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

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

Mary Pieper | March 26, 2024
How to Respond to the Day-to-Day Financial Stressors of Your Workforce

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

Ellen Stark | March 25, 2024
Navigating the AI Revolution: Transforming Workforces for the Future

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

Matthew Koehler | March 25, 2024
Boosting Employee Motivation by Focusing on Internal Mobility

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

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 25, 2024
What Transparency Can Expose: an Obvious Need for Organizational Change

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

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 24, 2024
Workplace Inclusivity: From Initiative to Integration

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

Carrie Snider | March 22, 2024
Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

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

Katie Chambers | March 19, 2024
Workspace Leadership: The Powerful Role of Place in Worker Well-Being and Productivity

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

Stephanie Reed | March 19, 2024
Whole-Person Well-Being: Nurturing a Balanced Workplace

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

Mary Pieper | March 18, 2024
Unlocking Gen Z’s Potential by Nurturing Engagement and Aligning Values

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

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 15, 2024
Making Flexibility a Core Value, From Hybrid Work to Career Growth

When Deanna Jones, now chief human resources officer at Baker Hughes, began her career at the energy and technology company, the rig workers would typically work 28 days on an oil and gas platform and then have 28 days off.“Early in your career, the ability to take a month and go skiing or travel the world when you’re not actually at work can actually be something that’s very engaging, but I do think it is very difficult,” Jones told moderator Paul Pavlou, the Dean of the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, during From Day One’s Houston Conference.Although having 28 consecutive days off gave rig workers a lot of freedom, they didn’t have much flexibility during their time on a platform, says Jones.“So, one of the things that we’ve been investing in is a lot of automation and the ability to be in a situation where we can operate a lot of the things that are on the platform, but not actually being physically in those spaces, but in the offices,” she said, noting this is allowing Baker Hughes to “provide a different type of flexibility out into the future.”During the pandemic, the company automated a number of drilling services.“It’s amazing to see those leaps in terms of technology adoption, when you have to go through that and then realize you can do work differently,” Jones said. “I think the pandemic allowed us to really think about the art of the possible as it related to flexibility.”Deanna Jones of Baker Hughes was interviewed by Paul Pavlou of the C.T. Bauer College of BusinessEmployers must be flexible in all aspects to attract the best and brightest minds, says Jones. “If we’re not willing to be flexible in the way that we think about work, how are we ever going to attract and retain the workforce of the future?” she said.Stamping Your Skills PassportFlexibility in the workplace helps employees to transition from the work they are currently doing to what their jobs will involve down the road. For example, “How do I take someone who understands technology from one perspective in oil and gas and take them into something like carbon capture and storage or geothermal?” she said.The key is to determine what transferable skills an employee has and which ones they need to develop, according to Jones. Instead of an individual getting a degree and using that knowledge throughout their career, they begin thinking of their skill set as a passport to a continuous learning journey, she says.One of Jones’ mentees who plans to work in human resources did a rotation in sales and commercial. He found it daunting at first, but then realized, “Wow, I use a lot of skills in HR that actually apply in that sales environment.”Embracing Inclusion is Key to Attracting EmployeesFlexibility goes together with inclusion, another critical core value for companies, when it comes to making the workplace more welcoming to the broadest possible pool of talent.“Employee resource groups are a way for us to create communities of like-minded people across the organization for them to come together from whatever background they are from and be able to provide insights to the organization around ways we could change or adapt so we become more open and inclusive to those various groups,” she said.For example, members of the employee resource group for parents can give corporate leadership feedback on the work schedules and employee benefits that work best for them.For a global company like Baker Hughes, it’s important to have a multicultural employee resource group that can provide insight into what makes sense for different regions of the world, Jones says.The integration of inclusion and technology to create a more flexible working environment is going to be absolutely incredible in terms of unlocking human performance over the next 20 to 30 years. “I have said to people recently that I wish I was starting my career at this moment,” she said.Mary Pieper is a freelance writer based in Mason City, Iowa.

Mary Pieper | March 14, 2024
People First: The Crucial Role of Investing in Employees in Challenging Times

