assessment and use it as a starting point to start driving some organizational change. Others want to go deeper.This is where they might go into a detailed analysis, where Orgvue looks at the activities and work being performed by people in an organization to better understand how it can adapt to future change. It might also seek to identify who already has an AI skill set, what the future needs are, and where the skill gaps might be.The final principle is the design and implementation stage, where you use all the data you’ve gathered in the rapid assessment and the detailed analysis to design future scenarios. At this stage you want to understand the impacts of AI on headcount, cost, and team composition. This is a proactive capability around your organization so that it can adapt to all different kinds of changes."We can get all of these things together to then build that future state organization that keeps in mind the current state of the workforce, but also gives you a transition plan into a future state.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Orgvue, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Matthew Koheler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

Feature

What Transparency Can Expose: an Obvious Need for Organizational Change

In the realm of corporate values, few terms have been more universally embraced in recent years than the notion of transparency. Among its many applications, organizations have deployed it to contend with sticky social matters and public scrutiny of corporate ethics. At the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos this year, speakers repeated the term like a mantra, reflecting a movement that has been building for a while. Fast Company reported that at the summit in 2021, more than 60 businesses announced a “commitment to transparency” about their effects on society and the environment. In response to pressure from stakeholders on all sides, executives from TikTok, Glassdoor, Google, YouTube, Zoom, Boeing, Twitter, and the White House have all made public commitments to transparency in recent years.Yet lately it has been dawning on leaders that this magic, window-cleaning solution can make things worse, especially if what has been exposed seems to be hypocritical, poorly thought-out, or further obfuscation rather than moral clarity. The most notorious recent example came last December, when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania gave hedged, lawyerly responses when asked in a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people would violate their school’s conduct rules. Their answers frustrated stakeholders on many sides of the issue.Seeing the havoc that failed transparency can wreak, Harvard is second-guessing the value of transparency, and is considering keeping mum on divisive matters altogether. The Harvard Crimson reported in February that the school’s interim president is expected to announce that the school is considering a policy of “institutional neutrality,” in which it will make no statements on politicized matters. Leaders at other universities are in favor, it appears. During a recent panel discussion on the matter, Yale Law School professor Robert C. Post remarked that “when we speak outside of our lane, we invite reprisals, we invite regulations, which we cannot defend in terms of our mission,” he said. “There may be reasons to do it. But they have to be pretty good reasons because we’re vulnerable, we're especially vulnerable right now.” The public is not ready to retire the notion of transparency, however, so organizations need to take a more considered approach to it and the policies that it exposes. “Corporate values aren’t optional, and they’re more controversial and contested than ever,” writes Alison Taylor in her new book Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World. “[Yet] aiming to base your values on commitments on the full range of stakeholder pressures and demands is a recipe for incoherence and fragmentation.”This has become the principal dilemma for leaders who want to run an ethical business, argues Taylor, a clinical associate professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. “It shows up in HR teams doing employee engagement surveys and trying to make themselves look good. It shows up in these glossy sustainability reports about all the wonderful things [the company] is doing,” Taylor told From Day One. “The thing that has changed is that those defenses don’t work anymore.”The Age of Clarity and CandorThe theory is that if you bare it all, the company will be rewarded for its candor. “If a single concept drives today’s businesses, regulators, journalists, and NGO activists, it’s that transparency is the route to accountability,” Taylor writes in her book. Yet all this new data-dumping, press-releasing, and report-publishing hasn’t necessarily reconciled what companies say vs. what they do, though trust in business has generally grown over the years, especially when compared with trust in government. Yet company after company, ranging from Boeing to Wells Fargo, have taken a shellacking for saying that they’ve fixed problems when they haven’t actually changed the culture or system that caused harm in the first place.In fact, disclosure is easily weaponized, Taylor argues. The companies that release details of their ethical transgressions or corporate misconduct can