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Neurodiversity in Families: Innovative Ways for Employers to Support Parents

There are more than 11 million children with special needs in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health. For the parents of those children, the responsibilities are many and often changing—family life is different, which means their work life will be different too. How can employers make it better?“Parents will tell me, I don’t need pity, I don’t need sympathy,” said Angela Nelson, executive director of clinical services at RethinkCare, a virtual platform for behavior and mental health needs. What they do need, she says, is flexibility, reassurance, and recognition. “We’ve heard from families that they really need flexibility. That’s probably the No. 1 thing.” They also want reassurance, said Nelson. “Reassurance that they’re not going to lose their job or be discriminated against if they disclose that they have a child with a disability.”Parents of neurodivergent children appreciate the recognition that their experience of parenthood is atypical. “A lot of families I’ve talked to have said things like, ‘It was really wonderful when a colleague said, ‘You had that big doctor’s appointment or that neurologist’s appointment you’ve been waiting for for so long, how did it go?’ Or, ‘How are you doing? Not just your child, but how are you doing?’”Neurodivergence comprises a broad spectrum of conditions, but it often describes people who have Down syndrome, sensory processing disorders, intellectual disabilities, mood disorders (like bipolar disorder), Prader-Willi syndrome, Tourette syndrome, or are on the autism spectrum. No experience with neurodivergence is alike any other, but caregivers commonly shoulder a longer list of responsibilities.During From Day One’s July virtual conference on personalized approaches to family health, I moderated a panel of four leaders in HR and clinical mental health titled “Neurodiversity in Families: Innovative Ways for Employers to Support Parents.” Nelson and the other leaders discussed what they’ve learned about supporting parents who care for neurodivergent family members.Give Them Flexibility Consensus among panelists is that parents with neurodivergent children and family members need flexibility, perhaps even more than other families. They might be needed at regular school meetings or doctor’s appointments, or they might require the ability to work from home during certain periods of the day or week. For employees whose income depends on the ability to be physically present at a work site, flexibility can be tougher to come by. At Keysight Technologies, a company that makes testing and measurement equipment, on-site manufacturing-division workers have more leeway than is typical for the sector.Gloria Estrada, the company’s VP of total rewards and HR services, said employees can often choose the shift that best suits their schedules, plus “we can also set up partnerships where a couple of employees cover an environment and a timeframe–then if they need to be off, they can be off.”In some cases, flexibility can also be bought by helping parents to coordinate the search for caregivers and other providers, which can be time-consuming. Caring for a child who is neurodivergent can play a major role in parents’ ability to work full-time, and single parents are more at risk for disruptions to work schedules. Mothers of children with special needs often report changing or quitting their jobs or reducing their hours to care for their kids.The panel of speakers, clockwise from top left, moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Gloria Estrada of Keysight Technologies, Jeanne Walsh of Boston Scientific, Candace Damon of Northwestern Mutual and Angela Nelson of RethinkCare (Image by From Day One)Concierge services that handle research for workers—research about care providers, educational or behavioral counseling services, even their child’s legal rights—can lighten the workload for parents. That’s why Keysight provides its employees with such a benefit.“The stress of having to find the right provider is almost as much as doing the logistics of it, just thinking about what it takes, who I should look for, and what is available,” said Estrada. “This particular provider really helps ease not just the burden of the workload, but the mind of the employee.”Make It Easy to Access ResourcesWhatever you provide, make it simple to access and teach workers how to use it. Candace Damon, the VP of field rewards at the life-insurance company Northwestern Mutual, recently documented employee resources and their use cases.“We offered a bunch of support services, but we found that it was really hard [for employees] to navigate, given all the services we provide,” she said. “So we recently came out with a toolkit that helps them identify what organizations to work with on which topics, then those organizations help get them to providers.” Having it all documented is especially helpful to newcomers and to employees whose family member has received a diagnosis for the first time, plus it helps preserve privacy for workers who want it. “They can reach out to these third-party providers and get the support they need without one of their field leaders knowing or without one of the home office employees knowing,” Damon said. “It’s between them and those that they are searching for guidance from.”Train Workers and Managers on NeurodiversityJeanne Walsh, the director of benefits and global mobility at biomedical engineering firm Boston Scientific, acknowledged that despite having an extensive policy to be proud of—including ample time flexibility and a concierge service—more remains to be done. “What we need to do more is in manager training,” she said. “The best policy in the world isn’t effective unless there is awareness, especially from our people managers, that the needs of this particular demographic are really quite unique, and therefore need a higher level of support than someone who doesn’t have this challenge.”Employee resource groups can connect workers with the services they need in an environment where they already feel comfortable. Walsh works with Boston Scientific’s resource groups to conduct sessions about resources for parents with neurodivergent children. “Across benefits, the biggest challenge is awareness and making it easy for employees to get resources,” she said. “Corporate benefits can send out all the communications in the world, but the ERGs are the boots on the ground.” Colleagues need an understanding of what it means to care for a neurodivergent family member, and Damon’s team is trying to address that in public forums. “We’ve done a lot in the space of diversity and inclusion and creating psychological safety for our field members, from things like talking about it on the main stage at our annual meeting and at our regional meeting, to group sessions and discussing what it’s like to have neurodivergent family members.”Walsh too is making a point of destigmatizing behavioral health matters, whether it’s for the employees themselves, a child, or a spouse. “One of my colleagues in DEI, her overall philosophy is to lead with kindness,” said Walsh. “It’s making sure that we’re having those conversations at all levels, that people are seeing it from leaders within the organization, from their managers, from human resources—trying to make it easier for people to discuss the situations they have at home.”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 Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, Digiday’s Worklife, and Food Technology, among others.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | August 02, 2023
Solving a Universal Domestic Problem: Unequal Labor on the Home Front

“There is no nation on this planet where men do more unpaid labor than women,” said Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). Women still do more than two-thirds of domestic work despite advances in society, says Rodsky.Lila Seidman, reporter at the Los Angeles Times, interviewed Rodsky during From Day One’s virtual conference focused on family health. Their fireside chat started with a screening of the trailer of Jennifer Siebel Newson’s documentary based on Rodsky’s book.“I felt I was the default for every single domestic task in my family,” said Rodsky in the trailer. A mother, wife, and attorney, Rodsky was placed in a balancing act to manage her work and home life. Frustrated by the unequal domestic labor that was placed on her plate, Rodsky set out to research women’s labor in the household around the world. Righting the injustice of women’s unpaid labor requires more than verbal agreement from husbands. Instead, in her book and work, Rodsky enumerates the steps that are needed to save women’s well-being and maintain happiness in the home.From her research beginning in 2011, Rodsky crystallized the requirements for healthy households: defined expectations, fairness, transparency, accountability, and trust. If one of these components is missing, the home becomes disharmonious and stressful.Rodsky was interviewed by Lila Seidman during the grand finale fireside chat session (photo by From Day One)Since the publication of Rodsky’s book in 2019, she has seen its impact around the world. Procter and Gamble sponsored her trip to the World Economic Forum where she spoke to an international audience. There she learned of similar movements in India.The author also received “a wonderful message from politicians in Germany, who were realizing the difference in women’s labor force participation rates in the regions where kids have to come home for lunch versus when lunch is provided in schools.”The ‘jar of mustard challenge’ was a scenario Rodsky posed in the countries she studied. Imagine that a woman asks her husband to go out and buy yellow mustard. She is specific because she knows her son will not eat protein without the condiment. Instead, the husband returns with brown mustard every time. Now the wife loses trust in her husband.Women “cannot trust their husbands with their living will because they’re not bringing home the right type of mustard,” she summarized.The author reflects on the impact of this one poorly executed task multiplied by the innumerable duties that comprise household work.While male partners may assert that they are willing to bear the load of housework and childcare, in fact, they maneuver themselves out of considerable responsibility. “Women tend to under-report and men overreport” the amount of work they do, says Rodsky. “We need to invite men to their full power. Men have to do domestic work.”The problem of women’s unpaid work appears in the workplace as well. It is analogous to a female worker’s assuming the burden of an office party and all that entails. Her colleagues expect her to produce the festivity by ordering balloons, the cake, issuing announcements, and more.But how does one get both domestic partners to buy into Rodsky’s remedies? Seidman mentioned the deck of cards that the book Fair Play offers readers. These 100 cards represent tasks that are to be divided fairly. Once someone accepts a card, he or she agrees to complete it from conception to execution.“It’s not only about fairness. It’s about ownership,” Rodsky said.Francine Brevetti is a ghostwriter, author and editor at www.francinebrevetti.com.

Francine Brevetti | August 01, 2023
Family-Forming Benefits Add Value for Companies, Quality for Employees

The case for companies adding family-forming benefits for their workers can be persuasively summed up in two statistics. Surveys show that 70% of millennials would change jobs for fertility benefits and 97% of employers say adding infertility coverage did not significantly increase medical plan costs.Considering both data points, Dr. David Adamson, founder, chairman and CEO of ARC Fertility, says there is plenty of value for companies looking to begin offering family-forming benefits for employees. And because of the low cost of adding fertility benefits to a medical plan, Adamson says companies do not need to worry about sacrificing quality in the interest of budget adherence.One in seven couples will experience infertility at some point in their life, a problem that often leads to productivity, engagement and satisfaction issues for employees in the workplace.Adamson utilizes his three decades of experience in the reproductive health field to help businesses increase family-forming benefits to raise morale and, in turn, employee efficiency.“I’m delighted to see companies and employers paying attention to this important part of life,” he said during From Day One’s July virtual conference on family health. “This has become a really important topic in the past few years.”Offering Employee BenefitsDue to the low cost and high importance of fertility health plans, Adamson said companies must provide options for quality care to employees and ensure that the costs of the programs are not prohibitive due to high deductibles or other out-of-pocket expenses.“The end game is you still have to have good medical outcomes to have quality,” he said, adding that the flow of information to employees is essential when dealing with complex issues such as infertility.Dr. David Adamson led the virtual thought leadership spotlight session titled, “How to Identify High Value Family-Forming Benefits” (company photo)“The health care system is complicated,” Adamson said. “It’s good to start out with an app to provide initial information, but employees need to be able to talk to someone one-on-one and find out their actual needs, because it’s so different for everyone.”He also stressed the importance of fertility care among LGBTQ+ and single employees, who often seek the care at much higher rates — and can be helped by receiving fertility-minded guidance.“Diet, exercise, and how I should be thinking in respect to my age if I’m single — it’s important,” he said. “If you might be planning a family later, what should you be doing now? There are general questions that can help people understand reproductive life later and help them make better choices.”Value for Companies, Quality for EmployeesBundling care packages helps companies reduce the overhead and allow for high-quality care to be offered to a specific person to let them get precisely what they’re looking for out of a health program, Adamson says.“This can help reduce maternity and NICU costs,” he said, adding that there is a lot of “hidden” waste in health costs for employers that can be reduced by offering fertility care.He says companies that cover 1,000 employees will typically lose about $32,000 per year due to miscoding. “This is hidden in the general medical plan,” he said.Small subsidies for employees can reduce those losses significantly, and Adamson says the recommended subsidy of about $20,000 per employee is known to cost companies only about $100 per employee for a year.He said the addition of family-forming benefits by an employer is also considered a win on the public relations side of the business and often aligns with employees who want to work for an organization that supports diversity, equity and inclusion and the improvement of employees’ lives.“These benefits can improve the emotional health of employees and increase their engagement,” he said.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks its partner, ARC Fertility, who sponsored this thought leadership spotlight. Tim Zyla is the managing editor of a community newspaper in Pennsylvania and has a strong interest in business and finance.

