Search Stories

Showing 700 - 720 of 1066 results

How to Build a Grassroots CSR Program in Your Workplace

One of the few consolations of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it powered a surge in global volunteerism. According to the United Nations, the Red Cross received hundreds of thousands of new volunteers around the world, and received so many requests to volunteer, they didn’t have the time or the staff to respond to all of them. At the same time, the pandemic changed the shape of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs and quickly deepened the importance of corporate volunteerism and giving, said Sasha DeMarre, solutions architect at CyberGrants, a company that builds corporate giving and philanthropy software. DeMarre works closely with the companies that use their platform and sees firsthand how CSR programs are built, maintained, and grown. “[Covid] has made it so much more employee-driven,” she said. “Volunteerism is obviously quite popular–it’s a great way for people to give back.” I had the chance to interview DeMarre and her colleague Rob Livada, the SVP of solution architecture, about CSR programs and how they’ve changed since 2020 for a From Day One webinar titled, “Giving Your Employees a Better CSR Experience with the Right Technology.” We started by talking about the foundations of CSR. For companies who haven’t been involved before, where to begin? Begin With Employees DeMarre recommended asking your staff what they see and do in their communities. “Employees are likely already donating and volunteering, doing different acts of kindness, so we need to harness that if we’re going to engage them in our corporate programs.” This lets the workforce influence the direction of the program, which increases engagement. Livada said to start small. Don’t worry about budgets or dollar-matching yet, just be ready to power grassroots action. “It’s okay to launch just a simple volunteerism program so that your employees can just start engaging with each other,” said Livada. “Your employee base will start to tell you what is most important to them, then you can take that feedback and you can enhance and you can grow your program so that it’s growing alongside your company or your ecosystem.” Speaking about the CSR experience, clockwise from upper right: Rob Livada and Sasha DeMarre of CyberGrants and moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza (Image by From Day One) Don’t miss opportunities to get workers involved right out of the gate. Make CSR part of the onboarding process by giving an overview of the program, directions and ideas for how employees can get involved, and a tour of your CSR software. Some CyberGrants clients even provide paid volunteer hours and pre-loaded charitable spending accounts to employees on their first day. “If you give people two hours to volunteer their first week, then you can get them engaged. The first time you get somebody engaged is the hardest to do, then you can get them to come back more frequently,” Livada said. Companies can engender excitement for their social involvement by encouraging employees to talk about their personal experiences. DeMarre and Livada talked about the success of social sharing platforms—like Slack and intranets—that allow participants to highlight the ways they give back and the causes they support. It’s important, said DeMarre, “to give employees a space to share those stories without a huge corporate message behind it.” The goal of these programs, however, shouldn’t be employee recognition. In fact, offering cash incentives like gift cards or bonuses is usually counterproductive. Ultimately, the recognition employees want is awareness of their passions. “They don't necessarily want a gift card or a pat on their back,” DeMarre said. “They usually just want light to be shed on that cause or that nonprofit they were aligned behind.” Making the Initiatives Sustainable Longevity and adaptability of CSR must be considered too. Programs must be consistent enough to keep employees involved in annual events, like holiday gift drives or prom dress drives, but flexible enough to respond to local or global disasters, like the war in Ukraine. Livada and DeMarre said communication plans have to prepare for both eventualities. There has to be a regular promotion of ongoing activities and a plan to quickly notify staff of ways they can pitch in during moments of crisis, plus a way to record all of it. In fact, Livada argued that speed and agility have defined CSR for the last two years. “There’s a big shift to making sure that you’re responding rapidly to anything that’s happening in the world.” He recommended standing up a “hyperlocal” strategy as well, which calls for building relationships with community organizations that need support and can put people to work quickly. The longevity and the agility of any CSR plan depends on internal communication. Employees need to always know what’s happening, new ways they can act, who needs help, how to log their time, and how to report giving. A communication plan takes many forms: CSR software, physical flyers, QR codes, messages on TV monitors around the office, announcements at meetings, email newsletters—whatever gets the message out. And don’t forget to report on the good work your employees are doing. Every stakeholder, from entry-level to executive, needs to hear what’s going on. The more you stay connected with your workforce about what they’re doing in their communities and how the company can support that work, the more you can tie your workers’ values to your company values in a way that propels contributions to the social good. It’s about empowering your people to do the work that matters to them in as many ways as possible. CSR thrives with grassroots involvement, Livada said. “You stand it up, you let it run, and then you adjust it as necessary so it’s got a broad, wide path that really is meant to be engaging across all departments and all groups.” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner who supported this webinar, CyberGrants. CyberGrants is becoming part of Bonterra, a leader in social-good technology. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, Va., who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 16, 2022