Gen-Z is the fastest growing generation in the workforce, and they are drawn to companies that invest in the causes that matter most to them. “I love seeing businesses that are purpose-driven and are aligning their work around some amazing causes,” said Ben Sampson, chief evangelist, social impact and employee engagement at WizeHive on an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Houston conference.More and more, employees are seeing participation in community service programs as a major job perk. “Getting the opportunity to support nonprofits that align with the mission of the company is really special, and something that I was really proud to do,” Sampson said.By prioritizing investments in their workforce, organizations establish a foundation for sustained success, even amid periods of corporate austerity. The panel of leaders discussed questions like, what are the most inventive and budget-friendly ways to invest in your people, from innovative benefits, recognition, workshops, mentorship, and more.Investing in Employees During Challenging TimesTrisha Conley, EVP of people and culture at LyondellBasell, says her company’s Value Enhancement Program, which invests capital in employees to become problem solvers within their own organization. This investment in ideas has a big impact. “Culture change, they say, typically takes five to seven years. In less than a year, we have seen 20,000 people jump on board, because they’re so excited that people are listening to their ideas,” she said.Education and professional development are crucial investments, even during times of financial strain. “We are going to spend money on it. If we don’t, people are leaving,” Conley said. “Especially post-Covid, it’s a retention mechanism.” Organizations don’t necessarily need to rely on external vendors for education; many leaders will welcome and enjoy the opportunity to teach, and it can happen organically internally rather than incur an outside cost.Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) provides not only internal academies but has also partnered with outside universities to provide upskilling opportunities for its employees, says Sadie Bell, VP of people systems and automation at HPE. In addition, the company uses its benefits program to ensure “we give people the value that they need.” That includes six months paid parental leave for all parents (birthing or not) and cultivating women’s leadership opportunities through mentorship and development.Reassuring Employees During Periods of AusterityIt’s imperative for companies to provide employees with information during times of financial strain or uncertainty. “Reassurance is not codeword for lying,” said Jenna Sneed, U.S. growth leader, HR & compensation consulting at Gallagher. “It’s demystifying what we actually know is and can be reasonably true.” She suggests thinking of scared employees as people lost in a boat out at sea in the night. “Your sole job is to give them a lighthouse – not just [showing] that it exists, but a defined lighthouse that when we reach it at this point in time, we will know we have arrived on solid ground.” This means adjusting “the horizon” to changing times. For example, during Covid, “visions of the future” had to be tackled in 90-day chunks rather than five-year plans. Leaders with “front row access” to information need to be the ones to create anchor points for the rest of the team.The panelists discussed the topic “People First: The Crucial Role of Investing in Employees in Challenging Times” at From Day One's Houston conference Kristi Pittman, VP, HR at Daikin Comfort Technologies North America shares that Daikin creates not only five-year plans to tackle global challenges, but also annual company wide goals with bulleted action plans to share with its group of nearly 200 companies – so all employees and departments can turn to the same guiding principles during times of challenge. “That helps our leaders understand more about Daikin’s planning and what their part of it is, and they can take that down to their team so that there is no fear,” she said.Sustainable Career Paths Through TechnologyPittman explains that Daikin’s corporate culture is rooted in the Japanese tradition that one will work at the same company his or her entire life. In order to make that lifelong career path at Daikin attainable, the company has a robust electronic performance management system that invites conversations between employees and leaders, sets the standard for optimal performances, and provides training and development for further growth, she says. “This technology can tie training to career pathing to performance management. It creates a one-stop-shop for career development in general,” she said. “Those are investments in terms of technology, time, and development that we are very passionate about.”Technology can build careers, but its rapid development is also threatening the workforce. “There’s a huge fear out there that artificial intelligence is going to come in and sweep away jobs,” Bell said. HPE prioritizes education on AI to allay those fears, she says, to demonstrate to employees and consumers the responsible and ethical ways it uses AI and re-assure them that it will not be used to “spoof” or replace human intuition and intelligence in the workplace.“One of the powers of AI that we’re seeing being mass adopted is taking large qualitative datasets, summarizing them, and producing insights at your fingertips” Sneed said. She says that HR managers can harness this power to collect data, but then need to use their own human “facilitative leadership” to put that data to work to better the organization. Sampson adds that AI can even help increase employee volunteer engagement numbers (which hover at around 17%) by analyzing employees’ skills, schedules, and locations to help match them with volunteer opportunities that are right for their availability and skillset.Engagement Through Community Service“Workers increasingly want companies to invest in social issues and causes that matter to them,” said moderator Amanda Drane, Reporter at The Houston Chronicle. Engaged employees are 13.8% more productive and stay with the company longer, Sampson says. Therefore, investing in employee volunteer opportunities “is a huge cost savings in regards to recruitment and training of staff,” Sampson said. “Gen Z, which is becoming one of the largest workforces in the U.S., deeply cares about having those opportunities and how it aligns to a brand.”Having service shine through on two levels, both through company wide initiatives and individual employee opportunities, is integral to that alignment and fostering company pride. Sampson notes Campbells Soups’ programs with community food banks as a prime example of building a culture of care.Kindness, ultimately, is what employees themselves are looking for in a workplace and what will keep them committed and successful in their roles. “We care about our people,” Bell said about HPE. “We want to see them thrive, and people that are thriving are living, they’re working, and they’re innovating at the top of their game. This is why it’s so important, no matter where the cycle is, to always stay on the upside with people.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

Katie Chambers | March 13, 2024
​​Using Structured Hiring to Make the Process Smoother at Every Stage