Tim Zyla | July 31, 2023
Beyond the Job: Supporting Employees with Caregiving Responsibilities

In the U.S., 73% of employees stated they had some type of caregiving responsibility. Of these employees, more than 80% of them stated that their role as a caregiver has affected their work productivity, according to a Harvard Business School study.Employers have a key role in ensuring employees feel supported as caregivers. In a panel discussion during From Day One’s July virtual conference, Lydia Dishman, senior editor of growth and engagement at Fast Company, spoke with leaders on how their companies support caregiving and the impact they see.Offering Support for All Types of CaregivingWhen the pandemic closed the doors to offices and buildings, employees who were also caregivers had to learn to be a worker and caregiver under the same roof.The reality of returning to the office has been difficult for these caregivers. In a study of the current trends in the child care industry, researchers found that nationally, child care employment has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. With limited access and increased costs of child care providers, workers feel the emotional and economic strain of separating from their caregiving duties as they return to the office.Dan Figurski, president at KinderCare Education, recognizes the importance of child care benefits in his own company. In an employee survey, Figurski and his team discovered that child care was the second most requested benefit after medical benefits. In response, he and his team developed a plan to make sure employees’ needs were met.“Cost and accessibility are two huge issues for child care. So, we’re connecting KinderCare partners with organizations that are partnering with other childcare providers to have what we call subsidized childcare,” Figurski said. “We [also] increase the subsidy of our child care benefits so our employees who have children pay no more than $100 a week, while we cover the remaining cost.”Listening and acting accordingly to meet employees’ needs yielded positive results for KinderCare, which saw an increase in employee retention with these new benefits.But caregiving isn’t just limited to child care. For some employees, providing care for their loved ones or parents can also be a responsibility. According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 24% of employees have access to paid family leave in the private sector workforce, leaving a resounding majority of employees paying costs out of pocket.Companies need to also recognize the various types of caregiving and ensure they have benefits that encompass all of them. Christopher Smith, senior director of benefits at Universal Music Group, lauds one of the benefits his company provides to employees. “We introduced paid family caregiver leave where we’re not just focusing on folks who are having babies but focusing on family, so we have [time] to take care of each other,” Smith said. “I thought that that was absolutely incredible.”Providing Flexibility for New Parents at WorkWithout the need to commute during the pandemic, employees who juggled caregiving responsibilities were able to maximize time in their favor. For new parents, the shift in remote work was a prolonged opportunity to be there for their newborns.As a leader of a company that produces breast pumps, products, and support, Dana Kirwin, director of employer and government relations at Medela, acknowledges how important it was to support parents in the early stages of parenthood. “We have a lot of [working parents] at Medela who need more flexibility and are capable of doing everything that needs doing. But maybe they need to take a break in the afternoon to get their kids from the bus stop and then jump back on or want to start their day a little bit later so they can get everybody out the door in the morning,” Kirwin said. “As a company, we’ve taken that to heart and moved from it being a manager-to-manager decision and instituted some policies company-wide to support it and I think it's been a very welcome change.”The panelists discussed the topic “Supportive Solutions for the Many Stages of Parenthood” (photo by From Day One)For new parents, the return to work can be daunting when it comes to handling both work and caregiving responsibilities. New parents are dealing with sleep deprivation, and new mothers may also be dealing with symptoms of postpartum depression, which heightens anxiety and depressive thoughts.Employees who become new parents simply aren’t the same as they once were, Kirwin says. During the transitional time of returning to work, employees need support not just from their companies but from coworkers as well. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, you're back.’ And they rush off to the way things used to be before that baby arrived. For an employee who comes back to work and is juggling sleeplessness and breastfeeding, a lot of that struggle is invisible,” Kirwin said. “The mental health and cultural support inside an organization to recognize what those employees are going through by instilling structure and policies that give them space to transition back is just really important.”Instilling these types of change at a company starts with open communication. Employees need a safe environment to voice their needs, and employers need to be able to provide that.Madison Randolph, Psy.D., registered psychological associate at Oaks Psychological Services, said providing a safe environment for employees who are new parents can help normalize these conversations for future employees. “Normalizing those conversations can be helpful for individuals that are experiencing those transitions, where everything is changing or shifting,” Randolph said. “Making it more of a conversation than a quiet topic is helpful.”Easing Accessibility to BenefitsTo use company benefits, employees need to first know and understand what benefits are provided to them. However, with difficult-to-understand terms and technical issues, accessibility to benefits can be a challenge.Arturo Arteaga, senior total rewards director at VCA Animal Hospitals, said communication and reeducation on employee benefits are key in making sure employees know where to look for their benefits.“Benefits are not easy to memorize and too complex to know exactly what you have to do in each case,” Arteaga said. “Employees need to know where to go, where to find information, who is the right person to talk to so they can take advantage of those benefits at any given time.”For employees, not only can finding information about their benefits be a challenge, but access to these benefits can also be difficult.Smith emphasizes the need for companies to make sure employees can access their benefits information more conveniently. “You're not usually needing any benefits when you're sitting at your desk. It’s maybe after five o'clock and now you’re in line at the pharmacy, “What's the number that I call? What's my ID number?” We get those questions a lot, so we need to do whatever we can to reduce any barriers to accessing benefits information.”Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City. 

Wanly Chen | July 28, 2023
Trust and Inspire: How Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others

In the realm of old habits that die hard, there’s a management principle that has stuck through the 20th century and beyond, called “command and control.” It’s the top-down, military style approach to leadership. Stephen M. R. Covey, the best-selling author and leadership-development expert, compares command and control to stubborn ancient traditions like bloodletting, which remained in use well into the 19th century, despite being disproved scientifically and having hastened the death of George Washington, Scotland’s King Charles II, and countless others.“Old paradigms can live on indefinitely,” said Covey. “I think command and control today is like modern-day bloodletting, in that we’re just kind of persisting from an inaccurate, faulty paradigm that is no longer relevant.”Covey, speaking at a fireside chat that capped off From Day One’s conference in Salt Lake City, said that command and control served the world well enough when work was something that took place in factories, but it ceased being the right tool for the job with the emergence of knowledge work. He explores these ideas in his book Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others.The title describes what Covey proposes should be the new model. “‘Trust and inspire is the better way to lead a new world of work,” he said. To the world’s credit, the evolution away from command and control has been underway for a while now, albeit very slowly. “Over time, people said, ‘You know, but we’re not valuing people enough. We need to look at this better.’ And so they began to add things like emotional intelligence, and strengths and mission, and even trustworthiness,” Covey said. “And they became more enlightened. The problem was, we didn’t shift the paradigm. It just became a more enlightened version of command and control. True, enlightened command and control is better than the authoritarian, but it’s still not the kind of sea-change shift of trust and inspire, where you view people differently.” Stephen M.R. Covey signed books and chatted with attendees at From Day One’s conference in Salt Lake City, where his company is based (Photos by Sean Ryan for From Day One)Students of organizational leadership know that Covey’s late father, Stephen R. Covey, catalyzed the very paradigm shift that facilitated this enlightenment, through his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Influential People. Indeed, the elder Covey is even credited with popularizing the phrase “paradigm shift.” It’s compelling to see the younger Covey building upon and extending his father’s work. Covey says the pandemic cast a bright light on how starkly mismatched our day-to-day and workplace leadership realities are. “The pandemic accelerated this. Remote work, hybrid work, intentionally flexible work. Change and disruption and technology. People have choices and options they didn’t have before. The whole world has changed. And yet, our style of leadership has not kept pace,” he said.How does one become the kind of leader who trusts and inspires? To address this question, Covey distributed decks of cards summarizing the philosophy and steps to manifest it. Central to the process is incorporating the Five Fundamental Beliefs of a Trust and Inspire Leader. As he described them:No. 1: People have greatness inside them. “Leaders who incorporate this belief will unleash the potential of their employees, not control them,” Covey said. No. 2: People are whole people. “If I believe that, then my job is to inspire, not merely motivate,” Covey said. “If people were only economic beings, then motivation would be sufficient. Just carrot and stick–and that can work. But we’re leaving a lot of potential and value on the table.”No. 3: There is enough for everyone. “A leader needs to elevate caring above competing by instilling an abundance mentality,” Covey said.No. 4: Leadership is stewardship. “My job as a leader is to put service above self-interest,” Covey said. “It’s a stewardship, which is a job that comes with a trust, and that trust is to inspire.”No. 5: Enduring influence is created from the inside out. “My job as a leader is to go first. Someone has to. Inspiring leaders go first,” Covey added. A consistent impediment to becoming a trust-and-inspire leader is the mistaken belief that leadership requires certain personality traits.  “Some people want to do more than motivate, they want to inspire, and they say, ‘But I’m not inspiring!’ You’ve got to be charismatic to inspire,” Covey said. “Don’t confuse the two, because they are not the same. I know many people whom no one would call charismatic but who are remarkably inspiring, because of who they are, how they lead, how they connect, how they care. Inspiring others is a learnable skill.” Covey took a final swipe at the status quo by challenging the widely held belief that organizations should be measuring their success by levels of employee engagement.“We’ve been focusing on engagement for 20-plus years, it's been the Holy Grail, and engagement still is vital. But there’s something beyond engagement. It’s inspiration,” Covey said. “Inspired employees are not only 125% more productive than merely satisfied employees–and you might expect that because that is not a high bar. But inspired employees are even 56% more productive than fully engaged employees. There’s another frontier of engagement, and it’s to be inspired.”Ultimately, Covey sees a lot riding on his effort to bring this next generation of organizational leadership change to the fore. Indeed, he quoted Gandhi when explaining what’s at stake. “Gandhi said, ‘The difference between what we are doing, and what we are capable of doing, would solve most of the world's problems.’ So we're trying to tap into that. I think most organizations have that kind of capacity as well.” Judd Bagley is a marketing communications professional and freelance journalist.   