How to Enhance Mental Health and Wellness Benefits

A few years ago, Pammi Bhullar, now the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Edelman Financial Engines, had a colleague who was grappling with anxiety and not given a welcoming space or enough mental-health resources to deal with it. Bhullar’s friend found a new workplace that not only allowed her to talk about her anxiety, but by giving her tangible mental-health resources, allowed her to be a more productive and overall better employee. Plus, she created a support system within the inner circle of her colleagues. “If she thought she was going to get a panic attack, she had a support system who recognized the early signs,” Bhullar told moderator Patia Braithwaite, the health director at Well+Good, during a From Day One webinar titled, “Enhancing Employee Mental Health and Wellness Benefits.” This anecdote goes to show that investing in employee mental-health and wellness resources is not just an act of care, but it also has tangible benefits, such as employee retention, reduced absenteeism, and higher productivity. This is especially true in the late Covid era, when employees find themselves reprioritizing their relationship to work and questioning their identification with their own line of work. A Challenge, Exacerbated  With the pandemic, a lot of challenges came to a head. The trend toward remote work had been increasing in recent years “... and the pandemic gave us a leap off the cliff,” said Anastasia Norton, who until recently was director of total-rewards management at USAA, which mainly serves the military community. “It was an entirely new environment in which to operate. The traditional means of connecting were no longer relevant,” she said. With such a paradigm shift, how could leaders reach out to employees, and find ways to connect with them now that everyone was essentially a hermit? “We had to rapidly shift our paradigm, figuring out how to connect with them and how to support them,” she said. In this context, going to work stopped being the central part of people’s routines. With work-from-home policies, people started spending their whole days with their families, partners, and their kids, so that the idea of work being central got pushed to the side. Yet this shift also led to depression: Christine Celio, Ph.D., the national clinical director for mental health integration in primary care at One Medical, observed that her own psychotherapy patients went from asking, “How do I progress in my career and life?” to “What am I even doing?” Managers Stepping Up Focusing on mental-health benefits, from row from left: Christine Celio of One Medical and Marni McDowell of Micron Technology. Middle row: Patia Braithwaite of Well+Good, Jake Spiegel of the Employee Benefits Research Council, and Pammi Bhullar of Edelman Financial Engines. Bottom row: Anastasia Norton, until recently with USAA (Image by From Day One) In this shift, the ideal benefits package should put therapy and wellness front and center. “You can’t understate the managers’ roles, to make sure they liberate their teams by checking in on them,” said Bhullar. “Do you have the resources you need? Do you have the accommodation you need? Are you set up appropriately?” are some of the questions that should be asked she said. It’s crucial for managers to know people well enough to gauge when something is not right. “Prioritizing the relationship with direct reports is the most important thing,” said Marni McDowell, senior director of global well-being at Micron Technology. “We all heard the data that people don’t leave bad work, they leave bad leaders.” Celio, a licensed clinical psychologist, has some tips for managers to detect early signs of distress. They’re usually behavioral. “People make themselves and their lives a little smaller. They binge-watch TV instead of reaching out to friends, they tend to have trouble sleeping or they sleep too much. “How we behave correlates to how we feel, how we feel influences what we want to do,” Celio said. She recommends managers do weekly check-ins to get a sense of whether people aren’t doing as well as they used to do. This relationship is not one-sided. “One thing to keep in mind is that workers look to their employers,” said Jake Spiegel, a research associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “Employees really trust employers are going to pick a suitable suite [of benefits] for them, helping them improve the quality of being. Employers have a role to play, but employees trust them.” Towards a Better Understanding of Mental-Health Challenges  More mental-health and wellness awareness also means getting rid of stereotypes. In the first place, stress is not to always be considered an inconvenience. “A stress-free work environment is not an ideal place to work,” said Celio. “We need our deadlines, we need structure.” In addition, burnout and structure-related stress are not necessarily related. “What has been coming up in the pandemic is that burnout creeps in when people feel overwhelmed, when they feel that what they do doesn't matter, that there’s lack of fairness and lack of control,” Celio continued. “We’re not all in the same boat, but we’re all in the same storm.” Not being in the same boat especially pertains to the intersection between mental health and DEI. In certain underrepresented communities, Bhullar noted, there’s a lot of stigma around mental health, so people might not seek help nor openly talk about trauma, anxiety, and depression. “There’s the triggering of highly visible or invisible aggressions. Often those individuals become the educators, to someone who’s an ally,” she continued, indicating that educating allies can also be a burden. Harnessing Data and the Potential of Digital “When it comes to mental health benefits, there’s not a lot of data: it’s the Wild West,” said Spiegel. “What we found, though, as doctors’ offices closed, is that there's a pretty enthusiastic take on telemedicine. You’d think digital natives would be more likely to embrace it, but we found that the average age of a telemedicine user is higher than the average age of a person preferring an in-person appointment.” “It’s such a time commitment to go to therapy,” echoed Celio. “Going to the office, parking, checking in and out. The convenience of a telehealth appointment, the ability just to log on  and then log off, has been so helpful for so many people.” Sure, cost remains a hindrance, but there are ways to mitigate the expense. “One of the ways we tied it together is a program where people earn points, so premiums are lower,” said Norton. “Usually it’s healthy activities, or virtual seminars, prerecorded resources on stress, anxiety. We incentivized that behavior so they could lower the premiums. We get info out there and it makes sense for them.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | June 12, 2022