Hiring isn’t an exact science, but it should be. “If you can quickly, predictably bring on the best talent you can solve most business problems. That's basically the best weapon you can have in business," said President and Co-founder of Greenhouse, Jon Stross, in a recent From Day One webinar.Stross would know. He was once tasked with hiring local editors for Baby Center (a site that reaches over 32 million users per month) in 20 different countries. To do so efficiently and successfully, he and his team perfected a process by which they could “find people, interview them, test their skills and local language, then hire, onboard, and manage them.”“Hiring is so critical to the success of the business. And yet, [companies] are showing up so poorly in the hiring process. And we said if we could solve that, if we could help companies become great at hiring.”The interview process in most instances can be messy. Interviewers go in with a résumé and general idea of what they are subjectively looking for but no consistent outline of the ideal employee that fits a certain role. Stross says this often leads to duplicative and biased interview questions and bad candidate experiences.For structured hiring, Stross says, “the idea that you come up with a shared understanding of what it would take to succeed in this role? What are the characteristics of somebody who will succeed in this role?”“So you say, okay, we’re going to test these three skills and this one interview, we’re going to test these three behaviors. And so you’re able to come up with a consistent process that every candidate goes through,” Stross said. The idea is to create a consistent, transparent process that the interviewer can repeat with each candidate, and one that the candidate also understands.To achieve a more ideal hiring experience within the structured hiring model, Greenhouse, Stross's platform, achieves synchronicity between the hiring manager and recruiter by getting them to think about the role they’re filling – job requirements, metrics by which to measure them, people in the company who are already succeeding in the role, and more. Next they develop a "scorecard" to test the candidates capabilities, then structure the stages they'll put the candidates through to test various skills and attributes.Jon Stross of Greenhouse was interviewed by journalist Kelly Bourdet on the topic of structured hiring Session moderator Kelly Bourdet, founder of Apparata Media and the former managing editor of CNN Business, pointed out the established culture of hiring and interviewing and how there is some difficulty in navigating that mindset.“You might have some leader who’s been hiring for 20 years, or somebody who says, 'I have X-ray vision, I can just tell if somebody's good,'” Stross said. To overcome this, they point out the often inordinate amount of time companies spend on recruiting and ask them to spend a little more. “If you’re going to ask for all of your interviewer’s time, asking them to step away from what they’re normally doing, the least you can do is help prepare them.”He says there’s always resistance to new ideas amongst management but other managers in other departments might be open to it. “Start with the people who go, 'Yeah, this totally makes sense to me,' and you work with them.” Once management sees the benefit, others tend to fall in line.The other thing that usually helps is when seasoned interviewers see that structured hiring actually makes their job easier. “It’s going to give me exactly what questions to ask? I don’t have to think at all” I can just spend my time focusing on the candidate and not thinking of the next questions?" Stross said.Though it sounds like a broken record to point out that the professional world is changing, and AI is driving a lot of that change, it remains true. The roles we’re looking for today may last only five years, so the skills and attributes a company is looking for are more along the lines of adaptability – someone who can “roll with the punches.”Structured hiring can play an important role in shaping the hiring process away from what Stross calls "diffuse, amorphous interviews where people just ask questions about personal tastes." He points to use cases with ChatGPT and other AI, where there are obvious cases, non obvious (but profound) cases, and some "dicey" ones. Given that ChatGPT is adept at writing content, it can be used to write job descriptions, interview questions, and scorecard attributes.On the bias concern, Stross alludes to the legislation happening in New York and Europe, “You need to be transparent about how you’re making decisions. And the answer is I don’t know, the machine told us. That’s not gonna go over. It's not a great answer, right.”Stross says that for the most part, when bias slips in it’s not intentional. When making decisions without any sort of criteria, “it’s much easier for the bias to slip in.”Stross highlights the fact that Greenhouse started with a few hundred employees and now has 10,000, and went from one office to being all over the world. And everywhere you go, he says people invent their own process for everything.Hiring and managing an office are no different. “What we find is that without structured hiring, things can get messy quickly. And when you get international, each country invents their own thing. Now, obviously, you’re always going to have something unique about each country.” He says that even within Greenhouse their local offices are going to have cultures that are unique to where they are, but there are core values found in every office.“There is a lot of bedrock that we want to be the same across each place. And so one of the secrets of structured interviewing is that it’s a way to tell your internal employees what you’re all about. What are the values that we care about? You can inculcate the company values in the hiring process.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Greenhouse, for sponsoring this webinar.Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

Matthew Koehler | March 11, 2024
How DEI Must Evolve: Highlighting the Challenges and Opportunities