put the target on their own backs. In her book, Taylor tells of the story of a clothing company, operating in an industry known for its negative environmental effects and human-rights violations, that published a list of its suppliers in the spirit of transparency. They were among the first picked off as the target of a class-action lawsuit alleging forced labor. “The retailer making a good faith effort to be responsible and accountable was first in line for denunciation and punishment,” Taylor writes.Contending with a Public Wary of Good IntentionsAs companies see that their attempt at transparency can get them in trouble, many flatten their reporting into glossy packets and palatable stories. Some disclosures are required by law, yet by and large, these reports are voluntary. To steel themselves against criticism, especially involved tricky issues, many organizations appoint leaders charged with improving company culture and creating a more equitable workplace: chief culture officers, heads of compliance and integrity, and leaders of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). To be sure, many who sit in these offices are formidable forces. Figures like Yelp’s chief diversity officer, Miriam Warren, and Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd set high bars for the influence executives can have on equity and integrity inside and outside an organization.But some of the leaders installed in these roles are faced with the uncomfortable truth that their position is corporate PR. Taylor sees this often: People take jobs and think of themselves as organizational change agents, only to find that senior leaders think of them as defense mechanisms to protect corporate reputation and, in the case of compliance teams, to deflect regulators.For instance, the chief diversity officer is typically charged with making the business more demographically diverse and equitable for people across every department at every level of the business, yet many of them work with very limited resources. It's no wonder that turnover for the job is high.From Token Hire to Meaningful InfluenceOnce a company decides that it won’t favor transparency more than change, good things start to happen. This is when those leaders originally appointed as tokens can use their positions. If Taylor were to find herself in a role and learn that her presence was manipulative PR, she said, “I would make an argument about transparency needing to adapt the organization to a new generation. You can’t control the narrative, so hiring a load of people to do window dressing has become a waste of money. We can’t rely on confidentiality agreements, and we can’t rely on telling a good story.”Companies have to assume that young workers in particular are ready to undercut nice, neat stories and pounce on corporate misdirection, she says. Where a glossy report no longer suffices, those once-impotent appointees can play a valuable role, holding the company accountable from the inside before an angry public holds them accountable in the open air.Now that the public is suspicious of public declarations of corporate goodness, “no one believes it. There’s a total ‘gotcha’ mindset. Everyone rolls their eyes, and now there’s all this greenwashing and woke-washing litigation,” Taylor said. “It’s a pointless investment. You need to stop treating these as messaging challenges and treat them as organizational strategy challenges.”‘A Less Varnished Assessment of Activities’Taylor’s Higher Ground is loaded with case studies, action outlines, and advice. Not only for avoiding corporate blunders, but also correcting the bad habits and outright crookedness that cause them. Be a “first mover,” setting the example for peers, she writes. Companies often wait until a public scandal to start talking, but this tends to create chaos. She cites the example of Google releasing its transparency report on how it works with law enforcement in 2010. “This was not the result of a specific scandal but an effort to correct widespread misunderstanding.” Its success was due in part to the company being clear about what it can and cannot influence.Sure, there will be companies that invite scrutiny with their reporting, but that’s why Taylor warns against bending too deeply to public opinion and impatience that lures firms into dangerous waters. Don’t succumb to the pressures of social media, which turn companies into reaction engines, she advises. Wait long enough, and sensationalized social-media storms pass. Similarly, transparency often generates “impatient calls for an issue to be addressed instantly,” when real change takes time.Finally, forget about having 100% control over the stories told about your company and control over the behavior of your employees, which some companies increasingly see as liabilities, as evidenced by the new popularity of surveillance tools.Taylor believes that many corporate leaders sincerely want to avoid superficial reporting and put-on commitments to transparency. In five years of speaking to investors about sustainability reports, Taylor writes, “they told me again and again how much they–and their companies–would benefit from a less-varnished assessment of activities.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, the Washington Post, Quartz, and Fast Company.(Featured illustration by Fermate/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 24, 2024