The Myth of the ‘Woke’ Corporation

“Whatever you do, lead with your values,” Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the graduating class at Gallaudet University. Well, that leaves it wide open, doesn’t it? In Apple’s case, what values allow it to manufacture in China, a country that has crushed democracy in Hong Kong and violated the rights of millions of Uighurs on the mainland? Yet iPhones today are allowing citizens and soldiers of Ukraine to use technology to fend off the invading Russian hordes. Or consider McDonald’s, which closed some 850 stores in Russia, laying off 62,000 people. This is the same McDonald’s that is being accused by investor Carl Icahn of being complicit in ruthless treatment of pigs by vendors who supply meat for McRib sandwiches. Then there’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed to eschew politics before tweeting, disingenuously, that he was becoming a Republican because the Democrats are the party of hate, notwithstanding the GOP affiliation with the clearly hateful and racist “replacement theory” that motivated an 18-year old domestic terrorist in Buffalo, NY, to murder 10 people. That’s not going to play well among California’s liberal Tesla owners—who now have many more EV models to choose from. And there’s no more emotional and potentially divisive topic than abortion rights. The issue is so fraught that the public relations firm Zeno advised its corporate clients to do zero–to run and hide. No, you don’t. Businesses that don’t confront such issues face the possibility that a relatively small group of white, male, you-don’t-even-have-to-say conservative legislators and regulators in states such as Texas and Oklahoma are going to dictate national policy. Which is why companies as diverse as Citigroup and Chobani quickly revised their benefits programs to include travel for out-of-state abortion services. If young people today want to work for a company that has a purpose, then defining that purpose in all its forms–political, social, environmental, racial and even local–has never been more complex for corporate America. Likewise for investors and investment companies. BlackRock has drawn fire from both conservatives for its stance on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, and from liberals for its investments in China. In Florida, the Walt Disney Co. first tried to escape the debate over that state’s so called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But Mouse House employees, particularly its creatives, were having none of it. The company then broadcasted its dissent against the gay-bashing legislation. Disney’s support of its own LGBTQ community, in turn, made it a target for Florida’s reactionary governor Ron DeSantis, who orchestrated legislation that stripped Disney of its special tax and government status in the two Florida counties where Disney World operates. (Also potentially leaving the state on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of bond payments.) Then DeSantis vetoed funding for a training facility for the Tampa Bay Rays in part because the team spoke up against gun violence. Apparently, the governor favors it. But Disney’s customers voted Mickey over Ron—that is, they continue to flock to the Orlando resort and watch Disney movies. Those include the thousands of LGBTQ customers who show up, and are welcomed, for unofficial Gay Days at the resorts. A Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Michigan, one of more than 700 in the U.S. In 2018, the company halted sales of assault weapons in all of its stores (Photo by RiverNorthPhotography/iStock by Getty Images) The fact that a Republican governor would try to harm a Fortune 100 company that employs more than 70,000 Floridians underscores how divisive the politics have become. The fact that consumers have largely ignored DeSantis  shows that they respect thoughtful corporate decisionmaking about controversial issues. And well they should.  Yet another mass shooting event in Texas, in Uvalde, once again focused attention on assault rifles. But it was following a mass shooting at Parkland high school in Florida, in 2018, when Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack pulled assault rifles from the company’s stores and halted gun sales to anyone under 21 years of age. That decision would cost the company some $250 million in sales initially. But Stack, a gun owner, had had enough. He told me: “After Parkland, I said, ‘We’re done. We’re not selling these guns, we’re not selling high-capacity magazines, we’re not going to sell any guns to anyone who’s under 21.’ That was it. We’re never going to change our mind on any of that.” Sales would eventually rebound because most Americans want to ban assault rifles, too. Walmart, no paragon of wokeness, made a similar call on behalf of its customers. This is a company that is now making a big investment in health care, because it can see the great need, and opportunity, among its customers and employees. To that end, Walmart recently banned cigarette sales in many of its stores even though the company, via a subsidiary, was once the largest tobacco wholesaler in the country. Selling death while at the same time trying to prevent death is a mixed marketing message at best, so Walmart made a choice: your health matters. We’ve already watched the Trump Administration play divide and conquer with corporate America in its defenestration of the Environmental Protection Agency and the trashing of pollution regulations. In clashing with the state of California over its stringent automobile standards—Trump demanded lower fuel efficiency—the administration forced automakers to choose sides. GM, Fiat Chrysler and Toyota, conservative by nature, backed into Trump’s garage. Honda, Volkswagen, BMW and Ford (with the support of executive chair Bill Ford), boldly backed California. These firms were already moving swiftly to expand their EV offerings; siding with California enhances their EV cred and offers a market advantage by doing so. Ford’s F-150 Lighting EV pickup, for instance, is already a breakout star. Corporations need to look a decade ahead to stay ahead. Any company that wants to be aligned with the future can’t avoid addressing human rights, animal rights, government actors, health care, sustainability and the environment. Not that the path is straightforward or even logical. Consider that Texas (once again) bars state retirement and pension funds from investing in companies that want to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Also consider that Texas is the nation’s leading producer of wind energy. If you build wind turbines, doesn’t that make you anti-fossil fuel by definition? Texas pols can deny climate change, but those denials will provide little protection when a monster hurricane–one of the consequences–wipes out Galveston. (Again. In 1900, more than 6,000 people died in such a storm.) And even if Galveston is spared, homeowners in coastal areas that haven’t prepared for extreme weather tied to a warming climate are already seeing sharp increases in flood insurance, if they can buy it at all. Which is to say that even if the free market doesn’t have a conscience, it tends to be rational. The defeat of two ExxonMobil board nominees last year by an activist hedge fund that criticized its strategy around climate change didn’t suddenly transform a hydrocarbon giant into an alternative-energy outfit. But that outcome did demonstrate that ExxonMobil wasn’t as focused on the future of clean energy as it might be—and that’s a market risk shareholders don’t care to face. ExxonMobil’s investors were indeed following their own values–while at the same time addressing shareholder value. That shouldn’t be such a rare event in corporate America. And if the graduates at Gallaudet follow the advice of Apple CEO Cook, it won’t be. Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine.

Bill Saporito | June 12, 2022

It’s Time to ‘Pay Up’ for Mothers (and It’s Not About Salary)

In the decade before 2020, the movement to advance women in the workplace focused on equal pay–but was it was the wrong target? Gender equality was still in the distance, but women were making major professional progress. They held more degrees than men, more women were leading companies and sitting on boards, and in January 2020, there were more women than men on U.S. payrolls. Pay inequality became a natural focal point–in 2020, women earned 84% of what men earned, according to Pew Research Center analysis. It’s a cause whose progress can be readily tracked, so taking up this banner was, and is, a worthy cause. When the pandemic razed decades of workplace advancement, however, equal pay plunged down the list of emergencies. Equal pay doesn’t make a difference when schools are closed and there’s no child care to be found and no paid time off to deal with it. “I think the conversation on pay equality is exactly a good case study for how we’ve been duped,” said Reshma Saujani, who is an author, speaker, and the founder of Girls Who Code and The Marshall Plan for Moms. “The conversation on pay was centered around gender, when it’s really never been around gender, it’s been around the motherhood penalty.” The motherhood penalty refers to the fact that women who have children are paid less, passed over for promotions, perceived as less competent and less committed, and often ejected from the workforce. Saujani has written several books about women’s relationship to work, but Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think), released in March, is the first to look squarely at what doesn’t work for women at work. The book is a forceful push beyond the easily quantified problems of equal pay and representation and makes us look at who we ignored in our fight for equality in the workplace: mothers. Author, entrepreneur and activist Reshma Saujani (Photo courtesy of Simon & Schuster) “In our historic march toward equality,” she writes in Pay Up, “how could we not have seen that the doors the feminist movement cracked open in the workplace were not opened nearly wide enough to let in and keep the 86% of American women who were or would become mothers in their lifetimes?” For Saujani, “paying up” isn’t about higher salaries—in fact, salary is hardly mentioned in the book—it’s about giving women what they deserve: the ability to be a parent and do paid work. In Pay Up, Saujani calls for employers to do nine things, including offering paid parental leave and giving mothers the time they need after giving birth, in order to make work possible for mothers. Raising salaries is not one of them. Saujani doesn’t ignore the role of money in advancing women’s position, but puts it in its place. Equal pay can’t be the end goal, demonstrated by the fact increasing wages hasn’t solved anything so far. She writes, “What does it say about our culture that I am one of the privileged women with a stable partner, a solid career, and the financial resources to hire help and run my household—and yet I am still drowning under the conflicting demands of work and raising children?” Saujani told From Day One that public awareness of the gender pay gap didn’t even scratch the surface of what was really wrong, that the reason for the pay gap is not because of gender alone, it’s because of women’s status as caregivers. “If we had tried to focus on that, and focus on how we treat moms, I think we would have just gotten to solutions faster.” The argument that the problem is the system–not women and not pay–has a history. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s famous essay, “While Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which calls for changes to the way work is done, was published in 2012. Her book, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family, which calls for revision of public policy, employment practices, and gender roles, was published three years later. In 2019, labor organizer Jenny Brown published Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work, which demonstrates, in painstaking detail, just how untenable it is to be a mother in the U.S., and why women are increasingly opting out as a result. Less than two weeks before the Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic, Michelle P. King, who was, at the time, Netflix’s director of inclusion, released The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers that Are Holding Women Back at Work, dissecting what our culture and our workplaces get wrong about mothers. With Pay Up, Saujani has the advantage of striking while the iron is hot and employers are still feeling the sting of the pandemic. Of this she’s very aware. “Covid-19 has given us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reconfigure the equation,” she writes. According to a McKinsey report, the effects of the pandemic on women’s careers aren’t just damaging, they’re regressive. “Without intervention to address the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on women,” the report reads, “there’s a risk that progress could go into reverse.” Saujani writes in Pay Up: “The pandemic washed away all the tenuous arrangements of work-life balance we’d all cobbled together, it also washed away the pretense that the system as it currently exists is even remotely sustainable. Our reality was finally out there, raw and exposed in broad daylight for all to see.” What if, then, we don’t do right by mothers now that we know what we know, and can no longer look away? Elizabeth Gedmark, VP of caregiver-advocacy group A Better Balance, told From Day One that if we refuse to change the way we work, “we’re basically sending a message to mothers across the country that all of their struggles, all of their sacrifice over the last two years, were for nothing.” Saujani said that she’s encouraged by the new directions she sees companies taking. Employers are revising benefits packages, extending flexibility and remote work, and offering childcare support. In May 2022, the Marshall Plan for Moms formed the National Business Coalition for Child Care, an organization that recruits companies to provide child care benefits to employees. After the coalition was announced, Saujani said 130 companies signed up to learn more. Gedmark said that this work must continue, and at a steady clip. If it doesn’t, “we’re setting our daughters, our nieces, our granddaughters up to fail. That’s not a country that any of us want to live in. It’s not a country that we want to raise our kids in or have our families in. That’s why I say it’s really just not an option. That’s why we’re fighting every single day.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, Va., who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 11, 2022