Judd Bagley | July 27, 2023
How HR Leaders Can Prepare Workers for Economic Uncertainty

The recession that corporate America has been anticipating for months never quite seems to arrive–and the forecasts are mixed. Indeed, “it can be difficult to tell in real time whether the economy is smoothly decelerating or whether it is creeping toward the edge of a cliff,” noted the New York Times this week.The situation has created a period of prolonged uncertainty–not the favored climate for a workforce. So how can HR leaders prepare their team members to be ready for a change in the weather when it comes? While it may seem logical to some leaders to prepare for an economic slowdown by implementing hiring and salary freezes and scaling back initiatives to improve retention, a better plan would be to focus on using available tools to drive productivity and resilience, according to two leaders from Achievers, an employee recognition and engagement platform, who led a From Day One webinar. Achievers aims to accelerate workplace engagement and performance by giving employees a voice through pulse surveys, frequent check-ins, and networks that allow them to learn, grow, and contribute to their communities. Achievers Workforce Institute (AWI), the company’s research arm, is rooted in rigorous workforce science, including a survey of more than 5,000 employees and HR leaders across the globe.The Impact of Belonging: HR’s North Star Achievers' research found that helping employees remain resilient and productive were key factors for success and that they were twice as likely to feel this way when they had a strong sense of belonging. “Productivity can be difficult to measure, so if you can improve things like engagement, job commitment, and enthusiasm, you’re almost certainly going to increase productivity,” said Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist for Achievers. Where productivity is the “downstream measuring stick,” Hannah Yardley, chief people and culture officer for Achievers, said that focusing on small, measurable ways to increase productivity can have an outsized impact, and focusing on belonging is the perfect path.The five pillars of belonging are about making employees feel:1.) Welcomed: Introduced to, and incorporated within, the organizational culture and community2.) Known: Understood, motivated, and celebrated as an individual3.) Included: Valued and accepted without reservation4.) Supported: Consistently and meaningfully nurtured and developed5.) Connected: Developing and maintaining relationships across a diverse populationBaumgartner noted that “if this pandemic has taught us anything about the human experience, it’s that we do not thrive in isolation. We must have the opportunity to regularly develop and maintain relationships across a diverse community to feel a true sense of belonging.”The Roadmap to Create BelongingHow do we get there? AWI’s research found five action areas that had the most impact on resilience and productivity: recognition, feedback, connection, manager empowerment, and culture alignment. The Achievers speakers focused on three of these elements:Boosting Recognition: The data is compelling. Weekly employee recognition doubled individual resilience, and 42% of these employees reported they believed their organization was prepared for–and could manage–unexpected changes. Productivity jumped significantly as well. Yet one of Achievers’ earlier reports showed that only 14% of employees receive any kind of training on recognition. Yardley stressed that a culture of recognition needs to become ingrained by making it part of the onboarding process, reminding employees about it, tracking how often managers recognize their team members, and optimizing your organization’s recognition program.Among the tips the speakers shared: Focus on quality and quantity by recognizing positive behavior in real-time. “Social recognition” is the way to say thank-you that doesn’t have any monetary cost, from a thumbs-up in a chat, a callout in the weekly staff meeting, a “great job” in the hallway, or actually singing a worker’s praises on a social site like Linkedin or your company Facebook page.Managers should ensure recognition occurs within the work flow. For workers on computers all day, consider Teams, Outlook, Slack, or Zoom. For offline workers, it means having a consumer-grade mobile app.Employers should fuel recognition programs with a proactive, ongoing communication strategy. Encourage recognition with training, reminders, special campaigns, and technology resources for managers.Companies need to measure success with metrics that matter to the business. Compare recognition frequency to survey results about engagement and productivity.Creating Connection: “What you're looking at here is the correlation between employees who say their organization supports them and making friends at work compared to productivity, individual resilience, and organizational resilience,” said Baumgartner. Employees who felt supported in this way reported being nearly three times more productive. Affinity groups or Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) like a women’s network, an LGBTQ group, or a military-veterans group stood out to Yardley, who said, “we feel so convinced that these are the right things to do that we actually fund these groups. We help them set budgets for both the group members and for the company as a whole.” Connection tools can also support belonging for a distributed workforce, helping put names and faces together and encouraging a sense of connection.Building Manager Effectiveness and Empowerment:“We’ve been tracking manager effectiveness in our research for over two years now and it’s consistently one of the strongest predictors of productivity and retention,” noted Baumgartner. Four factors are critical:1.) Contact: AWI suggests regular and frequent one-on-one meetings as well as ad hoc check-ins, starting with positive feedback, asking where employees may need help, and defining next steps.2.) Recognition: It bears repeating. Showing appreciation in meaningful ways is easy and tripled managers’ scores.3.) Development: Managers who help employees navigate clear career paths create loyalty. Companies need to empower managers to offer intermediate development steps, including stretch assignments and upskilling.4.) Coaching: Rather than a manager identifying problems and telling employees what to do, a coaching approach reverses this process. “The employee is empowered to identify both the problem and the solution with the manager really taking on more of a consultative role,” said Baumgartner.All told, employers should focus on where they can truly make change and break their action plans into small steps and measurable results. Implementing employee surveys, planning with attention and intention, remaining flexible, and humbly pivoting after negative feedback is solid advice. We encourage all of you to read the HR Preparedness Report and understand the pillars of belonging so you can work to increase belonging throughout your organization.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Achievers, for sponsoring this webinar. Gail Gonzales is a writer, brand strategist and designer based in Austin. Her boutique agency, Evolve Your Brand, helps business owners who care about the positive evolution of people or the planet amplify their message.

Gail Gonzales | July 26, 2023
Older Workers and Technology: How They Approach It With a Different Mindset

Karen Fleshman is a 54-year-old CEO of a small workshop-facilitation company based in the world’s tech capital, the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, a potential client approached her about creating some anti-harassment videos, but before they would award her company the contract, they wanted to see a sample. Fleshman’s expertise is content, not tech. To win the job, she would need to deliver both.“I was like, ‘Oh God, this is not something I can record on my phone,” said Fleshman. “I’m really going to have to work to make this look up to their standards.” Video creation and artificial intelligence is new territory for Fleshman—for the project, she’s teaching herself Descript, Loom, StreamYard, and Beautiful.ai—but resourcefulness comes naturally. “I’m not the most technologically proficient person to have walked the planet,” she said. “But I am a very creative person, and I’m also a very strategic person.”Fleshman is careful to not live down to the stereotypes about people in her age bracket when it comes to technological proficiency. “There is the assumption that I won’t be technologically proficient, so I’m trying to not play into the stereotype that I’m going to ask for help because I’m frustrated,” Fleshman told From Day One. “I try to do what Millennials do and look for a YouTube tutorial.”Most mid- and late-career workers know the preconceived notions counting against them: bad with tech, slow to learn, resistant to change. A survey by Generation.org found that people 45 and older commonly cite their age as one of the most significant barriers to getting hired. If indeed “every company now is a tech company,” like the pundits declare, where does that leave older workers who are especially susceptible to the ageist stereotype that the older you are, the fewer tech skills you have and are capable of learning?Karen Fleshman, CEO of a workshop-facilitation company in the Bay Area (Photo courtesy of Karen Fleshman; featured photo by Gorodenkoff/iStock by Getty Images)  In some cases, Gen Zers and Millennials do outperform their older peers when it comes to tech. There’s data to support this. In 2021, the Urban Institute found that, generally, adults aged 50 and older have fewer digital skills than those under age 50, though the gap is not particularly wide. Simple exposure is likely to blame. If Gen Xers wrote their term papers at terminals in the university computer lab, Gen Zers dictated theirs to a phone that autocorrected their spelling and generated perfect MLA citations. “People say, ‘I want to hire digital natives because they’re more adaptable and more skilled with tech,’ but I’ve never seen any empirical evidence that that’s true,” said Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management at UC-Santa Barbara and co-author of The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI. Yet in some cases, older workers aren’t given the opportunity to learn new tech skills because it’s assumed they either don’t want to or aren’t capable.  With the quantity and variety of technology available to the average consumer growing relentlessly, it’s becoming harder for anyone to be a true expert on the innumerable choices at hand. “So many of these technologies are new for everyone, not just the older folks in the workforce,” said Loren Blandon, the global head of learning and development for advertising agency VMLY&R. “We’re all on this learning curve together, so from that perspective, there’s an even playing field.”If more seasoned workers express resistance to new tools, it’s not on stubborn principle, but because they’ve seen tech trends before, said Heather Tinsley-Fix, a senior advisor at AARP, which offers a multigenerational skill-building platform. How many promising new ideas have been adopted only for them to be made obsolete or replaced just as quickly? “Whereas a younger worker who’s 20 years old, this might be their first or second change of processor platform,” Tinsley-Fix observed.Older workers pump the brakes out of judicious caution while “young workers charging ahead, and it looks like younger workers are better at this,” said Leonardi.The distorted notion that older workers look unkindly at change can do a lot of damage to a well-developed career. According to the Generation.org study, hiring managers said that reluctance to learn new technologies is the No. 1 characteristic most likely to limit the success of job seekers 45 and older. No. 2 is the inability to learn new skills. In addition, hiring managers tend to think of workers under age 45 as being more “application-ready,” that they have more relevant experience and are a better culture fit.But those same managers fail to support their own beliefs. The same survey found that when asked about overall performance, 87% of hiring managers said that their older workers perform as well or better than their younger peers.Given the penalties for being “old” in the workplace, mid- and late-career workers worry about looking like the stereotype. “There’s this internalized ageism, where they’re afraid that they’re going to be perceived as slow and not able to do it better or fast enough,” said Tinsley-Fix. “If I don’t know how to do something on, say, LinkedIn, I will go to someone and ask them to teach me, but I will never admit it openly because I’m mid-career, and I don’t want people to know that I don’t know.”Kyra Sutton, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, said the ability to use or learn new skills isn’t usually what divides the generations, it’s the format. Sutton is currently surveying her students about their learning preferences, and the unofficial results indicate that “those under 25 prefer mechanisms like TikTok and YouTube. People that are 45 and older still want technology, but they want it consumed in a different way. TED Talks or podcasts are very popular among that group.” Blandon at VMLY&R flagged something similar. “I think learning styles are more personality-based than age-based, but if I had to say where age differences emerge, it would be in attention span. For our entry-level folks, we need to come at them with short-form video.”Leonardi notes that motivation can also vary across generations. Older workers, he’s found, have less patience for learning things they aren’t interested in. Employers may be wise to have senior team members take on new tech that corresponds to a totally new skill they’re interested in learning. “Let your older workers surprise you,” Leonardi said. “Give them the opportunity to use a new tool not for the sake of using a new tool, but to expand their own knowledge, and they will have the motivation.”For many, interest is self-generated. “There have been times in this when I’ve become incredibly frustrated,” said Fleshman, the Bay Area entrepreneur. The video tools she’s teaching herself don’t integrate with each other, and the standards for video production are exceedingly high. “Because we have all these tools at our disposal, the standards of what things should look and feel like are so high. And then it’s me and my laptop.”Why, then, didn’t she just hire out the work? Wouldn’t it be easier to write the content herself and hire experts to do the video production? Because it’s new, she said. It could land her this new client, and now she’s considering recording other sessions and gating them behind a paywall. “I wanted to develop a new skill, and I wanted to see what these different things are capable of doing. I’m doing this on contract for another company, but I can apply this to my own. I’m excited about that possibility.” 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 Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, Digiday’s Worklife, and Food Technology, among others.   