Carrie Snider | March 22, 2024

Workplace Inclusivity: From Initiative to Integration

For Madhuri Kumar, VP & global head of talent management at ChampionX, inclusion means “embedding inclusion across the lifecycle, which is inclusive hiring, onboarding, development, talent management—that is everybody has an equitable playing field to grow their careers.”Kumar, one of five speakers on a panel at From Day One’s Houston event, talked about the path forward for workplace inclusivity. For several years now, companies have been trying out DEI. But, as Kumar put it, “We are messy humans, trying to do the right thing.” The key is to keep trying, keep learning, and remember why you started in the first place. “This is not a sprint, it's a marathon. Let’s pace ourselves,” Kumar said. “It’s a journey we’re on.”The DEI JourneyIt may have started in various forms years ago, but the real push during the pandemic and civil unrest required companies to focus on what they were doing to either hinder or help their employees.“The last few years has raised the capability around the conversation,” said panelist Jill Ramshaw, VP of HR at Marathon Oil. DEI initiatives were the first focal point, which encouraged employees to be bold, she says. Marathon Oil has increased its ERGs as well. Support from leadership has helped everyone to open up even more.“These small group conversations help to really get under the surface and think through and work through things that people are not always comfortable talking about,” she added. At the core of success on the DEI journey is intentional planning, says Ramshaw. Companies don’t mandate change and expect everyone to fall in line. The ERGs help to bring the middle into play, and help leadership take note of what must change.“This top down, middle kind of approach helps with the integration,” she said.From Initiative to IntegrationIntegration, the panelists agreed, is the next step on the DEI journey. The trial and error of DEI over the past few years has proven valuable, but the move from initiative to integration is vital. Panelist Elise Smith, co-founder and CEO, of Praxis Labs says going from standalone DEI to embedded is key, especially when it comes to managers. “You can’t do a DEI training and then a separate manager training,” she said. “Being a manager is being a manager who leads with inclusion, who leads with a lens towards equity. We have moved away from the paradigm of those being two separate things.”In light of that expectation, it is the hardest time to be a manager. They are required to be more and do more for their employees and the company at large. Building those foundational skills that embed equity and inclusion into an employee experience is what will be vital for managers and companies moving forward.The panelists discussed the topic "DEI Will Endure, But Corporate Advocates Will Need to Reframe Their Approach" at From Day One's Houston conferenceFor one client, Smith said it was a great place to work with great feedback scores. However, they saw a dip in engagement across the board last year, especially for underrepresented groups. “What we found is that when their managers and their teams worked with us, they had a 10% higher engagement score, because these foundational skills are so core to people feeling seen, engaged, and able to bring their best to work,” Smith said. Panelists noted that the Millennial and Gen Z workforce will be a big part of making DEI part of the fabric of companies by the sheer nature of their perspectives on life. “They are choosing to work at places that are aligned to their values,” Smith said. She cited a recent study from Deloitte that found 1/3 of Gen Z and Millennials chose not to take a job because they didn’t feel like they were prioritizing DEI and the environment. Kumar agreed, “the new generation entering the workforce is going to help us really speed this work up because they're not going to accept anything less. So I truly believe that this work is about creating the workplace of the future.”Moving ForwardModerator Shelby Stewart of Essence asked this of the panelists: “when you all consider the current challenges and backlash against the DEI initiatives, are you in your companies likely to take your foot off the gas?”Panelist Mindy Fitzgerald, global director of diversity, culture and engagement at Air Products said DEI isn’t always popular with people, including their own employees. But the idea of DEI requires a total mind shift.“We’re not in this game to make friends. And we’re not in this game to be comfortable,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re in this because this is the right thing for our company to do.”Fitzgerald added: “What does diversity in 2025 or 2027 look like in a company? Where are employees of underrepresented groups of employees? What is their lived experience? What are we doing to meet their needs as employees?”Part of getting there requires a lot of transparency. At ChampionX, they started a Pipeline to CEO where employees can anonymously write directly to him, and he answers each one personally, then those discussions are published for everyone to see.“I believe it is a really powerful way through which he shows his ability to be humble, wanting to listen directly with no filters,” Kumar said.Panelist Lucho Vizcardo, head of international HR, Western Hemisphere at Nabors Industries said DEI has been an evolution for them. The more they learned, the stronger they could move forward with what worked. They continue to use ERGs and take initiatives globally so all can benefit. Learning has been key.“We didn’t have all the answers at the beginning,” he said. Now that DEI has matured, it’s taking that next step of integration, or in other words, belonging.“Belonging is where you try to integrate all the things that you learned and that worked, and try to become better as a company.”From future surveys, the feedback was loud and clear: they weren’t following through and making changes. The show of maturity in DEI is making those changes and moving forward as a company. “Are you able to make all the changes? Probably not, but at least you are doing something,” Vizcardo said.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Webinar Recap

Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

It’s never been easier to put skills-based hiring into practice. The tools and the resources are there–and the potential benefits are abundant. And yet, some leaders and hiring managers are skeptical.“One of the major positives about the skills-based approach is that it adds more science and rigor to the hiring process,” said Christopher Rotolo, vice president of global talent at Mitek. Adding science, Rotolo says, adds objectivity, which can remove some of the bias and “increase the validity of the whole hiring process.”“The fact is that over 60% of people don’t have a college degree. But that hasn’t stopped employers from benchmarking candidates that way,” said moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company. Dishman moderated a panel of leaders during From Day One’s recent webinar about Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Uncommon Objections.Unconscious bias can easily creep into the hiring process when looking at a candidate’s resume, which can reveal indicators like elite educational opportunities, prestige, race, and even generational wealth, none of which are necessarily predictors of career success. Hiring almost exclusively on skill can help employers dial into what really matters.Rather than focusing on degrees, says Amanda Richardson, CEO and head of people at CoderPad, “You have to dissect the role into the skills that are needed, working with the hiring manager and people who are currently in the role. The most important part of the conversation is not just ‘What are the skills?’ but ‘What does good look like?’” This approach requires more in-depth conversations between hiring managers and department leaders to get a stronger sense of not only what success looks like, but how previous successes can be communicated during the interview process.“I find that taking a practical approach [means] literally saying, ‘What does a great answer sound like? Does this person really know what they're talking about?’” said Stacey Olive, VP of talent acquisition and employer branding for Medidata, Dassault Systemes.“Because there’s not an empirical objective test for everything, we really have to go based on our conversations with people.” This means hiring managers need to prepare upfront so they can infer if they’re hearing “flowery language” merely alluding to past success, or if a candidate actually has lived experience that will be beneficial to the role.Focusing on skills-based hiring isn’t just a great way to reduce unconscious bias, it can also make the hiring process quicker. “A little bit of upfront work on understanding and aligning on the skills and the level of the skills needed will actually make a much faster hiring experience,” Richardson said.Semoneel Bamboat, VP and global head of diversity, inclusion and talent acquisition at Capri Holdings, shares that while her organization has a rubric within which they score talent competencies on a scale of one to five, her team does not let the skill scoring fully dictate the conversation.“While we have numbers and rigor around it, nothing is set in stone,” she said. “The purpose of that really is so we can cast this wide net. We don’t want to be that specific, because we don’t want to then lose sight of someone that might not fit that exactly.” Skills-forward hiring should be used to identify previously untapped candidates, not a blanket way to eliminate unusual or creative choices that could be an interesting fit.Richardson adds that getting too technical in the taxonomy can overwhelm the conversation, especially as hiring managers try to parse the subtleties between junior and senior versions of the same role. “I've seen the situation where developers start arguing about the nuances of ‘What does it mean to be very proficient versus mildly proficient?’ And I think you can lose the forest for the trees pretty quickly.”Copying and pasting old job descriptions when looking to fill a role is no longer enough. Instead, there should be periodic check-ins to make sure descriptions are up-to-date as the nature of the work, and therefore the role, continues to evolve. Part of this can be solved by shortening and simplifying the job listing. “It tends to be a lengthy laundry list of desires and needs. Instead, employers should aim to distill it into ‘What is the required skill for success?’” Olive said.With an eye toward DEI, Bamboat’s organization uses short external job listings with neutral language, keeping the more elaborate and specific job description for internal use only among the hiring team. “We take a lot of the details out to be able to cast that wide net,” she said.“We never want to post the exact job and be very specific about those requirements, because we feel like we’re decreasing our talent pool.” Bamboat shared the well-known study that showed women tend to only apply for jobs where they feel they will fit every single benchmark. Shortening the list of requirements can make it more inclusive. Once candidates make it to the interview phase, the hiring manager can discuss the specific details from the full listing to gauge if it’s a fit.In conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panelists discussed the topic “Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections” (photo by From Day One)Pamela Rodas, global senior director of talent acquisition at Telus International, hires for a company with more than 3,000 types of job profiles, all of which are changing rapidly as her organization embraces hybrid workplaces and remote opportunities. In turn, she and her team must change how they assess skills. For example, her newer sales development hires may not have been exposed to an in-person environment where they could hone their technique. Therefore, she finds herself hiring more for soft skills or what Dishman prefers to call power skills, especially as the post-pandemic corporate environment has higher than ever expectations. “All of our clients want to go faster. So forget about skills, do you know how to do the job and do it in less time?” Rodas said.Trying to identify those more amorphous qualities, like being a fast learner, in a candidate can be a challenge. Panelists offered two solutions. The first is reviewing case studies. “To identify these characteristics that lead to outstanding performance, you study what those outstanding performers do,” Rotolo said.The second, is conducting actual testing during the hiring process. “Work simulations can be helpful, whether that means programming together for two hours or sitting and doing a sales demo. What are those real-world experiences where you can actually test the proof points?” Richardson said. Just having a great conversation in an interview is not necessarily enough.But the interview process can still be helpful if you are asking the right questions. “The research still says that behaviorally based questions are the most valid. And there’s really two types: ‘Tell me about a time when’’ past experiences, or situational questions,” Rotolo said.Rodas believes it’s also important to have an honest conversation about the nature of the role and pay attention to the applicant’s response. “The recruiter can [now] spend more time with the candidate talking about how they would endure the type of workload we’re going to put on them. In any type of business today, that’s worth 10 times more,” she said.This also means asking the right questions internally too, to ensure there is no unconscious bias at play and that a candidate’s competency is still at the forefront. “We have an opportunity now to ask [hiring managers], ‘What's the basis of your decision?’” Olive said. “You have to understand and politely point out where you think you see bias happening.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