What Coaching Can Do for Your Company–and What It Can’t

“Historically, coaching was limited to just bringing in an external executive coach and working with our senior leaders, and thankfully, it’s expanded well beyond that,” said Jackie Bassett, the director of people strategy for the UChicago Medicine health system. Now, companies are including employees at all levels of the organization in the coaching experience. Some are bringing in third-party coaching services, some are training people managers to coach their teams, some are even facilitating group sessions or peer-to-peer coaching. Others are doing all of the above. The potential is great. Coaching in the workplace can improve resilience, increase engagement, encourage collaboration among workers, and boost performance. It’s both a talent attractor and a talent retainer, and 86% of employers that invest in employee coaching say they recoup their investment. In May, Bassett joined four other leaders in corporate learning and development and people operations for a discussion titled “Balancing Technology and the Human Factors in Coaching,” part of From Day One’s May virtual conference on coaching and recognition. The panel conversation, which I moderated, addressed what employers can expect from corporate coaching programs and how to set those expectations, how tech can scale a program, and the importance of “coaching culture.” Employee coaching isn’t necessarily for workforce upskilling or training the next line managers, though it can include this. The five panelists identified all kinds of worthy goals for corporate coaching programs, including generating a sense of belonging for employees, encouraging employee rapport, general workforce skill development, creating opportunity for people from marginalized communities, individual employee growth (personally and professionally), and succession planning. Focusing on coaching, top row from left: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Kristine Ayuzawa of Attuned, and Jackie Bassett of Chicago Medicine. Bottom row: Gerard Camacho of Atrium Health, Emily Pearce of Achievers, and Sharahn Monk of FIS Global (Image by From Day One) The reasons may be myriad, but panelists agreed that leaders must set clear expectations for the outcome of a given coaching program, especially once it reaches the one being coached. Emily Pearce, the director of global customer care at employee recognition and engagement platform Achievers, recommended not being overly prescriptive when picking outcomes. “We’re not saying, ‘This is the outcome, this is what you’re going to get,’” she said. Instead, they outline the “basic rules of engagement and shared values.” Pearce continued: “For example, if respect is a shared value, how does that show up in your partnership? Is that being on time to meetings? Is that doing the pre-work you say that you’re going to do? It’s more about setting expectations by starting that dialogue and also creating that safe space.” At fintech company FIS Global, Sharahn Monk, the global director of learning delivery and performance solutions, said that in the company’s one-on-one coaching setup, the person being coached, that person’s manager, and the external coach, if there is one involved, should all agree on three things the person being coached says they want to work on. Keep it focused. Employers might even consider involving employees in distilling goals for the entire program. “I think there’s definitely a case to be made for organizations to ask your employees what they want,” Pearce said. At Attuned, an employee-engagement platform that offers insights on intrinsic motivation, identifying goals and starting the coaching process actually begins in the interview process, where candidates take the company’s intrinsic motivation assessment, said the company’s director of people operations, Kristine Ayuzawa. “It’s a really great opportunity to begin that conversation by saying, ‘Maybe you and I are coming at something from a very different perspective, but where are the places where we potentially meet in the middle? How might this benefit us? What are some of the blind spots or challenges that we might want to overcome?’” Ayuzawa said. Where Coaching Shouldn’t Go The group flagged the limits of coaching, too. Coaching is not a way to fix performance issues. In fact, a report from McKinsey & Company warns that reserving coaching for performance problems will backfire, essentially making it a disciplinary measure. “Coaching is not meant to be a way for leaders to abdicate their responsibility in developing their employees and managing performance issues,” said Bassett. “But on the other hand, we will encourage leaders, as they’re working through a development plan with their employees, that perhaps coaching could be one component of that development plan.” It’s also not a quick fix for culture problems, Gerard Camacho pointed out. Camacho is the AVP of learning and career development at North Carolina–based health system Atrium Health. “Coaching is not going to save everyone, going to promote them, going to engage them, going to make sure that they have a sense of belonging within the organization,” he said. “It has to be attached to something more. It’s a tool. Coaching is a tool to get to a certain outcome.” Similarly, Monk made a point of noting that training people within your organization to be coaches should not be transactional. “[You can’t] just send them off to coaching school, and they’ll come out on the other side doing and being everything that we need them to be.” How to Establish a Coaching Culture For all of the panelists, a “coaching culture” is what they’re going for, one that blends structured, preplanned coaching sessions with coaching opportunities that naturally present themselves between manager and employee, or even employee and employee. A 2020 Gallup story based on its research urged employers to move from “bossing” to “coaching” their employees, a distinction that reflects both employees’ increased interest in being coached and how important it is to business success. Bassett said this is why managers at UChicago Medicine who are expected to coach receive coaching themselves. “As they get more familiar with the coaching approach, we see that they naturally start to apply it in their own leadership practice, that they start showing up with that coaching mindset.” Coaching and being coached can seem like an unrealistic luxury for workers who struggle to find enough time to get their regular responsibilities done, like health care workers, for example. When employees are already stretched so thin, you have to make coaching easy by bringing it to them, and make it worth their time by giving them knowledge they can use right away. Camacho said Atrium employees are given micro-coaching sessions, and he recommended other employers think of similarly flexible delivery vehicles. “The ability to create an incentive for people and for leaders to attend is to give them the tools that they need the most to make the time worthwhile. Perhaps the solution is to do micro-learning, or to take time during already existing huddles and things like that, that are there to provide those sessions and not make them do something extra.” Monk encouraged employers to make every employee their own “chief learning officer” so they’re empowered to pursue the help and information they need, even if it comes from a peer. “It goes above and beyond just the formalized coaching,” said Monk. “How can we leverage each other to support each other?” For those wondering how to make coaching happen at scale, Ayuzawa said the right technology can handle the administrative chores, which may seem like small potatoes, but can drain a lot of hours scheduling sessions, sending reminders, digging up session notes, and organizing surveys. “I also think it can be really useful in terms of helping to give some structure to the content of what's going to be discussed,” she said. Further, having the consistent framework tech provides can give participants a shared vocabulary, and that can contribute to a culture of coaching. The fruits of such a culture are promising, panelists said. “Participants have reported feeling more engaged, more valued by the organization and more connected to their coaches and to their peers,” Bassett said of UChicago’s programs. “We’ve seen that coaching is really great at creating that safe space for people to be more vulnerable to share their fears, their hopes, and and especially in a group coaching format, to really get support from their peers as well.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, Va., who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 11, 2022