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | July 26, 2023
How HR Can Deploy AI to Enhance the Employee Experience

Much of the emerging conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) is full of doom and gloom, focusing on how the technology will replace human workers–or turn their work lives upside down. Yet it’s possible to envision a near future in which AI will have a beneficial side, especially when it comes to the employee experience (EX) in companies that are determined to put people first.That’s the scenario illustrated by two leaders from Erudit (pronounced AIR-uh-dite), an AI platform for companies to track and manage employee-experience initiatives, who gave a workshop presentation on the future of work at From Day One’s San Francisco conference. Erudit’s team of psychologists and data scientists is on a mission to demystify AI for HR, specifically regarding culture management and initiatives to enhance EX, said co-host Corey Jordon, Erudit’s head of growth. In the interactive session, the Erudit leaders told their audience how and why EX is the next big thing for AI and HR tech, advised on practical ways to address issues like burnout and turnover, and how AI for EX levels the playing field for employees and management alike.Corey Jordon, left, Erudit’s head of growth, presenting with Joe Meyer, Erudit’s senior natural-language processing researcher and engineer (Photo by From Day One)“Staying informed about tech goes beyond just ‘tech’ roles,” said Joe Meyer, Erudit’s senior natural-language processing researcher and engineer. “It’s important to dispel myths around AI as people leaders, recognizing the value it has for understanding and improving the employee experience.”The co-hosts offered a bounty of statistics to show the scale of the AI boom: Private investment in AI was 18 times greater in 2022 than in 2013. Invsetment in AI for HR Tech doubled from 2021 to 2022, reaching $1.63 billion. The benefits for people leaders can be striking: 56% of AI early adopters report significant improvement in the EX space. Generative AI technology is showing plenty of uses: creating job descriptions, filtering and tracking prospective hires, and screening candidates. Erudit focuses in particular on employee sentiment, monitoring it in real time and tracking trends across teams.Yet it’s all a lot for HR leaders to absorb. When the co-hosts took an “AI vibe check” among the attendees, their responses were on a spectrum of “uneasy” to “optimistic.” The participants asked plenty of questions too, which served to highlight the major issues that need to be sorted out: How can big-business changes like mergers and acquisitions impact employee experience during onboarding? How do members of marginalized groups feel seen and heard in a dispersed workplace? How can companies convey that employee-sentiment tools are helping employees–not there to infringe on their privacy?The co-hosts sought to demystify the science as well, explaining that machine intelligence, loosely based on the human brain, is math, not magic. They pointed out that the old data-processing maxim of “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” applies to AI as well: data quality is crucial.The back-to-back crises of the last three years finally gave HR leaders a seat at the table when it comes to corporate influence, and they’re not going to give it up easily. But they need to pursue their initiatives with a mind toward business impact and connection to the workforce. While pulse surveys can give insight into culture initiatives, People leaders need real-time, actionable data from their workforce. This is how Erudit empowers HR and people executives to tap into organic interactions for data instead of relying on gut instinct only, the company’s co-hosts said. Each workforce is unique and complex, and workplace sentiments change by the minute.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks its partner, Erudit, who sponsored this workshop. To find out more about them, tune in to the brand’s podcast, The Employee Experience Experience, and sign up for the People-First Newsletter.    

the Editors | July 25, 2023
Trailblazers of Change: How DEI Leaders Are Paving the Way Forward

When Nicole Hughey was hired as VP of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Sirius XM in July 2020, she joined executives at hundreds of other companies who were tasked with effecting “real change,” according to a memo from Sirius XM.Now, across corporate America, that “real change” may be headed in the opposite direction.“I’m seeing colleagues laid off, entire teams wiped out, and DEI budgets are being slashed because folks are focusing on other things,” said Hughey, now a senior VP. “That’s the biggest obstacle right now.”The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 led to a surge in businesses and organizations across the country pledging an increased focus on DEI efforts. In the past year, however, that momentum has been stalled by corporate austerity, “diversity fatigue” among some members of the workforce, as well as political backlash.How can DEI leaders and advocates adapt? In one sense, the push to foster a more understanding and accepting workforce has evolved from leaders wanting to teach employees how to be inclusive to current strategies based on listening to the experiences of individual workers.“We should listen with curiosity and not listen to solve,” Hughey said. “If you listen, you get data, and that can help us directionally with where we need to go.”Hughey and four other DEI leaders spoke during a panel moderated by New York Times deputy managing editor Monica Drake as part of From Day One’s live conference in Brooklyn.Funding DEI and its Profit PotentialAs businesses experience economic headwinds spurred by the aftereffects of heightened inflation, DEI funding has been caught in the crosshairs as companies look to preserve profits.Atrium’s VP of people and engagement Cara Zibbell said it’s essential for executives to understand that DEI efforts can bring monetary value to a business, albeit indirectly.“This is about employee engagement and DEI is part of a pillar in that,” she said. “I think we all stand to achieve both goals — people goals and profit goals. Marry the two and run them parallel.”Monica Drake of the New York Times moderated the panel discussion at the Brooklyn Museum (photos by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)Keeping experience on the payroll by maximizing employee engagement benefits companies in the long run, says Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor for financial resilience at AARP. “The Mercer Workforce Sciences Institute released a study last year that said tenure is directly related to business success,” she said. “There are two implications I take from that: Experience does, in fact, matter, and the other is it’s important to have employees who are employees rather than consultants or gig workers. Bringing employees in and keeping them there has a real impact on the bottom line.”Saks VP of DEI Alicia Williams said her team uses the acronym CAPS to operate under budget restrictions and said it’s important to remember that not all problems must be solved for DEI efforts to be worthwhile. “We go into “All CAPS” mode,” she said. “CAPS stands for collaboration, asking, prioritizing and strategizing.”Williams says her team is always looking for other businesses to combine forces to achieve a common goal, and said they’ve also learned that sometimes a solution can be found just by asking company executives for help.“Prioritizing is learning to have a realistic conversation with yourself — hey, we may want all of this, but what are the priorities for this year?” she said.Identifying Goals and ToolsSince creating a DEI-focused program in 2021, NAF, a nonprofit that supports career academies within traditional high schools,  has embraced an internal and external strategy for helping its leaders create a feeling of safety among its employees, said Tara Bellevue, VP of diversity, equity and access strategy.“We’re a lesser-known company, but we’ve made progress in the last few years,” she said. “We talk about brave spaces and invite people into it. This is where we’re sharing and have that happen not just once, but on a regular basis.”Panelists agreed that both formal and informal avenues of employee engagement should be considered.“They’re both really important,” Hughey said. “Not every structure you set up will get you the information you might want or need, so those informal conversations are critically important.”About 70% of executive senior leaders fear showing empathy because it is often perceived as a weakness, Zibbell says.“How do we bridge that gap?” she asked. “Listening is not just tuning in or taking information and putting yourself in their shoes. It’s stopping and understanding that I can’t just know what it’s like in your shoes.”Taking a Top-down ApproachWhile adverse conduct exhibited by employees in organizations is often the result of ingrained behaviors, Drake asked panelists if it is possible to be taught how to appropriately speak, listen and engage more productively.“Yes, you can, but it starts with creating an environment within a space,” Bellevue said.Hughey agreed, “But with anything you learn, it takes time to get it right. I ask leaders to give themselves grace and give themselves permission to go into something that is uncomfortable. Two or three years ago when I first joined Sirius XM, we forced leaders into conversations about race. I know they thought I lost my mind, but it was important for me to say, ‘As leaders, you must lead the way. I need you to show up authentically as yourself.’”The full panel of speakers, pictured, discussed the topic “How to Keep Momentum Going on Diversity and Inclusion”Tinsley-Fix, who focuses on generational biases that may lead to the pushing aside of older Americans in the workplace, says it’s key for employees to have humility.“You have to have a balance of people with different levels of experience. Older white men do have something to bring to the table, but you must have that humility. Recognizing the explosion of all of these different aspects of diversity is important, but it also makes it challenging.”Noting that in the beginning of the DEI movement it was referred to as EDI, Williams said more shifts will occur as the initiatives continue to evolve.“We must stay up on trends, on how communities are impacted and use inclusive language libraries. DEI shouldn’t just be in HR, it should extend to marketing, finance and merchandising — not just during holidays and heritage months. In the future, think about how you will restructure DEI in your organization, so it remains relevant.”Hughey concluded, “We all have egos, but at the end of the day, if I leave my organization and they think DEI has gone away because I left, I have not done my job.”Tim Zyla is the managing editor of a community newspaper in Pennsylvania and has a strong interest in business and finance.

Tim Zyla | July 25, 2023
Maintaining Momentum in Diversity and Inclusion Efforts

Julia Lashay Israel, head of inclusion and belonging at Keller Williams, is cautious about using the acronym ‘DEI.’ “I prefer to explicitly write [diversity, equity, and inclusion] out. I’ve found that most people, if you say DEI, really have no idea what it means, or what you’re doing, or what the work means. They just know that they’ve heard it [in media, online and elsewhere] as this bad thing,” said Israel.Israel and a panel of four other leaders participated in a discussion at From Day One’s June conference in Austin, Texas, titled “How to Keep The Momentum Going With Diversity and Inclusion,” moderated by reporter Deborah Sengupta Stith. The panelists addressed the challenging gap between companies’ commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, (DEI) and employees not feeling a sense of belonging, as noted in Gallup surveys and a report issued by the Pew Research Center.In her role, Israel focuses on both external and internal DEI efforts. All 170,000 realtors at Keller Williams collaborate with individuals to ensure fair and equal opportunities for homeownership. “We believe that people build wealth through homeownership.” The internal focus with DEI at Keller Williams is to ensure there are growth opportunities within the company.Janet Etlinger, vice president, HRBP leader for HPE’s computer business unit,  agreed with Israel’s thoughts on DEI, stating, “We are in a really polarizing climate right now.” She shared her observations about the limited diversity in their boardrooms. “We still have to get there,” said Etlinger. Etlinger is responsible for managing HR business partners at HPE worldwide, supporting staff that designs general-purpose servers with artificial intelligence as a driver. Etlinger supports DEI training presented to employees as optional vs. mandatory to ensure buy-in with initiatives.Commitment to DEIMadhukar Govindaraju, founder and CEO of Numly, talked about his first step toward his company’s commitment to DEI, signing a pledge to CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion. Govindaraju focuses on an intersectional definition of diversity ‘’Diversity for us is not just based on gender and ethnicity. We include neurodiversity and disability in our definition,” said Govindaraju.Staff at Numly work with large global companies to combine DEI with leadership and development based on research from the Harvard Business Review, resulting in inclusive learning. According to the Harvard Business Review, DEI should be present in all learning content and experiences. Learning and development should carefully review all existing and future material through a DEI lens.Women’s Leadership RolesWomen are an underrepresented group that is a pivotal focus of companies’ DEI initiatives. Susanne DiCocco, principal at Deloitte, talked about her journey to becoming a partner at a firm in Canada in 2015 before her relocation to the U.S. to join Deloitte. She attended a new partner global conference in Beijing for the firm in Canada. She was surprised when a global leader was excited to announce that the new partnership class comprised 21% women, which was a 30% increase from the previous year. “[It was] 2015, and we [weren’t] even a quarter of the firm’s population.”DiCocco compared the representation of the 2015 firm to that of Deloitte in 2023. She received applause from the audience when she shared that female partners make up 42.7% of Deloitte. DiCocco hopes that one day it will not be necessary to talk about statistics of female partners as it would just be ‘what is.’ Mark Pearson, corporate vice president for human resources, talent, and organizational capabilities at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), shared the company’s goal to encourage women to pursue careers in the semiconductor industry. Turnover for women and people of color at AMD is lower than experienced within the technology industry, says Mark. Workplace Culture That Embraces BelongingAll of the panelists agreed that it is essential for companies to establish a culture that embraces a sense of belonging, especially in states like Texas that have a reputation for not supporting DEI initiatives.Deborah Sengupta Stith of the Austin American- Statesman moderated the discussion (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)Pearson pointed out the common mistake that many companies make with a primary focus on creating a diverse pipeline before focusing on establishing a healthy culture. “Great, your pipeline gets better, and your new hires look great, but if your culture stinks, you’re still going to run into the same statistics where you’re experiencing turnover with new hires within 18 months, and you never strengthen the middle piece of the organization,” said Pearson. A focus on culture drives the pipeline in the right direction.Etlinger strongly agreed with Pearson’s analogy about culture in the workplace. “Culture eats strategy, that eats performance, that eats everything for breakfast,” said Etlinger. HPE’s Modern Slavery Transparency Statement refers to the company’s commitment to human rights and culture as stated in the following excerpt from the statement, “Driven by our culture and what defines us as a company – how we act, how we treat others, and how we conduct business – we believe a future without modern slavery is possible, and we are determined to do our part to get there. We re-examine and refine our program each year in light of our experience and emerging best practices.”Employee Resource and Affinity GroupsIt’s also important to establish employee resource groups (ERGs) that allow employees to develop leadership skills, since they are usually employee-led. ERGs support employees from underrepresented groups to learn how to speak up when they encounter such behaviors as microaggressions, unconscious bias, and systemic discrimination and mitigate them accordingly.“Affinity groups are really just to provide spaces for a sense of belonging and to be able to share experiences related to their demographics,” said Israel.DEI MetricsMost companies supporting DEI initiatives are good with strategy and implementation but are still determining what metrics should be established to measure progress. Govindaraju shared his thoughts on DEI metrics. “I encourage you to measure one to two goals you can manage and monitor. Retention by underrepresented groups is a very good metric.”DiCocco shared Deloitte’s journey with metrics for 13 outcomes with DEI. Her sentiments with metrics support accountability at the group and individual levels and provide insight into how companies can keep the momentum going with DEI. “DEI is not a program. It is not a thing. It’s every little action that you do every single day. You can start measuring yourself to determine your contributions to DEI.”  Linda Devonish-Mills is a writer and diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant based in Teaneck, New Jersey. 