In the past year, big corporations like Target and Bud Light both faced backlash for their DEI initiatives, and states like Texas and Florida have even implemented bans to curb the expansion of DEI in higher education. DEI is facing a tough challenge in the nation.The pushback isn’t a surprise to Y-Vonne Hutchinson, CEO of diversity and inclusion product and services firm, ReadySet.“We’re seeing backsliding in those areas of DEI but I always tell people not to be surprised when that happens,” said Hutchinson. “We tend to think of progress as a linear advancement when in reality, it’s more of a push-pull and we have to be prepared for that resistance.”In a conversation with From Day One’s co-founder Steve Koepp, Hutchinson discussed the current challenges and opportunities in DEI, and how companies can continue to progress.Relabeling DEI While Remembering the Core ValuesDespite recent backlash, company leaders are still committed to DEI initiatives. Some leaders have audited their initiatives to ensure no legal risks, while others have rebranded and continued their initiatives more discreetly. When rebranding DEI initiatives, Hutchinson reminds company leaders to stay focused on the core of the problem.“Relabeling is helpful but I think that we have to be careful and we have to still call things what they are,” Hutchinson said. “Language like belonging, inclusion, accessibility is great but I get nervous when companies steer clear of naming some of the very foundational issues that they’re trying to solve because it makes it harder for them to do so. For example, racism still exists but if you rename racism then you have to figure out how to solve those problems without creating a perception that you’re being unfair to other groups.”Utilizing DEI as a Tool to Problem SolveIn the workplace, being diverse, equitable, and inclusive were long problems before the recent attention DEI had received. Hutchinson points to meritocracy as a key example of the clash of diversity and equitability.Y-Vonne Hutchinson of ReadySet was interviewed in the thought leadership spotlight (photo by From Day One)“Meritocracy has never existed when it comes to working in a company. Most people come into organizations through things like referrals and most people’s networks are homogenous,” Hutchinson said. “Even if we were to strip away traditional DEI programs, we would not revert to a meritocracy. Instead, we would be deeply entrenched in those hiring problems that were already there and have fewer tools to solve them.”To be effective in DEI efforts, leaders need to first identify the problem they want to solve, Hutchinson says. “DEI is a toolkit meant to address specific, deeply entrenched problems, and it's evolving,” Hutchinson said. “When we think about the future of DEI, focus on the problem first and specifically name some of these issues that organizations are going to have to deal with, no matter what happens in the DEI space.”Acknowledging Long-Term Effects of the Pandemic on the WorkforceThe pandemic did more than drastically change the style of working; it also left lingering effects that directly impacted workers’ health.In a study on workers’ claims and the impact of Long Covid, researchers found nearly 18% of claimants with long Covid were unable to return to work for over one year, with most claimants under 60 years of age.“We’re seeing people who are sick more often, more instances of chronic illness, more instances of disability,” Hutchinson said. “Traditionally, our tools that were relying on our old school tools, such as sick days, but over time it is not going to serve us. We’re gonna see more labor shortages, more attrition, lower productivity and I think that’s going to have a real impact on our bottom lines.”Leaders must be able to recognize the impact long Covid has on their workforce and be willing to take measures to protect and include those that are directly affected, Hutchinson says.“The best thing that companies can do now is critically think about accessibility and disability inclusion, and how they're going to make those accommodations for their workforce.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, ReadySet, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.

Wanly Chen | March 05, 2024
DEI Will Endure, But Corporate Advocates Will Need to Reframe Their Approach