Katie Chambers | March 19, 2024

Stephanie Reed | March 19, 2024

Workspace Leadership: The Powerful Role of Place in Worker Well-Being and Productivity

“Everybody's familiar with the traditional ways of keeping employees happy, right?” KHOU 11 anchor and reporter Shern-Min Chow inquired. “Their salary, bonuses, benefits, health insurance. But you have some pretty interesting ideas just about our workspace in general.”“Any place we go, whether that is a sacred space, a shared space, or a private space – there are certain features that affect our needs in the workplace,” responded Dr. Alan Witt during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Houston conference.Witt, who regularly works with environmental psychologists and architects, provided the audience with profound insight into the psychological and physiological impact of the physical place of work on employee satisfaction and productivity.From the colors of the wallpaper to the presence of real (or fake) plants – every detail plays a role in cultivating a particular mood and atmosphere that can improve or hinder employee satisfaction, development, and engagement, he says.As a professor of public affairs, management, leadership, and psychology at the Bauer College of Business, Witt shared the impact of the workplace on engagement, development, and employee mental well-being. Servant Leadership: Surveying Environments for SolutionsServant leadership is a holistic approach to creating a productive workplace. It is a methodology that measures success through employee well-being and development. Servant leaders survey what areas of the workplace impact employee health and productivity to make sustainable improvements.“It's a mindset that a lot of us focused on productivity and achievement don't really have,” Witt said. “But if you treat people as the customer, they will generally respond.”Alan Witt, PhD, Professor of Management & Leadership, Public Policy, and Psychology, C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston was interviewed during the fireside chat in HoustonTraditional leadership measures success based on adherence to employee performance plans, quantified with data analysis. Servant leadership assesses the quality of the employee experience as an indication of success.Servant leaders also assess the physical environment, company culture, and their respective influences on well-being, diversity, equity, and inclusion to identify problems and create solutions to an individual’s personal and professional growth.By replicating the customer-first experience with employees, servant leaders can identify areas of improvement in the physical environment that may boost engagement in ways that traditional leadership and performance plans miss. Physical Elements Conducive to Workplace PerformanceChow and Witt identified several physical elements of a supportive workplace. Crafting an efficient workplace involves considering human psychological and physiological complexities within specific environments.For example, Chow, a news anchor at KHOU-TV, asks Witt for his perspective on the TV channel’s recent move to a new facility without permanent desks. People in the workplace may not like that because it obfuscates their identities with no individually designated spaces, says Witt.“People like to have their space and have their stuff, and they want to make it their own so that they can identify with it and people will recognize it as theirs,” Witt said.He cites UC Berkeley’s Employee Engagement Model, where autonomy and belonging are among the top 12 conscious and subconscious psychological needs that, once met, help improve employee motivation. Chow confirmed this analysis creates more efficiency. After finding the stand-up desk she liked, she remained at the same one for three years.Witt recalls when he asked a colleague what color he should use during a house renovation: “And so I called and said, ‘Please tell me what colors to choose.’ She said, ‘What do you want to experience?’ That's the key phrase that HR folks think about.”When cultivating an engaging workplace, elements that create positive physiological responses are the most sustainable. From a psychological perspective, Witt provided several examples of strategizing a workspace supporting employee mental well-being like assessing indoor air quality for mold, airflow, and temperature control. Buildings made of up to no more than 50% light wood rather than dark wood elicit a positive physiological impact and blue, green, and white encourage more focus and positive social engagement and interactions, says Witt.The unique set-up of a workplace environment plays a critical role in creating an atmosphere and behavioral dynamic that influences employees to feel more belonging and at ease or isolated and restricted.When it comes to cost-efficient solutions, Witt believes more studies are needed to determine the extent to which individuals can have control over their spaces in the workplace to support their needs without disrupting the workflow of other employees.Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses.