Silicon Valley’s Congressman Calls for ‘Dignity in a Digital Age’

What does dignity mean to Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley member of Congress and author of the new book, Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us? “Dignity means respect for someone, their agency, their ability to do things, to lead fulfilling lives,” he believes. It also relates deeply to economic security and citizenship: “In an economic sense … it’s about giving people agency, how they’re going to be economic actors and build wealth in this digital age.” As for citizenship, “A robust public sphere shouldn’t be just talk for the sake of talk, it has to influence government action.” Khanna joined Brian Bennett, the senior White House correspondent for Time magazine, at From Day One’s May conference in Washington, D.C., to offer a vision for democratizing digital innovation, empowering workers, and embracing a new kind of “progressive capitalism” to build economically vibrant and inclusive communities. Much of that argument is woven into his new book, which imagines how the digital economy can create opportunities for people across the country without uprooting them. Throughout the conversation, Khanna broke down the different ways that “globalization has not worked, modernization of the economy has not worked” for people outside his district of Silicon Valley. His book points out that of the 25 million digital jobs that now exist, 90% are concentrated in five cities. Not only has this contributed to intensified economic inequality, the dominance of tech and social media–alongside the lack of representative governance–has threatened democracy and public discourse. “One of the reasons I think people are on Facebook and Twitter is almost a disempowerment, because they think it’s the only way they’ll get attention,” he said. “A robust democracy requires citizen opinion that shapes government action, and I’d argue that link is broken and people know it’s broken.” Khanna was interviewed by Brian Bennett, senior White House correspondent for Time magazine Khanna offers solutions to repair this broken link, starting with regulation in the tech industry. “It can’t be just left to tech companies, there needs to be regulation,” he said, including laws around privacy and antitrust. “We need to have rules of the road, which have been critical in the broadcast space and the media space that’s allowed journalistic ethics to emerge.” With regulations in place, he believes that tech leadership must “have a responsibility of what the mission of the social-media company is, and then think critically about the guidelines, what we’re trying to achieve, and our responsibility to democracy.” To provide more economic opportunity, he called for better alignment between the tech industry, government and education. “How can government support people in doing this, and how can the educational institutions design curriculum with the private sector?” he asked. Khanna pointed to a Google pilot program at Carl Sandburg College, in which the company will pay students $5,000 to take an 18-month course, which includes a mentor from the company and will result in being hired for a well-paying job. “There’s no reason we couldn’t scale that if we got the land-grant institutions, HBCUs, government and the private sector saying, How we could get 1 million folks preparing for these digital jobs?” Tech companies also must be more intentional in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. “You can’t outsource the responsibility of diversity as a CEO or as a leader,” Khanna said. “You have to have that tied to a CEO’s performance and metrics.” In bringing back women to the workforce after the pandemic-induced child care crisis, for example, he listed initiatives like flexible workplaces, child care benefits and paid family leave: “We need to rethink work.” Wrapping up the conversation, Khanna took the long view about society’s adjustment to the digital age, pointing out that the printing press also caused great societal upheaval. It took about 100 years to build institutions around it, leading it to become widely seen as a public good. “Social media has just started,” he said. “We need to do a lot more to build the digital institutions to get us to that place.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | June 05, 2022

In a Hybrid Environment, What Makes a Healthy Workplace?