Linda Devonish-Mills | July 21, 2023
The Evolution of Employee Listening: Using Employee Voice to Inspire and Empower Workers

What do Mariah Carey, Steven Tyler, Axl Rose, and Prince have in common? They all boast an incredibly diverse four-octave vocal range. But the man who blows them all out of the water is a relative stranger: Tim Storms. He may not be a household name, but Storms broke the record books with a ten-octave range! Similar to these iconic (and not-so-iconic) singers, modern-day office workers also have a diverse range of voices waiting to be tapped into.To connect with a uniquely talented and diverse set of workers, and to be able to identify and harness hidden talent, employers have to experiment with different forms of engagement. Just as the days of listening to eight tracks and cassette tapes have fallen out of fashion, bland annual surveys and passive exit interviews are a less valuable strategy for employee listening. Rather than taking a passive approach, organizations need to practice active listening. In fact, organizations that actively listen to their employees are 12 times more likely to engage and retain their talent.Rob Catalano, WorkTango’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, led a From Day One webinar on “The Evolution of Employee Listening” earlier this month. Catalano, who devised the aforementioned rock and roll analogy, offered insight into the history of employee listening and shared strategies to capitalize on the power of employee voice and “the wisdom of crowds” in today’s evolving office culture.Why Employee Engagement MattersAs workers reconsider their personal and professional priorities, organizations have to focus on offering the right combination of total rewards and career advancement opportunities. Companies must find authentic ways to engage with their employees to measure their satisfaction, provide recognition, and increase retention. This can be accomplished using the right balance emerging technology to systematically pulse check while also organically building trust through active listening and demonstrating actionable solutions based on the data gathered.WorkTango revolutionizes how the world’s most forward-thinking companies engage and inspire their people. They offer the only employee experience platform that enables meaningful recognition or rewards, offers actionable insights through employee surveys, and supports alignment to goal setting and feedback.Trends in Employee Listening and EngagementFor years, companies relied on occasional surveys of employees, perhaps once a year, followed by an exit interview when the worker moved on – and had already checked out. Catalano noted that these strategies are no longer the norm, and workplaces have moved from annual surveys to more frequent pulse checks to more active listening. “The reality is there's no such thing as survey fatigue,” Catalano said. “There’s a lack of action fatigue.”Rob Catalano, co-founder and chief strategy officer of WorkTango, led the webinar (company photo)With active listening, companies can immediately utilize diagnostic feedback to respond and evolve with employee voice, rather than just filing away the annual survey responses and moving on. Employers should be ready to follow up to get clarity on feedback and ask specifics about what changes employees would like to see in the workplace, be it in onboarding, DEI initiatives, recognition, or elsewhere. It’s also crucial to gauge employees’ sentiment on change. When possible, Catalano says, organizations should try to get feedback in advance so that they can build out their future strategies with the wants and needs of their workers.Catalano encourages HR to “not be a filter.” In other words, they should share the good, the bad, and the ugly with company leadership and not let survey data get stalled in HR. “I see companies that will not share feedback from employees or through surveys to their leaders,” Catalano said. Or they will show the leaders some of the data, but not the problems. The new trend, Catalano says, is for leaders to own the data and own the responsibility of building engagement and satisfaction among their teams.New Ways of MeasurementUsing new technologies and platforms can lead to faster turnaround and increased return on investment for employee surveys. Catalano noted one organization that found the responses came back six times faster through high-tech listening approaches than through written questionnaires.Employers can also consider using artificial intelligence to quickly tabulate responses and even measure sentiment, rather than having to go through thousands of responses by hand. “Technology today makes it really easy. You can get automatic themes or sentiment of what people are thinking,” Catalano said. And, with AI reading responses rather than an HR manager, employees might feel they are able to share their thoughts and feelings more freely without risk of repercussions. The very human element of trust that is integral to this process can actually be improved, rather than impeded, by the use of a non-human reviewer.Employers must avoid what Catalano calls “insights in isolation.” Instead, results of employee listening must be correlated with other data the company already has. For example, one must not only study the DEI demographics (such as race, gender, or sexual orientation) of the workforce in one vacuum, and employee engagement in another. They must integrate the statistics and ask questions to gauge how certain demographics of the population engage with the company.“We have to look at all methods to hear the employee’s voice,” Catalano said. Beyond surveys, companies are using in-person or online focus groups, and even experimenting with unsolicited feedback monitoring through emerging technologies, such as location tracking to optimize routes for truckers or computer monitoring to assess software application usage.Actionable Results: Ensuring Employees Have a VoiceScott Halstead, assistant vice president of talent and organizational development at American Eagle Financial Credit Union, shared how his organization revamped its employee listening strategy. “We had been doing a one-time-a-year survey and, to be honest, not really taking any action. And if we did, it was very delayed and hard to see how it connected back to the employee voice,” Halstead said.In late 2021, AEFCU launched the Eagle Pulse Survey through WorkTango. These pulse checks were shorter, more frequent, more confidential, and no longer considered simply an HR task but an integral element of the organization’s strategy. Using data from the surveys, which was then shared with employees, AEFCU managers nominated team members to participate in more intimate and locally facilitated conversations to develop actionable results. The entire strategy was effective, from surveys to transparency to action planning. “We’ve gotten tremendous energy from shifting it to that process,” Halstead said. In just 12 months, favorability grew from 62% to 78%.Building Employee Listening Strategies TodayIn order to build an effective employee listening strategy in an evolving workplace, it’s crucial to get organizational leadership fully on board with the methods and engaged with the results. In turn, one must build employee trust through a combination of confidentiality and transparency. Through the use of emerging technology and companies like WorkTango, employers can gain fresh insight to engage, inspire, and retain their workers while meeting all the challenges of today’s working environment.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, WorkTango, for sponsoring this webinar.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 | July 20, 2023
The Culture of H-E-B: Why Employees (and Customers) Are So Devoted

Texans don’t say, “We’re going grocery shopping,” they say, “We’re going to H-E-B.”Mayerland Harris, group VP of talent at H-E-B, said the reason for that is all about the company’s values. “Doing what’s right simply because it’s the right thing to do, not for the accolades and not for profit, but to help our community” is a value that underscores every decision at H-E-B, which employs about 154,000 employees in more than 430 stores in Texas and Mexico. Doing what’s right plays out in how the company treats its employees, referred to as “Partners,” as well as their suppliers, and their customers. Harris was interviewed by Dan Goodgame, editor in chief at Texas Monthly, in a fireside chat at From Day One’s Austin conference.H-E-B is always looking for ways to integrate innovative technologies throughout its business but, as a people company, prioritizing the relationship with the customer comes first. That means giving customers options, like offering curbside, home delivery, and self-checkout while making sure H-E-B partners provide excellent customer service.Doing Right By EmployeesH-E-B is renowned for its ability to retain employees for long careers. According to Comparably.com, “H-E-B is in the top 10% of similar sized companies in its ability to retain quality employees. Fifty percent of employees would not leave H-E-B if they were offered a job for more money, while 75% are excited to go to work each day.” Harris, a 32-year H-E-B veteran, said she’s remained with the company for so long because “I get to bring my authentic self to work every single day.”  Many of Harris’s coworkers have been by her side for over 25 years. “Caring about your employees, giving them respect and ownership in something bigger than just a job is the secret to creating a feeling that can’t be replicated,” said Harris. Dan Goodgame of Texas Monthly, left, and Mayerland Harris of H-E-B kicked off the From Day One Austin conference with a fireside chat (Photos by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)At H-E-B, employees have the opportunity to work in many different departments, so they can learn, grow, and pursue a career path of their choosing. Those opportunities are inclusive. “We employ everyone, from all kinds of backgrounds. H-E-B is here to serve all Texans.” Harris said. H-E-B has also earned a reputation for its commitment to employee well-being. Taking Care of the CommunityH-E-B is at the forefront of emergency preparedness and disaster relief, sending convoys including Disaster Response Units, with a pharmacy and business-services center, where locals can fill prescriptions, cash checks, pay bills, and access an ATM. While many of their relief efforts are unadvertised, this role has earned the company significant amounts of goodwill.In 2021, when the “Snowmageddon” struck Texas, Goodgame recalled that an H-E-B store manager let customers take their groceries free of charge when the store power suddenly went out and check stands were down. Other stores handed out bouquets of fresh flowers to customers as they waited in line to shop. These decisions of goodwill were not in any training classes.  Our store managers made the choice and we celebrate them because “we empower people to do what’s right," said Harris.Leading a Quest for Quality and InnovationH-E-B keeps in mind why we visit their stores: local flavor, fresh food, and new ideas. The company features the Texas Department of Agriculture’s GO TEXAN mark on more than 3,700 products. The H-E-B Quest for Texas Best contest allows locally owned food-and-beverage suppliers as well as non-food suppliers a chance to break into the highly competitive grocery market by placing their items on H-E-B shelves and a chance at winning up to $25,000 in prize money.  “We source as much as we can locally in our communities and across Texas,” Harris said. “And we’re proud to say that we support so many small business owners, small farmers, and small producers. If you can produce things here, think how much fresher that product is than something that you procure elsewhere.” Gail Gonzales is a writer, brand strategist, and designer based in Austin. Her boutique agency, Evolve Your Brand, helps business owners who care about the positive evolution of people or the planet amplify their message.