Mary Pieper | March 18, 2024

Whole-Person Well-Being: Nurturing a Balanced Workplace

Nikhil Shahane, global vice president of people development at TechnipFMC, recently had a revelation because of the attitude of a woman brewing coffee at Starbucks. The worker was “so cheerful and positive,” he said. “It was that small moment of interaction that was really inspirational for me.”“People are always talking about senior leaders, but inspiration comes from every person in the organization,” Shahane told Matthew Kitchen, moderator of a panel discussion during From Day One’s Houston conference.But for that to happen, company leaders need to inspire workers through day-to-day things, says Sarah Ziemer, senior vice president of employer sales at Mobe.“It’s about helping managers know how to balance empathy with accountability, and compassion starts with asking, ‘How are you doing?’’’ she said.Helena Deal, vice president of human resources at the Hess Corporation, added that it’s also important for managers to pause and give employees a chance to fully answer that question and listen closely to what they say.“It may be that everything went wrong on the school run or picking something up or we’ve got a lot of people here dealing with aging parents, young kids at school and various things like that,” she said.Dealing with Times of CrisisThe feeling of being valued as a whole person rather than just an employee is particularly important during a time of crisis, such as the pandemic, says Cheryl Nienhuis, director for the health and welfare programs at Mayo Clinic.“I think we’ve really experienced a lot since the pandemic and there’s a lot of burnout,” she said. This is particularly true in the healthcare field, where employees faced a huge increase in workload, staff shortages, and even assaults by patients, according to Nienhuis.In response, Mayo created a culture where “it’s OK to walk away” for 10 minutes to get coffee or take a walk if you are overwhelmed, she said.The speakers shared their insights on workplace well-being during the executive panel discussionIt can be difficult to convince people, especially healthcare workers, to take breaks, says Ziemer. She said when she was working for a fitness company, she encouraged her mother, an OBGYN nurse, to take a class there or get a massage to get away from the stress of her job.“She said, ‘I’m helping women in labor. I can’t leave this to go get a massage,’” Ziemer said.That’s why it’s a good idea to build break time into an employee’s workday. If they are on Zoom calls all day, “give people a window to use the restroom, to get some water,” she said, noting this also gives them time to process what was discussed during the previous meeting and come back refreshed for the next one.One example of a workplace crisis is a company being sold. Deal said when the Chevron purchase of Hess was announced last year, “people were sobbing, they were tearful. We’ve now got this prolonged time of anxiety and tension in the organization.”Internal messaging within a company is critical at times like these, according to Deal. “When people have misinformation, that creates gossip,” she said.When a company is emerging from a crisis, it’s crucial for leaders to understand that employees may be forever changed by the experience, says Kelly Oliphant, vice president, HR, talent and organizational development learning with Memorial Hermann Health System.“I think there’s a misperception around what resiliency is,” she said. “Resiliency is not your ability to bounce back. You might not actually return to where you were.” That’s why giving employees space to show their vulnerability and share their struggles is key.“I think that actually builds resilience,” Oliphant said. “It’s about being able to talk through the story of how you grew and how you’ve evolved.”The Quiet Quitting PhenomenonOver the past few years, some employees have been setting boundaries at work, leading to buzzwords like “quiet quitting” and “bare minimum Mondays” and creating a conversation about how American work culture needs to be more humane, Kitchen says. He asked the panelists for their insights on this topic.“Quiet quitting” isn’t exactly a new concept, according to Oliphant. “We’ve been talking about levels of engagement for a long time,” she said. However, what’s different now is that workers are developing the mindset that they don’t owe their employers discretionary effort. It may be that they want to direct that effort toward their personal life instead.“How do we as organizations embrace when people need to pull back and give them the resources and the space to honor that in the moment, they need to spend time with their families?” she said.Leaders shouldn’t be judgmental when employees want to pull back, says Nienhuis. “We don’t know their story. We don’t know what’s really happening behind the scenes other than what they’re sharing with us.”Shahane says it helps when employees have a sense of psychological safety at work “so they can open up and share their concerns.”One way TechnipFMC created this safe environment is by having an event during Mental Health Awareness month where a few people talked about personal stories. This encouraged others to do the same. “We got to know our people much better during the past two years than ever before” he said.Mary Pieper is a freelance writer based in Mason City, Iowa.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 15, 2024