The recent headlines say it all:“Inside the anti-DEI crusade” (The New York Times)“DEI efforts are under siege” (CNN)“DEI is under attack” (Harvard Business Review)With initiatives toward diversity, equity, and inclusion enduring a backlash on several fronts, advocates would be well-advised to rethink their goals, strategies, and messaging. If there’s still a strong business and moral case for DEI, what approaches will work better in the current climate of culture wars, corporate austerity, and legal challenges? Experts on a panel at From Day One’s February virtual conference discussed the path forward.While the headlines make the struggle seem dire, panelist Sue Schmidlkofer, global director of diversity and inclusion at UPS, says not to be alarmed. “There are cycles to this kind of work,” she said. “It’s not going away, and it’s part of the foundation for organizations large and small.” Much of the controversy, she says, comes down to the proper framing and education about the initiatives.William Rolack, chief inclusion & diversity officer for management at Kroll, agrees that the added scrutiny around DEI comes down to a lack of understanding or “misplacement” of its role within the broader corporate conversation. “DEI is not a policy. It is a philosophy,” he said. “We influence policy for equity. We don’t write policy.”“There has been an ebb and flow for DEI, as a term, and certainly as a perceived discipline. In many cases, it's been politicized and weaponized,” agreed Lauren Guthrie, VP of global talent and inclusion, diversity, equity at VF Corporation. “But I personally believe that it is an essential set of concepts, skills, and capabilities that are necessary in our culture for an organization to be successful.”Taking a Global Perspective“We are a consumer-serving organization. And for us to do that work effectively and authentically, and to connect with our consumers around the world, we have to embrace and uphold the tenets of what it means to serve those who are different than ourselves,” Guthrie said. Her organization upholds “integrity, growth mindset, and consumer centricity” as three of its core company values. This infuses the philosophy of DEI into every level of the business – from hiring and establishing a leadership competency model to building an environment of psychological safety for employees, decision-making, consumer support, and beyond.Schmidlkofer says that UPS’s DEI initiatives grew from the company’s global reach, dating back to the 1960s as the company began to reach outside of the United States to what is now over 220 countries and territories. “You're going to reflect the fabric of those communities,” she said.The group of DEI leaders discussed the topic “DEI Will Endure, But Corporate Advocates Will Need to Reframe Their Approach” during the virtual conference (photo by From Day One) “I love how you say, ‘We need to look like our customers.’ I think that will embed diversity into your efforts automatically,” said moderator Nicole Smith, editorial audience director at Harvard Business Review. Having DEI ingrained into the company’s culture allows UPS to operate from a position of strength, she says, so that any new initiatives become a natural extension of its past track record and don’t seem performative.This long term commitment to inclusion can feel more natural and nuanced to potential critics. Gus Viano, VP of global diversity, equity & inclusion at Brink's, says that organizations that only started DEI departments as a response to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, face far more pushback than those that have been incorporating it into strategy for much longer.DEI in Your Business StrategyFor Brink’s, Viano says, DEI is tied to ESG (environmental, social, and governance). “We have to report it to investors as part of our sustainability report,” he said. Guthrie agrees that DEI can have “dollar and cent impact” that can make it easier to make the case for its importance within an organization.“We’re looking to maximize not only the productivity of our workforce, but their ability to live the corporate values in an authentic way,” she said, which in turn can impact benchmarks like retention, attrition, and engagement. Rolack warns that sometimes corporations can get so caught up in compliance and education on DEI, that they miss the economic value, “the understanding that everything that DEI touches has a financial formula.”Looking at consumers from a DEI perspective can also expand customer reach and therefore increase profits. Guthrie notes that inclusive philosophy can come through in marketing efforts, product websites, and advocacy initiatives. “We’re always thinking about this holistically through the lens of associate, consumer, and community. And through each one of those filters, there is a set of metrics that we can use to hold ourselves accountable, and also demonstrate a very palpable return on investment for the work that we're doing in this space,” she said.Mitigating the “Threat Level”Viano emphasized the importance of collaborating with the legal department to ensure that any statements or policies are just and defensible. Schmidlkofer encourages all organizations to do a legal audit of their current DEI practices, especially in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, to ensure they are still being intentional as well as legally compliant.Schmidlkofer also reiterates the need for better awareness about what DEI really means to help decrease the feelings of threat and anxiety around the issue – and making it not just about race, gender, and compulsory unconscious bias training. “We all know how terrible it feels to be excluded. So let’s focus more on bringing people together so that the business performs better,” she said. These “courageous conversations,” as she calls them, take time and patience.When DEI is under attack, employees from diverse groups may feel under attack by extension. “I advise the leaders of the company to speak openly about it, and to be very specific about the position of the company as it supports diversity and inclusion, making sure that employees not only feel safer and that there is a sense of sustainability with regard to the DEI, but also that leaders are committed to the work,” Viano said.Incorporating DEI into employee systems also means ensuring people are not excluded, which can lead to resentment and the feeling of being under threat. “White males are sometimes left out of systems that may only have [identity-based] employee networks, but may not have an intersectionality network,” Rolack said. This nuanced approach to inclusion is crucial to cultivating allyship.Moving the Work ForwardEstablishing DEI as a philosophy that all employees feel ownership over is key to moving the dial forward. It starts with leadership embedding the philosophy, and then creating accountabilities for other employees too. “It needs to have a clear functional owner within the construct of the organization to drive that work,” Guthrie said.“Through programs, processes, and ways of working, the evidence needs to be palpable. Getting tactical about the clear actions, which then can allow an organization to speak transparently about progress or lack thereof, is really where the ownership lies.” Crucially, organizations must choose a path that makes the most sense for its own structure and needs. “There’s so much opportunity to lean into this platform in an authentic and an effective way for your organization.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

Katie Chambers | March 04, 2024
Building a Data-Driven DEI Program in Today’s Landscape

DEI has been making the headlines, which can be largely be attributed to the Supreme Court decision on higher education, which ruled that race can no longer be used as a component of how selections are made for college admissions.How does this apply in the context of employers’ DEI programs?  What should organizations do to try and solidify their programs?  Cheryl Boyer, director of diversity and inclusion services at Berkshire Associates, spoke about the ways to do this at From Day One’s February virtual conference.First, your DEI program should be aligned with your business priorities and objectives. Also, inclusion should be a priority. Programs and initiatives should be driven by (or at least assessed) by the data, she says. And those programs, including the data, should be reviewed annually to ensure they're meeting the organization's goals.Cheryl Boyer of Berkshire Associates led the thought leadership spotlight alongside colleague Thomas Carnahan (company photo)So, what does it mean to really look at your data? First, look at your current representation and demographics from an intersectional lens. Other items that you would have in your employee database that you could look at are age, levels within the organization, geography, and individuals with disabilities. You can also collect information on your LGBTQ+ community.  All of these help assess where you are.You should also look at the entire employee lifecycle, such as recruitment strategies, hiring, performance and talent management, mentoring programs, development opportunities, promotion, and even engagement. All of these factors can help you find gaps and areas for improvement.Thomas Carnahan, manager of compensation services at Berkshire Associates, says that it’s important to consider the interrelationships of data. “Make sure that you're not treating every one of these data gathering processes as standalone,” said Carnahan.This is because a lot of the engagement information you can get from employees and customers is really telling when you look at the differences by race, gender, different demographic groups, organizational level, and more.If you’re not doing this, you’re missing an opportunity to draw characteristics and lines between aspects of your data. Performance ratings, for example, are associated with your engagement and your promotions. It’s essential to ask questions like “Do you feel comfortable raising your hand and pointing out mistakes?” and “Do you feel comfortable bringing concerns to your team to your supervisor?”“We know, from broad research on engagement surveys, that there are groups of people that feel marginalized in businesses and that they feel that they are not heard,” Carnahan said. “People tend to feel that way when they don’t match in some way, demographically with their manager.” When you look at the data and the connections in the data, you see a drastic drop off of highly qualified people not applying for promotions or providing important input or impact — because they don't feel comfortable.Building a strong, sensible DEI program hinges on data, as data can speak volumes about interrelationships between race, gender, and economics, and how the interplay of these factors impacts the workplace.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Berkshire Associates, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Keren's love for words saw her transition from a corporate employee into a freelance writer during the pandemic. When she is not at her desk whipping up compelling narratives and sipping on endless cups of coffee, you can find her curled up with a book, playing with her dog, or pottering about in the garden. 