Gail Gonzales | July 19, 2023
The Keys to Attracting Diverse Talent in the Tech World

The path to tech was anything but traditional for Dana Morrow Branch, the vice president of systems engineering for Bank of America.Branch became a self-taught coder by spending all her free time on a computer in the library of her high school, mastering the Microsoft DOS command prompt. In her explorations, Branch not only accidentally broke into Maryland’s Board of Education database, but discovered her knack for coding as well.Branch’s path to success proved that not all skills need to be learned from a textbook or a professor. In From Day One’s webinar “Attracting Non-traditional and Diverse Talent,” moderator Jonathan Pride, executive director of NPower, spoke with Branch and other tech leaders on how aspiring tech workers can break from the traditional career path and how employers attract skilled talent in the current labor market.Redefining Traditional Hiring PracticesWith lower costs and time commitment than traditional degree-earning colleges, certificate-based programs are redefining how candidates are receiving their education. In a recent study by National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, researchers found certificate-based programs had a 5.5% increase in enrollment at the undergraduate level and a 4.6% increase in enrollment at the graduate level.For NPower, the success is in the numbers. Since its founding in 2003, the national technology training organization has helped over 5,000 individuals launch their digital careers through accelerated tech training programs. The program assists military veterans and young adults from underserved communities by providing tech resources, training, and job opportunities.As more people lean into certificate-based programs to develop their skills, hiring practices must change, Pride emphasized. “Not everyone is meant to go to Harvard, and that's okay,” Pride says. “Our job as a national organization is to create a pathway. [The job market] is a different time today than it was and the applicant base is different than it was just even two years ago before Covid.”The full panel of speakers from top left, Brashanda Walker of Citi, Jonathan Pride of NPower, Dana Morrow Branch of Bank of America, and Rashmi Jain of Careington (photo by From Day One)Rashmi Jain, chief information officer of Careington International Corporation, a healthcare company, also recognizes the break from the traditional route from her own experience. When discussing her son’s decision to take a certificate course instead of attending a four-year college, Jain acknowledged the challenges he might face but emphasized the value in his choice. “Coming from a Southeast Asian background, our families might say you're not a doctor or engineer because you don't have a college degree,” Jain said. “But [we have to] shift from that perspective and look for what adds value to the workforce.”To accommodate changes in how individuals receive their education, employers must be able to reflect that in their current hiring practices. Like Jain, Branch believes college degrees aren’t always telling of an individual’s potential. She urges hiring managers to look for more.“You just can't pick up a resume and immediately look for a college degree,” Branch said. “You have to have trained and experienced eyes that know how to convert skill sets. We have to translate that person’s resume into transferable skills, and know immediately where would be a best fit for them.”Empowering Through Resources and MentoringFor those who are curious enough, a computer is the only resource needed to kickstart a career in tech like Branch did. However, not everybody can discover their strengths with limited resources and time.Brashanda Walker, infrastructure tech lead analyst, VP at Citi, and NPower alumna, discussed how NPower helped define her career path. Through the program’s resources and connections to job opportunities, Walker discovered her love for technology. “My first exposure to technology was through NPower’s internship program, in which I was able to participate with Deloitte,” Walker said. “[NPower] inspired me to continue to move forward. Through NPower, I received my first career at AIG.”The path, however, was not without challenges. As a woman and a person of color, Walker faced challenges in a heavily male-dominated industry. In the U.S., women make up only 26.7% of tech-related jobs, a staggeringly low number. To handle these challenges, Walker said there’s an important need for mentorship for women in the field. “Representation is extremely important. Not only for career guidance, but for mentorship as well,” Walker said. “You’re going to feel intimidated in those rooms when you are the only woman and if you are not confident enough to express yourself or to ask questions, you’re going to feel that. And unfortunately, that pushes women out of technology.”In a study by talent network Adeva, over 40% of participants expressed a lack of mentorship and female role models as primary reasons for the underrepresentation of women in the tech industry. With just 11% of women in tech leadership positions, the lack of representation affects women’s interests in pursuing tech.While organizations like Women Who Code and digitalundivided have helped bridge the gap for women and minorities, leaders must do more, Branch says. “When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we talk about diversity driving innovation. Diverse perspectives are what we need, [and what this] boils down to is bringing opportunities for others to come to the table to thrive and be powerful leaders for our future.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, NPower, for sponsoring this webinar. Wanly Chen is a writer based in New York City.

Wanly Chen | July 18, 2023
Hiring Hourly Employees: Nine Ways to Diversifying Your Sourcing Strategy

While posting an open position on an online job board like Indeed is common for hiring managers looking to attract hourly workers, employers need to take a far more comprehensive approach in a job market that has moved heavily in favor of workers.“I hear from most people who are hiring hourly workers that they get most of their candidates from Indeed. We want to keep doing what works. Let’s stick to that, but we also should be diversifying and finding other ways to attract applicants that will be good options for you,” said Jackie Adams, a hiring specialist at Workstream, a mobile-based recruiting platform. Adams spoke in From Day One webinar focusing on how employers can attract hourly workers by diversifying their sourcing strategy. She distilled her advice into nine points:Text-to-ApplyPosting QR codes at physical locations in the local community that permit applicants to apply through mobile devices has proven five times more effective at attracting applicants than job board postings.“Farmer’s markets, gas stations–anywhere and everywhere,” Adams said. “A great place is your local schools and colleges. Pass out flyers at sporting events or concerts. Meet your community where they are.”Referral ProgramsCompanies with solid referral programs are nearly nine times more likely to attract qualified job applicants than businesses that utilize only job boards. Adams suggests hiring managers take advantage of employees’ connections with others in the community by offering incentives for attracting new talent. “Your employees are the best ambassadors for your business,” she said. “They know how the company functions, and they know what personalities are the best fit for your company.”Adams says high-performing employees are often acquainted with other valuable workers, and employers should work to create clearly defined referral programs to make use of those connections.“The biggest mistake HR leaders make with referral programs is treating them as a ‘set it and forget it’ initiative. You must regularly monitor and optimize them,” she said.Social MediaWith most people spending up to 147 minutes on social media daily, it’s a no-brainer to utilize diverse platforms to promote open positions. “This is a massive way to capture an audience that could be applicants,” Adams said.Sixty-nine percent of adults in the U.S. use Facebook, while 73% use YouTube. “These are awesome outlets if you’re looking for adults in the U.S.,” Adams said. “Do your own research and build social media content.” She stressed the importance of posting daily.Jackie Adams, a hiring specialist at WorkstreamAs an example, Adams says Disney has had a lot of success posting day-in-the-life videos of its employees, which has the dual benefit of attracting applicants and boosting morale among established employees. “McDonald’s does food prep videos–it makes it seem like an interesting place to work,” she said.Job BoardsConsidered the baseline for most hiring managers looking to fill positions, online job boards must be utilized in a creative, tech-savvy way for managers to see success. “Although you need to find other ways to diversify, we do need to spend more time on job boards,” Adams said. She says search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the keys to success, allowing for better visibility among thousands of job listings.“Write job posts so the right people will feel qualified and will apply,” Adams said. ”You can have ChatGPT create job posts. I’ve seen many companies do this and it does a great job.”Indeed recently changed its algorithm to emphasize employers interacting with prospective employees, leading Adams to recommend constant communication with applicants.“Seventy-nine percent of internet users scan instead of reading something,“ she said. ”Put information in bullet points, not blocks of text.”She also recommended that companies always highlight the pay range for open positions, whether or not the law requires it in the state the company is from.Branded Career PagesA staple of most mid- and large-sized businesses, career pages on business websites greatly influence how candidates view a prospective job. “One of the main places you can highlight culture is this,” Adams said, adding that polls suggest that 56% of applicants believe they can tell what it will be like to work for a company from its career page. “It should share the company story with genuine photos and videos. If you can get away from the stock imagery and photos, then do that,” she said.Community-Based OrganizationsEmployees hired through local organizations have a retention rate 70% higher than the average employee, Adams said, sharing an example of using such an outlet in her job working for a hotel chain earlier in her career. “They were struggling to find chefs and cooks, so they created a mini culinary school and brought students in so the current chefs could mentor them.”Upon graduation, the hotel chain’s staffing woes disappeared as many of the most valuable students from classes became full-time employees. “Get creative, build relationships, build programs, and everything you can sponsor goes a long way,” Adams said.Underrepresented GroupsAnother hiring technique that provides businesses multiple benefits is targeting underrepresented groups to hire employees. Adams says the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a federal program,  could provide companies up to $10,000 per hired employee who may have a criminal history, receives government assistance, or qualities as a refugee, immigrant, or military veteran.“Studies have found that 82% of managers think that employees with criminal records perform as well, or better, than employees with clean records,” she said, adding that those same employees are often less susceptible to turnover due to a sense of loyalty to the company.“Many think sourcing applicants in this group can be hard,” Adams said. “Just do a quick Google search for someone who helps hire veterans or other groups. There are many job boards and agencies geared toward these underrepresented groups."Applicant PoolSometimes it pays not to try to reinvent the wheel. If you have applicants from a previous job posting, contact them to see if their interest abides.Career FairsOne of the most old-fashioned approaches on the list, attending career fairs can be lucrative if the right people are staffing the company’s booth. At one experience at a career fair where she assessed the presentations of various employers, “there were some people that really stood out to me and then there were some I couldn’t tell you what the name of their company was,” Adams said.She says businesses must send people who are passionate about the company and will reach out to potential applicants instead of waiting to be approached. Current employees should attend as well to talk about their experience working with the business.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks its partner, Workstream, who sponsored this webinar. Workstream’s mobile-based recruiting software helps businesses hire smarter and faster. Through sourcing from many places, the program helps hiring managers to engage with candidates while they’re motivated to apply.Tim Zyla is the managing editor of a community newspaper in Pennsylvania and has a strong interest in business and finance.(Featured photo by Dusan Petkovic/iStock by Getty Images)

Tim Zyla | July 17, 2023
Why America’s Wage Gap Leads to Its Decline—and What to Do About It

Only the revival of workers’ bargaining power can remedy the desperate situation of the working poor in this country, according to Michael Lind, in his book Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America.Lind, a columnist at Tablet and a fellow at New America, outlined the decline of American workers’ bargaining power in a fireside chat at From Day One’s conference in Austin, Texas. Interviewed by Will Anderson, managing editor of the Austin Business Journal, Lind offered some remedies. Low-wage jobs were still living wage positions in the 1920s, but now they are poverty jobs. Lind points to his grandfather, who was earning a living wage as a janitor in the 1920s.Today, janitors, fast food workers, nurses aides, construction laborers, and others can only meet the monthly bills with food stamps (EBT), housing vouchers, and earned income tax credits.Lind calls the American workplace a two-tier system–the working poor on the bottom create benefits that redound to employers. But the costs of the low wage system are spread across the whole country in the form of subsidies.“You’re privatizing the benefits to the employers and to the consumers of goods and services produced by low wage workers. And you’re socializing the costs to the rest of us, to the taxpayers, we have to pay,” he said.Lind, right, was interviewed by Will Anderson, left, of the Austin Business Journal during the grand-finale fireside chat session (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)Now 25% of US jobs are in poverty positions versus 3% in Norway, a country he has studied for this work.Why? The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which was to support workers’ bargaining power, is flawed, Lind said, calling its decline the main reason why today only 6% of the workforce is protected by unions versus 20% in the 1940s and ‘50s.Nor is this decline the fault either of globalization or technology, as so many believe. Instead, Lind points out, other democracies have experienced the same transformations, and yet their low-skill workers can thrive. Rather it is the encroachment of employers and institutions over the power of production and labor.Besides the flaws of the NLRA, Lind lambasted the proliferation of non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Meanwhile, legal or unauthorized immigration also bolsters employers’ ability to suppress wages.Paying higher wages is not a simple solution.One reason is that today’s academic economists hold the belief that wages rise as productivity does. This belief is untrue, he says.Instead, we want to strengthen the bargaining power of workers in sectors.Despite their illegality under trust law, companies still use salary bands – employers across industries establish wages in relative complicity.Instead, he proposes reviving a century-old system called wage boards. Here, the governor or the mayor appoints industry representatives, say fast food, and the workers set wages and hours.In New York State in 2015, under Governor Andrew Cuomo, the workers “came up with minimum wages, hours, scheduling benefits only for fast food workers in New York.”“I argue that this kind of granular specific approach is better than simply raising the minimum wage,” Lind said.Employers, governments, or institutions cannot remedy this system that keeps the poor poor. Instead, it’s the workers themselves that can have the muscle to repair our unjust system.Francine Brevetti is a business writer, ghostwriter, and author, residing in San Francisco, California.