The Covid-19 pandemic and the consequential Great Resignation—or whatever your team chooses to label the transition period—has sped up a corporate re-commitment to employees, who now widely demand at least some work-from-home days. However, challenges abound in building a hybrid work environment. A relatively small number of companies have fully adapted to this territory, and even fewer have scaled it to such an extent that will please their workforce. Most companies are making it up as they go along. That’s why From Day One, as part of its May conference in Brooklyn, hosted a panel conversation covering potential solutions and areas of focus for corporate leaders. Here are some key takeaways from the discussion, moderated by Bryan Walsh, editor of Future Perfect on Vox: Onboarding Takes on New Importance One of the pitfalls of a hybrid work environment—with some employees working from home at least part time, or perhaps select team members working remotely full time—is a proximity bias. Unwittingly or otherwise, team leaders overseeing both remote and in-person workers might show favoritism toward workers who clock in and out at the office on a regular basis. As a result, simply because there’s less physical space between a manager and worker, the employee enjoys what the BBC called a “halo effect.” This phenomenon can cause a host of problems for teams and managers. Among other issues, those haloed workers might find their poor performance more readily excused, while the remote workers’ skills and expertise are disregarded. Considering the halo effect, you can probably guess which type of employee might get promoted at a higher rate, and dynamics like these can lead to a breakdown of trust, motivation and productivity on the part of workers. The full panel at the Brooklyn Museum event, from left: Amanda Quillen of IKEA, Carmel Boyle-Lewis of NYU, Judith Harrison of Weber Shandwick, Kristen Carlisle of Betterment at Work, Amanda Conway of Talkspace, and moderator Bryan Walsh of Future Perfect on Vox “It’s super, super important to make sure that you are not giving advantage to people you see all the time,” said Judith Harrison, EVP of global diversity, equity and inclusion at the global communications firm Weber Shandwick. She observed that simple awareness of the possibility of proximity bias in the office is Step One toward combating it from a leadership perspective. She added that managers have to be extra sensitive to this issue in regards to employees who started their jobs during the pandemic’s social-distancing phase. “They have only seen [co-workers] on Zoom or Teams,” Harrison said. “So it’s really important to not only do great on-ramping for them, so that you are being very specific about introducing them to the people they need to know to succeed, but also making them feel welcome all the time.” Harrison shared that her company has onboarded team members throughout the pandemic with robust “intentionality,” producing favorable results. She said at least one worker, whom Harrison recently met in person for the first time after they were hired as an all-remote employee during social distancing, has “developed great relationships with many, many people” on the team. Coach Managers to Prepare for New Workplace Expectations Another factor that contributed mightily to the Great Resignation was the sentiment of younger employees from the Millennial and Gen Z demographics who are not happy with traditional work models and office cultures. Nearly three-quarters of such workers say they’ve ultimately regretted taking a job after recognizing, in their minds, the company that hired them does not operate in ways it advertised. These young people may also prolong the Great Resignation, with 52% telling Microsoft in a recent poll that they will consider changing employers in 2022. It’s widely known how turnover negatively affects an organization, from the bottom line to morale and beyond. So in changing work models to hybrid—something young workers, especially, desire—while fostering and maintaining a culture of strong personal connections between managers and coworkers—something else Gen Zers and Millennials covet tremendously—leaders are going to have to change expectations of what the workplace will look and feel like. Said Boyle-Lewis: “Everyone wants flexibility. That’s key right now.” “What I’ve seen is younger generations … they want untraditional work schedules, professional development, to get promoted and know how to get promoted,” said Carmel Boyle-Lewis, an HR director and a diversity and inclusion officer at NYU. “Sometimes I have to tell the manager, ‘You’re hiring someone from a different generation; these are some of the things you might expect.’” She said coaching supervisors in multi-generational management and varied expectations can help keep young workers engaged and content on the job, which should mean they’ll be more apt to stick around a while. “Everyone wants flexibility,” Boyle-Lewis observed. “That’s key right now.” Get Creative With Your Hybrid Model In the spirit of flexibility, leaders should think unconventionally when it comes to building a hybrid office model. This could include reconsideration of individual employee roles and duties. Amanda Quillen, head of employee engagement at IKEA U.S., said the company is figuring out how its retail workers can work from home as well as work in stores. It’s all part of the company’s perspective that “creating a better everyday life for our coworkers means creating a better experience for our customers,” she said. The pandemic “forced” IKEA, she added, to take stock of the company’s value attached to workers, particularly after it furloughed thousands. “We took a really deep breath and said, ‘OK, our people come first. How do we take care of them the right way?’” Quillen said. Shortly after the furlough, IKEA brought many of the workers back to stores so they could facilitate the company’s pivot to a “buy online, pickup in store” model of sales. It was what Quillen called “a whole new way of working” for IKEA employees. “As we’ve moved forward, we keep listening to our coworkers,” she continued. “At the core of any response in a crisis, it’s listening to what people need and creating programs to respond to it in a good way.” Get Creative With Your Benefits Packages, Too With well-being at the fore during the global health crisis, benefits packages are something that workers are paying closer attention to these days. In a hybrid environment where workers have varied schedules and thus varied needs, flexibility in benefits package construction is also a must. Kristen Carlisle, general manager of Betterment at Work, a financial-wellness benefits platform, said that last year her company conducted a survey that found 74% of the workers polled said they would prioritize financial wellness benefits over an extra week of vacation. “The sentiment by and large was, ‘How can I really even think about taking a vacation when I can’t financially plan for today and tomorrow?’” she said. Said Conway: “The demand, the burnout, and the stress is still a very real issue. Our work is not done yet.” Carlisle suggested that people leaders talk with their workers in ways that can inform the building of benefits packages to fit the employees best. “Ask them qualitative questions that lead you to a better understanding of what they’re dealing with, like, ‘Hey, what are the top three things on your mind right now?’” Carlisle said. “They’re far more likely to share that information than, ‘I am actually sending a lot of money home [to relatives in other countries] and while my paycheck looks good on paper, I can’t afford my bills.’” One popular piece of benefits programming is “summer Fridays,” in which personnel enjoy shorter hours during the last day of the traditional workweek during the warmest months of the year. However, as Carlisle noted, that benefit might not be an option for select personnel in any given organization—in fact, it isn’t in her own company, as some employees simply have to put in full days on Fridays to monitor financial markets. “Whenever that kind of thing happens, we make sure we augment those benefits in other ways,” Carlisle said. “We incentivize them with other opportunities, and give them different types of flexibility than maybe other parts of the organization, because there’s just a different need in different parts of where we work.” Be Mindful and Take Action In 2021, the American Psychiatric Association found in a survey that the majority of employees who work from home are experiencing “negative mental health impacts,” such as isolation, loneliness, and challenges with logging off from work when the day is done. So while workers may want more remote work, it’s important for managers to be wary of the mental health problems that can come from it. The stress from the pandemic and other disheartening developments in the world can certainly exacerbate these feelings, too, perhaps leading to burnout. Amanda Conway, SVP for employer strategy at Talkspace, the digital therapy platform, said that her company conducted two surveys, in 2021 and this past spring, of thousands of U.S. workers about their mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, stress, and burnout. In spite of all the talk this past year that organizations need to provide more support to its workers, Talkspace found there was no improvement in worker mental well-being. “So the demand, the burnout, and the stress is still a very real issue,” Conway said. “Our work is not done yet.” She said that change must start from the top, with leaders communicating their benefits packages to workers with vigor and reducing the stigma of mental health treatment. Executives and people managers alike have to offer messaging that sounds like, according to Conway, “We get it, it’s tough right now. We see you, we hear you, we’re listening and we’re responding.” Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Michael Stahl | June 04, 2022