Keren Dinkin | March 01, 2024
Taking the Long View Toward Progress in Workplace Diversity

“Things get hard when they’re working, but that doesn’t mean we let up,” said Loren Hudson, senior vice president and chief diversity officer of Comcast Cable. “Right now is our time to remain committed to supporting our teammates and communities because we have all learned that DEI is a key part of how we win talent, business space, and how we make an impact in the communities where we live and work.” DEI initiatives across the country are being politically scrutinized, resulting in bans and rollbacks in colleges and companies. Yet in the midst of it all, Hudson remains steadfast in her stance in supporting DEI.In a fireside chat at From Day One’s February virtual conference, with Sharon Epperson, senior personal finance correspondent at CNBC, NBCUniversal, Hudson discussed the current world of DEI and how companies can maintain their progress in driving change.Placing DEI at the CoreA CNBC survey found that nearly 80% of survey respondents wanted to work for a company that valued DEI issues, showing the importance of DEI to employees and job seekers alike.DEI initiatives extend far beyond just the workplace, Hudson said. “[DEI] touches so many aspects of our lives, from personal to professional, to our business to our community,” Hudson said. “At the heart of what is important, DEI practices, initiatives, mindset and focus are good for the business, people leadership, employee experience, and community activism.”Leaders can often assess the success of DEI initiatives and programs against business value and employee experience, Hudson says. However, leaders who lead DEI initiatives with intentionality can be more fruitful in the long term.“When I look at businesses who are focusing intentionally on this space, their most senior leaders have said, “This is important to us as leaders, as a business and as a community partner,” Hudson said. “Many organizations that can say that they were successful in this space are because it connects back to what the organization stands for.”Driving Equity Beyond the WorkplaceDuring the pandemic, Hudson realized there was a sudden need for internet access by community members who traditionally did not have regular access.Sharon Epperson, right, interviewed Loren Hudson, left, at From Day One's February virtual conference on the topic of Getting to the Next Stage of Diversity and Belonging (photo by From Day One)As a leader of a telecommunications company, Hudson knew her role was more than just driving change and equity in the workplace, it also meant driving change in the communities they served.By partnering with community organizations, Hudson and her team at Comcast were able to provide free Wi-Fi centers and resources for the communities. “We provided broadband while other partners provided the site and lunch or breakfast,” Hudson said.The success of these sites wouldn’t have come together if community members hadn’t raised their concerns, Hudson says.“Without partners telling us what the people are whispering or loudly saying, we wouldn't necessarily know all of the things we may know,” Hudson said. “So, talking to partners who are closest to the community members is key because they provide us perspective and provide insights to what their community or their members are saying.”Embracing Outside PerspectivesBy encouraging a growth mindset for employees, leaders can help cultivate a more inclusive work environment. This can aid the progress of DEI as team members are more committed to learning and growing. To help foster a growth mindset in teams, Hudson recommends actively looking for outside perspectives.“I bring other CEOs and their teams in, and we share what we’re doing, what keeps us up at night, and what’s going well. We can play off each other and do joint things to have greater impact, and that’s important across whatever line of business we’re doing,” Hudson said. “It’s creating this space for new fresh perspectives by inviting people from different backgrounds to come in and share those perspectives. That’s how we learn and grow and innovate.”Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.

Wanly Chen | February 29, 2024
Empowering People With Eating Disorders to Recover at Home