Francine Brevetti | July 17, 2023
How to Build a Culture of Inclusion at a Time of Backlash

Cynthia Owyoung knows diversity because she has lived and breathed it her whole life. She is the daughter of immigrants in San Francisco’s Bayview District, a primarily African-American neighborhood. Her father served in the Air Force. One of her brothers is gay; another brother is developmentally disabled. When that brother lost his job during the economic downturn of the early 2000s, Owyoung was responsible for finding him a new job. The challenge inspired her to leave marketing for work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to break down barriers for people like her brother experiencing the same thing.“DEI was kind of the natural evolution of my entire life experience,” said Owyoung, “and bringing that to bear to help people thrive in their workplaces, no matter where they come from or what background or abilities they might have.”Owyoung is now the author of All Are Welcome: How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion That Delivers Results. She spoke in a fireside chat titled, “How to Build a Culture of Inclusion at a Time of Backlash,” with David Thigpen, director of the University of California, Berkeley undergraduate journalism program. The talk happened onstage at From Day One’s San Francisco conference in Mission Bay.As a field, DEI has advanced in the last 20 years. When Owyoung first became involved, DEI was mainly about affirmative action and compliance programs. “People were doing it because the government said you had to,” she said. Then DEI started to evolve into more of a business strategy, as people became aware that more diversity could help drive innovative problem-solving, better decision-making, and an improved ability to serve their marketplace and customers.In recent years, DEI initiatives have expanded as a greater number of leaders realized that it’s not just good for business, there’s also a wider moral imperative to correct social inequities beyond the workplace.“We all want to live in a more just world, and companies are now more and more being seen as places that can affect some of that change,” said Owyoung. “Because we have so much more distrust in government and other types of institutions that would normally be playing that role, there’s a grounded expectation of companies and organizational leaders really driving in this area.”Thigpen and Owyoung spoke in the grand finale fireside chat during From Day One's San Francisco conference (photo by David Coe for From Day One)Owyoung acknowledged that companies are still struggling with balancing those things, especially when talking about DEI can be so divisive. And everybody has differing opinions on how to do it well.“A lot of companies make this mistake of focusing only on representation numbers,” she said. “Often that translates into, ‘I have to hire more people from different backgrounds into my company and so let’s build up the talent pipeline [and] our recruiting organization to do that.’ And what ends up happening is that they haven’t done the foundational groundwork on their culture to make sure that it’s inclusive.”An inclusive company culture connects to people of all backgrounds and experiences and creates a working environment in which employees want to stay. “Staying usually involves being developed,” said Owyoung. “Seeing your career grow, seeing opportunities for yourself, seeing role models of yourself in the upper levels of the company. And oftentimes companies fall down on that part.”Companies lack inclusivity when they don’t invest in employee development and don’t pay attention to who’s getting promoted or picked for leadership opportunities. They can also fail to acknowledge whether employees feel a strong sense of belonging or if they’re feeling alienated because they’re the only one who is a person of color on a team.“All of that ends up creating this revolving door where you might be bringing people in, but they’re leaving at the same rate,” Owyoung said. “So you’re not moving your representation numbers at all. If you’re not focusing on all those other aspects of the culture, and that has to be tied to your values as a company, then you’re not gonna make progress.”Previously companies focused on DEI programs and partnerships with organizations to provide a sourcing pipeline for people of diverse backgrounds. “And that’s all great and necessary,” said Owyoung, “but not enough.” Companies must now take a systematic approach to fix the problem.“You’re looking at what are the institutionalized structures that are reinforcing our current biases and stereotypes and the status quo,” she said. “Those are the things that have to be dismantled. When you think about hiring, promotion, succession planning, talent review—any kind of talent process inside your company—attacking every step in that process becomes necessary to be more inclusive. Changing structures like that are how you drive change and progress in your organization.”Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who’s written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, California.

Samantha Campos | July 14, 2023
Putting Talent Where it's Needed: Companies Search Internally to Find Ways to Close Skill Gaps

When USAA’s Head of Talent Marketplace Lya Icaza reflects on her early career, she remembers being advised not to mention her family or children in the workplace.Icaza and a panel of four other female leaders used their personal experiences and business knowledge to highlight how companies can better foster career growth among employees during a From Day One conference last month in Austin, Texas.“[In previous workplaces,] if I had gone to my leader and said, ‘Hey, I think I want to go work for somebody else,’ then [I’d be] terminated tomorrow,” said Ramona Arora, chief learning officer and vice president of global talent and development at Dell Technologies. “That talent-hoarding mentality, that's part of a culture.”A culture that all five women were happy to report is becoming increasingly scarce in the 21st century, thanks to the advent of more flexible work schedules and a drive among managers to keep productive employees happy.Focusing on Internal MobilityWhile the U.S. economy experiences a slowdown in hiring and increased reorganizations within companies, especially in the technology sector, NXP Semiconductors Senior Vice President for Talent and Culture, Elsa Zambrano said her company is increasingly focusing on internal mobility.“Development can start with where you're at,” Zambrano said. “You can change a job, and you can do it within the company.”Zambrano said NXP, a company of about 30,000 employees, recently began measuring internal mobility and set a goal to reach 30%. “We're just under 20% — it's too low. But we started at 14%, so we're making good progress on that,” she said.Icaza said USAA is also beginning to focus more on internal mobility and the intentional upward, lateral and downward movement of employees.“We want to be able to recognize that careers have seasons,” she said. “Depending on where you are in life, not just your professional life but in your personal life, you may want to change, and that could mean a demotion. Careers aren't just upward.”Arora shared that buying labor is a demanding task for technology companies in the current economic environment, so companies like Dell have turned inward to find talent opportunities.“It's our talent. So how do we move people gracefully, and also intelligently, across the company?” she said.The Tech SideRebecca Warren, who oversees customer success for Eightfold, a company that provides artificial intelligence talent acquisition and management services, said the importance of AI in helping to boost skill sets among employees can be invaluable to many organizations.Tom Miller, the morning anchor at KXAN, moderated the panel discussion (photos by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)“We look at internal employees using a career hub model so they can say, ‘I want to do this so I can bolster my skills,’” she said.AI can also impact the hiring process, with some companies opting to analyze skill sets instead of the traditional resume and cover letter. “When you focus on what skills are needed or what someone's potential looks like, it's a completely different conversation compared to looking at a resume and thinking that's all someone can do,” Warren said.Arora said technology plays a large part in supporting a company's philosophy and culture, and AI is essential to achieving success. “I think this is an opportunity for HR,” she said. “You really need to lean into technical analysis. You have to lean into your technology teams to build that technology infrastructure and find out how that's going to support the philosophy and the culture that you're wanting to drive. We need technology. We need AI.”Achieving Personal FreedomWarren’s husband left his career as a talent acquisition specialist in search of an opportunity that would permit him to work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and not deal with stressors outside of the workplace.“He was very transparent, and from the organization's side, you have to be really clear about what a job like that might look like,” Warren said. “He basically said, ‘I want to go into leadership, do my job, and go home.’”Warren said he was able to find the job, even if decades ago, that would have been a nearly impossible task. She said the company created a remote work policy for her husband to work from home to provide even more flexibility for the valued employee.Those opportunities, Icaza said, in some cases allow for employees to work part-time jobs, which can help with advancing a skillset to benefit the full-time employer.Mel Faxon, COO & Co-Founder of Hey Mirza, said her company is dedicated to helping employers retain employees by offsetting the cost of childcare. “I spent the bulk of my career in startups across the U.S. and Europe. If you don't have care, you can't go to work, and you can't get paid.”Faxon said she remembers being shocked at the announcement that one of her mentors at a previous job was quitting because she “couldn't be a mom and work here.”“Mirza aims to solve that problem," Faxon said. About 61% of households in America are dual-income families, a number that has doubled in the last 50 years, she said.“If you think about the gender pay gap, when you control for everything except kids, it is 98 cents to a dollar—having kids is really where you create the gap,” she said. “That's mostly attributed to women, but any stay-at-home parent and someone taking time out of the workforce is affected.”Tim Zyla is the managing editor of a community newspaper in Pennsylvania and has a strong interest in business and finance.

Tim Zyla | July 13, 2023
How to Enhance Employee Well-Being? Manage the Whole Person