Why HR Has Risen in Stature: the Competition for Talent

When it comes to promoting HR leaders up the chain of command, in the past companies tended to shut the C-suite door to them. They were often relegated to administrative roles and supervised by executives who might not have much understanding of the value of human capital and its management. But recent years have been nothing if not transformative. More and more, as companies respond to the enhanced sense of worker empowerment, HR leaders are finding their way into the C-suite. “The employee is really at the heart of what companies are facing right now,” said Soni Basi, global chief people officer at the global communications and marketing firm Edelman. “Employees are more influenced today by their employer and their employer’s views than they are by NGOs, by other businesses, by anyone else. The employer is front and center for them in terms of what they’re thinking through, what they want to do, and so for all of these reasons I think [executives] see the HR role as more and more imperative for organizations.” Speaking in a fireside chat with Lydia Dishman, a staff editor at Fast Company, at From Day One’s May conference in Brooklyn, Basi added that HR leaders like her are indeed finding seats at the table when it comes to corporate decision-making. “It’s not the baby seat, the high chair at the table. That’s not the seat that we want,” she said. “We want the real seat and we have to earn the real seat.” Basi, who had secured her “real seat” inside Edelman’s C-suite just two weeks earlier–she previously had been global head of talent for AIG–said that her company had recently compiled research data that said a belief-driven employee can have significant positive impact on a business. These types of workers want to work for organizations that are going to be vocal about their support for a cause and take actions that will enact change. Basi was interviewed by Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman, left, at the Brooklyn Museum event “Communicating that sense of purpose is really important to employees right now,” said Basi. Among the initiatives she’s working on in her new role: building communication pathways to workers so that Edelman leaders might better communicate their values. But it’s also vital that corporate leaders share their organization’s values with job candidates, too. “Your [Employer Value Propositions], your websites from two or three years ago, probably don’t communicate what you need them to communicate today,” Basi observed, adding that not only will talent scan these resources for information on what causes a company has taken up, but investors will too. Basi advised company leaders to leverage social media platforms for the same purpose as well. Investing resources into a strong TikTok presence might help them land some of the better young talent in the job market, too. Another challenge for HR personnel in our late-pandemic reality is the fragmented staff, who want to log into virtual meetings perhaps from locations as close to down the street and as far as the other side of the world. But Basi’s up for it. “Having a distributed workforce just makes it even more fun,” she said. “To try to get to the talent that you really need in an organization, there’s always questions [such as] ‘How remote do you want to make your workforce?’ And it’s not an easy question to answer for every organization.” Executives might genuinely want their company to go all-remote, for example, but then quickly come to realize it’s not practical for many of their team members. There are many considerations, she said, including tax implications and real-estate footprints to name only two of the many factors that HR managers need to keep in mind when working to carry out that initiative. “Advice from me would be to put some guardrails around that,” Basi said, “unless you are an organization that has said you’re 100% remote and you’ve got the backing of your finance and your legal organization on how to do that well.” Because the adoption of a distributed staff is so new—at least on the scale that industries are experiencing now—what they will look like is difficult to predict, she said. Basi might not have the answers to this conundrum now, she acknowledged, but solutions are likely to present themselves in the next couple years. In any event, she believes that keeping staff connected should be a top priority. “There’s so much to be gained from connecting,” Basi said. “The purpose of being in the office is three-fold: It’s about connecting, collaborating, and creating. And if you’re there you might as well add another ‘c’ [word]: ‘celebrating.’” She added that there’s a “richness” that comes with in-person professional development that should help inform decisions about hybrid or all-remote workplace models. “But we have a reality that we can’t always bring people in-person,” Basi said, referring to safety concerns, “and so we have to find new ways to integrate and develop new talent.” Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Michael Stahl | June 04, 2022