Unlocking Gen Z’s Potential by Nurturing Engagement and Aligning Values

Generation Z entered a workforce unlike that of past generations. Not only did many of them complete their final years of university during the pandemic, separated from their peers and completing coursework in solitude, they also entered a workforce indelibly changed by remote work, rapid globalization of business, and proliferating tech.As the share of Gen Z in the workforce grows, employers are eager to recruit and retain these young workers, yet they may find themselves stumped for ways to attract, engage, and motivate them.“They’re looking for companies that aren’t going to use them and abuse them, but are rather going to give them what they feel that their worth is,” said Rachel Schonwald, senior marketing campaign manager at HR tech platform HiBob. That means respecting their boundaries and the hours they’re working, and giving them professional development opportunities.”I spent time with Schonwald recently for a From Day One webinar, titled “Unlocking Gen Z’s Potential by Nurturing Engagement and Aligning Values.” She shared the best ways to engage Gen Z and HiBob’s latest data on the workforce’s youngest demographic.Loyalty Is Tenuous for Today’s Youngest WorkersPeople of all generations are less likely these days to spend a decade with a single company or even in a single industry. But for Gen Z, tenure is remarkably short. According to HiBob’s own data, one-third of Gen Z respondents said they’re planning to leave their job within two years, Schonwald said. And unlike their older peers, they’re ready to jump ship without a new job lined up.If they don’t get what they want at work, they’re willing to look for it elsewhere. “They don’t have this long-term career path in mind. They’re still at the beginning, and they’re still experimenting,” Schonwald said.Finding More Purpose and MeaningSo, what will make them stay?More than the generations before then, Gen Z wants meaningful work. In fact, HiBob found that 42% of Gen Zers satisfied with their jobs joined their company because of its impact and mission. HiBob’s own research found that shared values is a top reason that Gen Z is likely to work for a company. But companies aren’t able to satisfy the values of every worker they employ.Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza interviewed Rachel Schonwald of HiBob during the webinar on Gen Z (photo by From Day One)“The reality is, not every corporation is a nonprofit,” Schonwald said. “However, I do think that there are a lot of different opportunities for organizations to align with those values or show their shared values, be it the work they do or the product or the output your company brings.”Some companies will be able to satisfy that need for meaning with their internal programs. “We saw a much higher proportion of Gen Z was satisfied with their workplace when they had diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging programming. Specifically, LGBTQ+ programming.”Publish information and data on your programs both internally and externally, Schonwald said. “You want to make sure that everybody within the organization knows that you have those, and you also want to attract and recruit young talent by showcasing it.”Gen Z Wants Opportunities for AdvancementIn addition to meaningful work and a place to belong, Gen Z is looking for an employer that will invest in their careers. Twenty-seven percent of Gen Z respondents told HiBob that a lack of a clear career path is what they most dislike about their current job.Young workers today are also eager to advance. “If you ask somebody early in their career, they’re going to want a promotion every six months,” Schonwald said. “I mean, who doesn’t want a promotion and a raise every six months?” But that’s not realistic, so set expectations early, showing them ways they might grow within your organization and the benchmarks they need to achieve.“Having that transparency will go a long way,” Schonwald said. “When you have something you’re working toward, usually you’ll see a lot more productivity, and you’re going to see better results because there’s a path.”But don’t limit those paths to upward ones. This generation is far more open to the “career lattice” in which moves might be upward, lateral, or even across departments. “We’ve had no stability,” she said of the ways the workplace has changed in the last five years. “The thing that we know now is that change is constant. That’s very different from what people entering the workforce 20 years ago experienced.”Zoomers Crave Workplace RelationshipsMany opportunities for advancement are won through who you know, and employers can facilitate career-building networks Gen Z wants with mentorship and sponsorship programs.“We see higher satisfaction levels within Gen Z when there are formal mentorship programs at their company,” Schonwald said. Thirty-seven percent of Gen Zers who are dissatisfied with their current employer say they get only informal mentorship opportunities, and more than 50% of satisfied Zoomers say they get formal mentorship opportunities, according to the company’s data.Gen Z, perhaps overfamiliar with remote work and digital-only relationships, is looking for a face-to-face experience: 41% of Gen Z told HiBob that they feel more engaged while working in the office than when they work remotely. In fact, more than one-third of respondents said what they most dislike about the job is that there aren’t enough opportunities to build relationships with colleagues.If you have the time and money to fly everyone into company HQ periodically, by all means do so, “but there are always great opportunities for finding digital ways to bring people together, whether that’s through ERGs, mentorship groups, or interest groups. HiBob, which is headquartered in New York, created “villages,” where workers in close proximity around the country will take a half-day and get together. “They’re across all different functions and all different levels, and that contributes to creating a village, meeting new people, and having those connections that you wouldn’t normally have. But it absolutely needs executive sponsorship, be it from HR or whoever is the most senior person in that area.”The Changing Demographics of the WorkforceMcKinsey estimates that Gen Z will constitute more than 25% of the workforce by next year. And as the Baby Boomers age out of the workforce and into retirement, the power they wield will grow.This will require employers to make significant adjustments to recruitment and working styles, Schonwald said. “Now’s the time where we can start to recognize, influence, and inform other people to make the changes that we need in order to accommodate Gen Z entering the workforce. And what they’re looking for is a little bit different.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner HiBob for sponsoring this webinar.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.