“We are booming in terms of productivity,” said Claire Zhang, VP of HR for Samsung. That’s the good news. However, there’s a flip side: “We worry that people burn out. That’s where we started creating more programs, especially awareness training for our managers and employees to create boundaries, [that] it’s OK to stop at a certain time.”Zhang joined other HR experts in a conversation about “Enhancing Employee Well-Being Through Whole-Person Management,” moderated by Pete Suratos, a news reporter for NBC Bay Area / KGO-TV, at From Day One’s San Francisco conference last month.People tend to cringe when they acknowledge positive outcomes of the Covid pandemic, yet a few social advances are undeniably beneficial. The pandemic greatly influenced how we measure health. It also blurred boundaries between home and workplace, allowing leaders to get to know their employees on a more personal level, with a focus on mental health and psychological safety. “One of the silver linings is a normalization [of] the psychological aspect of well-being,” said Elizabeth Pavese, Ph.D., a senior business psychologist for Workday, an HR software company. “We are whole people. We don’t just park that at the door. I read a [mental health] report recently that 74% of employees are now more comfortable talking [about it] to their co-workers; 64% are more comfortable talking to their managers.” The employer approach to well-being needs to be holistic, the speakers asserted. “Covid put a spotlight in terms of, you can’t just think about physical well-being anymore,” said Heidi Schisel, VP of people and culture of commercial, medical, and government affairs at Genentech, the biotech corporation. “Are you exercising? Are you getting enough sleep? How do you continue to foster that sense of well-being, but also make sure that our leaders are modeling that as well, and giving space for people to be able to take care of things in their lives?”“When we think of whole-person health, it’s no longer about the health benefits for organizations,” said Justin Holland, CEO and co-founder of Healthjoy, a health care-navigation platform. “It’s how do we bring the mental-health benefits into place? How do we think about financial wellness? Because if someone is stressed out, they’re probably not going bring their best self to work.”“We talk about it from the World Health Organization’s perspective—well-being as a state where a person is realizing their potential,” said Pavese. “They’re able to cope with daily stressors in their lives, be productive, and make a positive contribution. So it’s a very action-oriented, not an end-state kind of definition. That allows us to understand, assess, measure, and then put the right pieces in place that help support the growth of somebody's well-being.”The panelists, from left: Samanntha DuBridge of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Heidi Schisel of Genentech, Claire Zhang of Samsung, Elizabeth Pavese, Ph.D., of Workday, Justin Holland of Healthjoy, and moderator Pete Suratos of NBC Bay Area / KGO-TV.A corporate culture of well-being needs to recognize the individual. “As a 60,000 team-member company, we're not all going to agree on what's going to work for us,” said Samanntha DuBridge, VP of HR for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the information-tech company. “We all have different types of jobs with different types of responsibilities. And so we try to make sure that everybody has the resources and tools available to themselves and their families to think about what they want to prioritize, what's most important to them, and what can they take best advantage of.”“We do need to focus more on the mental health piece,” she added. “We need to focus more on how people can take advantage of resources and feel comfortable.” Hybrid work is a big challenge for people leaders, since employee needs for flexibility can vary so much. Panelists spoke of a need to get creative about what they could offer employees that might be different from what was done pre-Covid. Access is another challenge. More than 150 million people live in federally designated areas with shortages of mental-health professionals, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The shortage could reach as many as 35,000 full-time employees by 2030.“There’s not one county in California that doesn't have a shortage of mental health professionals,” said Holland. “If you have a mental health [issue] and you can't get an appointment for three months, it’s challenging. So how do we help increase that access to employees to help meet them where they are?”Some larger companies focused on well-being can provide wellness resources onsite, to make it easier for employees to access. “We do have a lot of amenities on campus in terms of a health center, gym, doctor, acupuncture, you name it,” said Schisel. “Also, we’ve provided options throughout the day for employees to get to work safely, as well as childcare.” Greater efficiencies also emerged from the pandemic to prevent employee burnout. Leaders learned that meetings were a sore point, so they flexed. It became another opportunity to model self-care and well-being.“Are all the meetings productive?” asked Schisel. “Do they all need to be an hour? Could they be speedy meetings of 20 minutes? And factoring in focus time, making sure you’re taking your lunch. Instead of getting behind the screen all the time, let’s just call each other and take a walk or get outside.” “It’s building new habits, new behaviors, modeling those habits and behaviors,” said Pavese, “and having the system and structures around it.” At the height of the pandemic, Workday began implementing “interventions” with the nurses of one of its health care customers, a large hospital in New York City. “This idea of deliberate rest and taking a break from your day-to-day for 10 minutes,” Pavese said. “They did art walls in their break rooms. Colors are meditative. It allows you to focus your brain, to quiet things down. Having small things like that are investments in employee well-being to curb burnout.” Many workers deferred health care during the pandemic, leading to delayed discovery and treatment of illness, along with greater costs and lost productivity. “There's no shortage of evidence that shows the connection between well-being [and] job performance,” said Pavese, who pointed to burnout as one of those insidious conditions. “We put an undue burden on individuals to cure their burnout. The fact is, burnout is an organizational phenomenon, it’s not an individual phenomenon. It disproportionately affects your high performers because to burn out–it's not working more hours. It's about being highly engaged but not being able to manage and cope with the stress that comes with it. You end up feeling exhausted, you become cynical, and then you feel completely ineffective. So it is a very big detriment.”Pavese encouraged utilizing more proactive analytics and insights to detect burnout risk. Indicators of well-being dropping can help leaders deter absenteeism, attrition, health risks, and workplace accidents. “If we're investing in our people and our people are thriving, our organizations thrive,” she said. “We are all in the business of people.”Leaders are also resetting expectations of what great performance looks like. “And it's not, here are the 20 things you did,” said Schisel, “but what was your impact in the organization anchored in specific strategic goals and outcomes? Here’s the standard of excellence that we’re seeking so that it’s consistent, it’s equitable, and people understand that it’s about the impact moving forward–and that’s how your performance will be gauged.”Communication and intentionality are keys to enhancing employee well-being, especially while managing a hybrid workforce. Not all work is suited for intense collaboration and not all work is suited for heads-down individual time. Integrating with local culture, implementing multiple modal programs based on regions, team check-ins, and flexibility are all tools to utilize in supporting workers’ holistic health. The panelists said they support progress over perfection. Managers should be given discretion to adapt policies to unique situations, said Zhang. “We provide guidelines, but the guidelines are wide enough for you to have open interpretation. Then the leaders are empowered to do what is the best for their team as well as communicate with the employees to get the best outcome.” Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who has written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, Calif.

Samantha Campos | July 12, 2023
Personalizing Support to Create an Inclusive Culture

Early in her career, Elena Gambon missed out on a promotion due to an oversight. “They turned me down the first time because I neglected to let them know that I speak Spanish,” she said. Not accepting an automatic rejection for something she was qualified for, Elena, the chief growth officer and chief strategy officer for First Stop Health, took a proactive approach to secure the role. This experience not only shaped her commitment to creating an inclusive workplace but also influenced her approach to patient care.“It was a really formative moment in my career and helped me shape not only how I think about creating an inclusive workplace for my employees, but also how I think about crafting a patient care engine that's clinically competent and focused on the needs of the individual,” said Gambon.Elena Gambon and a panel of other leaders spoke in a From Day One Dallas panel session titled “Personalizing Support to Create an Inclusive Culture” moderated by D CEO Magazine’s editor, Christine Perez. The session covered the transformative power of inclusion and support in both personal and professional growth. The leaders shared narratives about moments that could have gone very differently without the use of inclusive hiring practices, mentorship, advocacy, or sponsorship.Dr. Harpreet Nagra, the senior director of clinical oversight at Supportiv, was the first in her family to go to graduate school. A doctorate degree felt daunting enough and being a first-generation person of color made everything feel even more overwhelming. “I was not sure exactly what the academic path looked like, if I was going to become a doctor or not.” At a crossroads, she shared her concerns with her professor who was also a person of color. Understanding what she was feeling, he guided her to find her passion and to go for it one step at a time. Dr. Nagra was encouraged to aim higher and believe in her potential. This moment between a student and professor instilled a confidence that motivated her to pursue her ambitions.Shenece Johns, the head of inclusion and diversity at JCPenney was once denied a mid-level promotion due to the hiring team’s lack of familiarity with her work. She was advised to wait a year and try again after working at the company for more time.Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to Johns, a colleague believed in Johns so much that he was willing to go out on a limb for her because he knew her work ethic and performance. “The partner went into the room [and said,] ‘Shenece deserves a promotion; I think she should get promoted. And here's why’” “It’s an important point for women and people of color, particularly black women, to have someone, a white man, to go in the room and say she deserved this promotion, I'm going to take a risk on her,” said Johns.The panelists shared personal examples of the power of feeling supported during the Dallas panel session (photo by Steve Bither for From Day One)Rudy Rodriguez the executive vice president and chief legal and human resources officer for CEC Entertainment credits the trajectory of his career to the long-standing mentorship of a respected peer. This mentor encouraged him to step way outside of his comfort zone and apply for a significant position at American Airlines. He felt that the position was a stretch and doubted himself.With the support of his mentor, Rudy applied and the experience shaped his professional path going forward. “Laura told me I could do the job before I knew I could do the job. And that gave me the confidence to apply and to feel confident in suggesting that I should be taken on for that position. It really turned my life around when I had somebody who believed in me like that,” he said.During the winter of 2022, Southwest Airlines experienced an unprecedented number of grounded flights due to a freeze affecting much of the Southeast and East coasts. Juan Suarez, Southwest’s vice president of diversity, equity & inclusion, was featured on a national news channel story, being personally blamed for all that was happening. The attitude of many was that sometimes that is just the job.Over the weekend, people reached out to Suarez offering empathy and support. “I did have some colleagues reach out to me on the weekend. Just to say, ‘Hey, how are you? Are you okay? What can I do for you?’” Juan said. Small gestures add up to big support.  “I’ve not been in this situation before, but exhibiting empathy, just in that little moment gives me a feeling of inclusion, which is so very important when we're talking about this topic. And so, it's a little thing. And I think it's important because sometimes the little things really do matter” he said.The panelists agreed that these stand-out moments helped drive the work they do today. Each of these moments shaped their perspectives and fueled their commitment to creating inclusive environments. These leaders have embraced the transformative power of inclusion and support, and they now strive to empower others, whether through inclusive hiring practices, mentorship, advocacy, or sponsorship.Sybil Fitzpatrick is a Dallas-based freelance writer, passionate about storytelling, evangelizing products and ideas, and leadership principles.

Sybil Fitzpatrick | July 11, 2023
The Making of a Master Builder of a Strong Company Culture

A corporation’s culture can be challenging to define, let alone build. Kelly Ann Doherty, the chief administrative officer of the home-loan provider Mr. Cooper Group, takes an architectural approach that has helped earn the company a reputation as a Great Place to Work.Doherty’s own career trajectory is a case study on how a company leader can learn how to successfully communicate the beliefs and behaviors that guide the actions of individuals as well as the company as a whole. Doherty traces her growing mastery to her attendance in 2018 at The Fellowship, a four-day master class in organizational culture for HR leaders in Santa Fe, N.M. Doherty was always passionate about building her career around people, and knew that communicating culture was part of her role as Mr. Cooper Group’s chief communications officer. However, it wasn’t until she attended The Fellowship that she saw what a career in building culture could look like. She realized that it wasn’t just her responsibility to communicate culture, but she could design and build the culture Mr. Cooper’s workforce and leadership were longing for.“People in organizations across the world are focused on building customer-journey maps. For the first time at The Fellowship, I saw a way to build a culture blueprint for our team members, and I knew I wanted to lead our culture efforts. Our culture blueprint has not only dramatically impacted our team member experience, but has directly translated into the way we care for customers,” Doherty said.Her company’s CEO, Jay Bray, had endorsed her attendance at The Fellowship and was eager to hear what she learned upon her return from Santa Fe. However, Bray never imagined what she would come back with. Doherty had put together a full presentation, complete with the culture blueprint from The Fellowship, along with the ways that she thought their organizational culture could change for the better. Within six months of that conversation, she was promoted to chief people and communications officer.“I’m so grateful for Jay’s belief in me. While human resources wasn’t in my background, he put his faith in me because he knew I wanted to put our people first,” Doherty recalled. “At The Fellowship, I realized HR is not just about the process and the policy. More than anything, the HR team are the champions of culture. Now, I’m responsible for caring for team members in the same way our customer-care representatives are responsible for our customers. I want everyone who works in a people-focused or communications role to know that they can and should be cheerleaders for their organization’s cheerleaders, champions for their organization’s champions, and challengers to their organization’s challengers,” she said.Kelly Ann Doherty, chief administrative officer of Mr. Cooper Group, at The Fellowship gathering with a colleague, top, and in a photo courtesy of Mr. Cooper GroupThe proof of Kelly Ann and her team’s work is in the results. Mr. Cooper Group has now been named a Great Place to Work four years in a row, has seen a 14-point increase in their Great Place To Work survey scores, and was most recently named a Best Workplace in Texas by Fortune magazine and included on Forbes’ Best Employers for Women list.In 2021, Doherty was named the company’s chief administrative officer. “Kelly Ann has a natural ability to bring teams and people together to drive change and propel our culture forward,” stated Bray in making the announcement. “She and her team have made tremendous improvements in our team member experience as they have focused on putting people first, and in her new role, she will work to ensure we continue to infuse our culture and brand into everything we do to truly delight our customers and team members as we strive to be the best in our industry.”For corporate leaders looking to emulate her approach, Doherty recommends a step-by-step approach. “Culture can sometimes feel so big it’s hard to wrap your arms around it, but you don’t have to do everything at once. Ask your people what they want, and start by attacking the areas that will have a high impact at a low cost to your organization,” said Doherty, who will join The Fellowship again this year to serve as host and emcee. “What is different about The Fellowship is how action-oriented the programming is. You won’t just walk away feeling good. This is an experience that gives you a plan to turn what you learn into meaningful change for your organization.”The event, which will take place Nov. 6-9 at the Four Seasons Rancho Encantado in Santa Fe, will feature a host of guest speakers including Cynt Marshall, CEO of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team; Nawal Fakhoury, director of employee experience at LinkedIn; Ginger Hardage, founder of The Fellowship and former SVP of culture and communication at Southwest Airlines; and David Salyers, the original Chick-fil-A marketing executive and pioneer. To find out more about The Fellowship and register to attend, you can visit the organization’s website here. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, The Fellowship, which previously published a version of this story.

the Editors | July 10, 2023