Eating disorders affect nearly one in 10 Americans, and 10,200 deaths each year are the direct result of one of these illnesses. However, the United States has a shortage of experts providing treatment, says Dr. Erin Parks, co-founder and chief clinical officer of Equip, a 100% virtual eating disorder treatment program. “I think it’s generous to say that there’s even 5,000 outpatient specialists,” Parks told Lauren Burkavage, senior director of the strategic partnerships team at Accolade, during a From Day One webinar. Another key issue in eating disorder treatment is it requires a multidisciplinary approach to be effective, says Parks. “It’s hard to put together a team because it often takes both medical and mental health professionals to help someone recover,” she said. Equip not only provides a five-person team for each patient, but also lets them recover in their own home. “We think it’s important to be at work, to be at school, to be at soccer practice, to be in their book club, because those are the reasons we recover,” Parks said. “We wanted to make sure treatment was being delivered at home around your schedule instead of having to give up on life to get better.”From an employer’s perspective, Equip results in reduced absenteeism because an employee who is either dealing with an eating disorder themselves or has a child dealing with one doesn’t have to “take them to appointments or travel to a residential treatment center, which many times aren’t closely located to where people live,” Burkavage said.Other Equip AdvantagesThere are four different kinds of treatment for eating disorders: a residential treatment center (RTC), where patients live full-time for a month or more; partial hospitalization (PHP), where the individual stays in a hospital for six to nine hours a day for five to seven days a week; intensive outpatient treatment (IOP), which lasts three hours a day for three to five days a week; and outpatient treatment, which is what Equip provides in a virtual setting.“Right now, about 85% of our patients meet criteria to go to IOP, PHP or residential, but choose to use Equip instead,” she said. One reason is a patient’s insurance might cover care at a residential treatment center, but when they go home, they can’t find a PHP, IOP, or even an outpatient provider.“That really contributes to the fact that 50% of patients usually relapse within a year of treatment, and it’s because treatment doesn’t last that long, just a couple of months,” Parks said. But in the Equip system, “a lot of our patients stay with us for a full year, really getting them to a solid place and giving them more than just a foundation,” she said. “They can see their life without an eating disorder by the time they leave.”Provider Diversity and Peer MentorsThe webinar featured Erin Parks, co-founder and chief clinical officer of Equip (company photo) One thing that prevents people from seeking treatment for eating disorders is the stereotype that they only affect thin, white teenage girls or young women, says Parks. “But the truth is eating disorders don’t discriminate,” she said. “At Equip, we’ve had patients as young as 5, and we’ve had adults in their 70s. Up to 40% of people who suffer are male. It affects all races and ethnicities equally, and it affects people at all areas of the socio-economic spectrum. And probably the most surprising thing is people with eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes.”Seniors, males, and people of color tend to want a provider that has a similar lived experience as they do, says Parks. In addition, someone who is transgender or gender non-conforming is four to five times more likely to develop an eating disorder than someone who is cisgender, Parks says. “It’s less safe for them to get treatment when they don’t have providers who understand the intersection between their gender identity and their eating disorder,” she said. This is why Equip is dedicated to increasing the diversity of its providers. The organization also has peer mentors, who are employees who have recovered from an eating disorder themselves. “Our patients really love working with their peer mentors because they have a shared identity.” Peer mentors “help to increase motivation, build a life worth living, and figure out why you want to recover from your eating disorder.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Accolade, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Mary Pieper is a freelancer reporter based in Mason City, Iowa.

Mary Pieper | February 28, 2024
Lifestyle Spending Accounts: Offering Employees a Flexible Benefits Choice

It’s not always about dollars and cents, but about what you can do with them. That’s the takeaway that flexible benefits company Forma has found working with 280 companies across the globe.Megan Burns, benefits strategy team lead at Forma, spoke to these findings at a From Day One Webinar titled “How Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) Revitalize Benefits for the Most Employee.” As a newer benefit in the industry, Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) are growing. Fast. The biggest reasons?“The power in these programs is employee flexibility and choice,” Burns said. “Since employees can choose how to spend their money, there’s always something valuable for every employee to use those dollars on, and then no one is left out.”A Changing MarketplaceIt’s no surprise that the cost of employee benefits increases year after year. So benefits leaders need to ensure their dollars are working efficiently without compromising the quality of benefits. Employees are already feeling the pinch financially, Burns says, as the cost of living keeps going up.“This type of stress is impacting both workplace productivity, and also makes employees more likely to explore alternative positions outside of your organization, directly impacting your overall retention,” she said.Traditionally, lifestyle benefits solutions relied on a confusing point system, leading to low engagement and low appreciation. Meanwhile, it takes more work for the admin to run these programs. Enter LSAs: this new way of looking at benefits can be a win-win for companies in more ways than one.An LSA, which can be called by many names, is a customizable spending account that the employer designs and sets up, then the employee decides how to spend those funds within the parameters. LSAs look different from company to company, depending on their goals.Megan Burns, benefits strategy team lead at Forma, led the webinar (company photo)Empowering EmployeesSupporting employee wellness is one common way of structuring an LSA, Burns told the audience. You as the employer set the pillars and budget with specific parameters. For example, a company could allot $50 per month for each employee as part of their LSA.“Once that’s set in place, the employee then gets to decide how to spend that $50. Within those program parameters, those pillars, they may choose to spend that $50 on a local gym membership, or purchasing a bicycle or running shoes because they like to be outdoors.”But it doesn’t have to stop there. Employers could set up parameters for financial wellness, caregiving support, or other benefits that could help support employee wellness. Forma can help companies set it up and offer employees a debit card to a discounted store with 250 vendors, making each dollar go further.Dollars are only debited from the company if they are used by the employee, and Burns said a majority of employees don’t always use 100 percent of what’s allotted to them. Not only that, but there is cost savings thanks to lower call volume and admin time required. For one company, Forma was able to save them $500,000 in the first six months, partially because they could use the Forma platform and offload their expensive benefits software.“We worked cross functionally across a number of different teams to realize what that amount would look like. For this particular client, they did choose to reimburse for gym, home office expenses like internet, cell phone, and other wellness items.”Gaining PopularityEmployers and employees have both benefited from this program, which is why Burns said LSAs continue to grow. In fact, 70% of employers are currently considering adding a lifestyle spending account. A projected 13% of companies will have them in place by 2024 and 43% by the end of 2025.“Employers are more diverse and dispersed than ever before. There’s five different generations in the workforce, and the most efficient way to meet their unique needs is to provide them with choice and give them benefit dollars that they can then use towards what matters most to them.” That’s why LSAs also translate well across global populations, since they are customizable and can adapt needs country by country.According to a Radford analysis, employees ranked their 401k match as the most appreciated and valued benefit program, with LSA as a close second. It’s interesting to note, too, that employees actually ranked less dollars given to them and an LSA as high as having higher value than more dollars put into a program that's specifically designed with strict parameters and less choice, Burns explained.In Forma’s recent benchmark report of 200 companies with 450,000 members as of December 2023, the broad all-inclusive LSA is the most popular. One likely reason is that it helps companies reach their DEI goals.“They want to lean into that flexibility of choice where everyone gets the same dollar value, the same dollar amount, and then they get to choose on how to spend that money,” Burns said.One account some companies have set up is medical travel. Especially for those who are in underserved areas and require medical services in another area, employees can get reimbursed for travel costs associated with medical procedures. Education repayment and other development reimbursement is also high on the list of LSAs for companies, as are home office reimbursements, rewards and recognition, caregiving, and even meal delivery service. The opportunities are endless.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Forma, for sponsoring this webinar.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Carrie Snider | February 27, 2024
Responding to Pushback and Creating More Inclusive Environments That Value Diversity

Even though diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace leads to better financial outcomes, greater social impact, and more satisfied employees, DEI efforts are “being used as part of the culture wars right now,” said Malia Lazu. Lazu, CEO of the Urban Labs at MIT and author of the book From Intention to Impact: A Practical Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion spoke in a fireside chat during From Day One’s February Virtual Conference. “It’s important for us to remember that DEI is not against the wall because it’s a failing endeavor. It’s against the wall because people are scared of losing what they think they have now,” Lazu told moderator Jeanhee Kim. “When you’re privileged, fairness feels like a step down.”Corporate leaders and managers must truly believe that “DEI is the platform of the future” if they are going to have the will to fight the inevitable pushback, Lazu said. Although political pressure can be intimidating, organizations can gain the courage to continue their DEI endeavors from realizing the pushback is coming from less than 25% of the U.S. population, says Lazu. “This isn’t about politics for you, this is about competing in a global economy. And in 20 years, this country is going to look very different.”Acknowledging the ProblemOrganizations first need to find their gaps in DEI before they can resolve them, says Lazu. And that realization can cause discomfort.Journalist Jeanhee Kim interviewed author Malia Lazu in a fireside chat titled “How to Respond to the Pushback to Create More Inclusive Environments That Honor and Value Diversity” (photo by From Day One)“I often tell my clients if we’re not uncomfortable, we haven’t started working yet,” Lazu said. It’s important to understand that racism isn’t just an interpersonal problem but systemic one, said Lazu. “It exists whether you’re a nice person or not,” she said, noting that in American school’s, children are taught about Manifest Destiny rather than other philosophies that don’t center the white European perspective. Once people understand that institutional racism exists and what causes it, “then we can start deconstructing it,” Lazu said. The Role of Middle Management and HR A top-down approach to DEI won’t make the changes that are needed in the company, according to Lazu. “Where the change gets lost is in middle management,” she said. Middle managers and HR officers can do a lot to create a positive environment for DEI within their companies because “modeling behavior is critically important,” Lazu said. If these individuals aren’t fully invested in DEI and are worried that the company will be getting less qualified employees by hiring more women, for example, they need to learn more about what DEI really means and become more confident with it, says Lazu. Middle managers and HR leaders also need to recognize their power to make changes, whether it’s making sure they are selecting a diverse slate of candidates or even just deciding where to buy coffee from, Lazu says.It’s OK to Make Mistakes While LearningEven those with the best of intentions can make mistakes when it comes to DEI efforts. Lazu says she learned this first-hand when she was helping to organize the first disability fashion show in New England. “It became front and center how ableist I was because I had never been blessed enough to organize with people with disabilities,” she said. “And I couldn’t just walk away from it and say, ‘Oh, well.’”Instead, Lazu asked the disability community, “How do I come back from using the word ‘normal’ when I meant ‘able-bodied’?”“It’s about understanding that if you’re going to do this authentically, like any other relationship, you’re going to step on toes,” she said. “Anyone who has life partners knows, even they will get it wrong sometimes.”That’s why it’s important that companies have a culture of “generosity of interpretation. It’s important to understand that someone tried and missed the mark, and have a reparative practice.” Mary Pieper is a freelancer reporter based in Mason City, Iowa.

Mary Pieper | February 26, 2024