Six Skills Your Managers Need to Thrive in 2022

Jon Greenawalt had spent 20 years at a company he helped build. While he still loved the work he was doing and the people he worked with, he noticed that he was no longer growing, nor were his strengths being fully leveraged. “I thought I was going to stay there for life,” he told the audience at From Day One’s Boston conference in Boston on the realignment of the relationship between workers and their employers. “I made one of the toughest decisions in my life”, when he left to become the chief people and culture officer at Boston-based SharkNinja. Today he is the SVP of customer transformation at 15Five, which combines continuous performance-management software with coaching, training and development for leaders and managers. Greenawalt pointed out that about 47 million people quit their jobs last year, and statistics show they are not just quitting their companies, they’re quitting their managers. Now more than ever, managers are the linchpin for supporting the career growth, learning, and development of their teams, and are the leading reasons why people remain at their workplace. Issues regarding managers and management have been a sore spot particularly over the past five years, where employee turnover has led to a loss of $223 billion by U.S. organizations. In addition, one of every three workers claims their manager can’t lead a team, and one-third of HR time is spent dealing with the problems caused by poor management. What’s more, 40% of employees say that their manager fails to frequently have honest conversations about work topics, Greenawalt said. As perhaps the most burdened and maligned workers in the past two years, managers can benefit from a set of science-back people skills that foster a healthy relationship with their teams, Greenawalt said in a talk titled, “6 Skills Your Manager Needs to Thrive in 2022.” Highlights: Be Vulnerable First, and Often  Separating the work self from the real-life self is a persistent workplace myth. But in reality, it’s all one life. “This does not mean that you shouldn’t create boundaries and respect people’s boundaries. As leaders and managers, we really need to do that,” Greenawalt explained. Right. “But who we are at work is going to have a direct impact on who we are at home.” Work, in fact, is a significant part of our lives. Leading with vulnerability is the key: One does not need to establish a relationship of trust beforehand. “If you have to trust someone to be vulnerable, you have it backward,” Greenawalt said, citing organizational psychologist Adam Grant. Said Greenawalt: “Managers and leaders have to provide way more positive than negative feedback” The goal is to create a foundation of psychological safety. “We have to set our vulnerability before people feel confident," Greenawalt said. “I know I have to set the standard with my team.” He starts his weekly meetings by outlining what is happening in his life and what he is dealing with. “I can literally feel the difference with my team when I do that. I can see the shift in the environment. Being open and vulnerable as a leader is important in building strong relationships.”  Create Role Clarity Through Clear Performance Agreements Only 50% of employees know what’s expected of them, Greenawalt said, adding that managers are equally in the dark. Knowledge of performance expectations empowers employees. If they’re informed enough, they are able to challenge the status quo, admit to mistakes, engage in lateral thinking, and are keen to find innovations within the scope of their work. “We should turn expectations into agreements,” said Greenawalt. “A great manager does not leave expectations to chance.” He proposed a kind of job description on steroids, with clearly stated agreements rather than the trap of uncommunicative expectations. A good outline includes the role overview, responsibilities, desired outcomes, near-term projects or goals. “[Then] you get a little bit more meat on the bones where you’re defining longer-term objectives, like listing out what the desired outcomes are, and key metrics for success.” Support Meaningful and Aligned Career Growth Research shows that another big reason people leave their jobs is because they either don’t like the work they are doing, they’re not growing, or their strengths are misunderstood and they feel under-utilized. “Managers need to be better at helping people grow,” Greenawalt said. “Cultivate and reinforce people's strengths!” As a manager, finding people’s strengths is part of the job description. “It does not need to take that long to discover how to leverage your strengths, values and passions in the workplace” Greenawalt assured, once managers learn know how to strength-spot and help their people focus on doing their best work. Give More Positive Feedback Than Negative Feedback We all experience some degree of “negativity bias.” After all, we spent the past two years doom-scrolling, and became somewhat morbidly attracted to the news and negativity surrounding it all. “Human beings are sponges for bad news,” said Greenawalt. He observed that someone can say something positive, but the glow doesn’t last long for us: called positive-negative asymmetry, we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than the joy of praise. To make it stick, “managers and leaders have to provide way more positive than negative feedback,” he said. “We need to pour on the praise more often for it to have a lasting impact. In doing so, we’re able to tip the scale.” And no, positive feedback does not make people soft. It is another myth that leaders need to overcome to empower their workforce. Offer Observation Over Judgment When Giving Feedback Providing feedback using judgments places a label on individuals and their behavior, and often leads to arguments. Say an employee named Taylor has fallen short of their performance requirement. It might come naturally to lead with, “Taylor, you obviously don’t care about your team performance because you keep missing deadlines.” It’s best to shift to sharing observations - as in what did you see, hear or notice, which specifically address the event or behavior that needs to be redirected. “Taylor, I noticed you’ve missed three out of the fourdeadlines for the projects you’ve worked on,” for example, is more effective than accusing Taylor of not caring about her team. Start One-on-Ones With Five Minutes of Relating to Strengthen the Relationship Don’t just dive into the tactics: human beings absorb energy through interactions with people, a phenomenon known as relational energy. “It has an immediate and direct impact,” said Greenawalt. “We have to show up great because it impacts people, they suck it up our energy, and their energy also impacts you. I get so much energy from my team, and I know they do from me.” Good one-on-one and team meeting openers include: How are you doing? How are things going with your kids? “This is a great practice and part of culture at 15Five. It’s critical,” he concluded. “The  need for cultivating relational mastery is really important in the workplace, particularly in a hybrid or remote-work environment.” Editor’s Note: From Day One would like to thank our partner 15Five, who sponsored this Thought Leadership Spotlight. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | May 23, 2022

Is Your Company Developing an Inclusive Culture?

Alban Jacquin, VP of diversity, equity, inclusion and well-being for Schneider Electric, introduced himself as follows, “Hi, everyone. I am alone. You can hear that I have a French accent. I am 41. I am white. I have glasses on; and I’m wearing Jordans VI, black-and-red edition.” Jacquin did this to demonstrate to the audience how to be inclusive, the topic of a panel conversation at From Day One’s Boston conference on the realignment of the relationship between workers and their employers. “First, you cannot assume that people don’t have a disability. Begin by trying to level the playing field,” Jacquin said. KeyAnna Schmiedl, global head of DEI for Wayfair, followed. “[For me] it’s about being open and honest. After George Floyd was murdered, I told my team, ‘Right now is really hard for me.’ And they appreciated how honest I had been with them, so they felt like they could let me know when it felt like too much for them. It’s about demonstrating that humility,” she said. “One of our corporate values is sharing your humanity,” said Julie Law, head of HR for John Hancock. “If you share some of yourself and be authentic, people feel more open to sharing their experience ... then you’ve got to listen intently when people do share, meet them where they are, and don’t leave anyone behind.” “I started as an engineer in the lab,” said Amina Lobban, director head of HR business excellence at pharmaceutical maker Takeda, “and have been working in grassroots women’s organizations for years. I felt included when company leadership recognized our efforts to enhance gender parity.” “In the past seven to eight months, we were able to grow from 15 to 80 people,” said Savina Perez, co-founder and chief customer officer at the talent-development platform Hone, “and still maintain a 50/50 gender parity. We were very intentional about how we wanted to build a certain type of culture, a certain type of team, an extremely diverse team, and we’ve been able to get that done.” Boston overview, from left: moderator Steve Koepp of From Day One, Savina Perez of Hone, Alban Jacquin of Schneider Electric, and Lobban, Schmiedl and Law Having shared their inclusion successes, the panel addressed what a New York Times story called “a two-year, 50-million-person experiment in changing how we work.” After all, the office was never one-size-fits-all. It was one size fits some, with the expectation–no, the mandate–that everyone else would comply. At the same time, “we need to acknowledge that there may be part of the workforce that never will have the option to work from home. We have folks in call centers, warehouses, fulfillment centers, and drivers,” said Schmiedl. “What we did was to figure out a way to acknowledge them. We would offer meals-to-go as a ‘thank you.’ We’re discussing implementation of a shared-hours model. [We continue to have] those conversations to understand the roadblocks for folks. Our thinking is different than it was pre-pandemic.” “Yes,” echoed Lobban. “I went to visit a plant in Nashville, and in France, and noted what inclusion and office work mean for shop-floor employees. ‘If you bring me in for a shift, ensure that there are enough paths for me to finish that shift, otherwise I’m going to be sent home without pay,’” one worker told her. “As a small organization in hypergrowth mode, it’s easy to say, ‘Let’s build a culture of trust,’” said Perez. “But how can you do that when everyone has 3,000 things that they’re working on every given day? From a leadership perspective we are having those conversations, trying to figure it out, and having our team members be a part of trying to find answers.” “One of the things we did,” said Law, “is make an inclusive-language effort. In the technology space, there’s blacklist and whitelist, for example. This terminology is embedded. We’ve been thoughtful and intentional about eliminating that because it can help systemically drive bias. We have a longstanding, tenured-employee base, so we’re on a cultural journey.” “When it comes to language,” Schmiedl said, “when you say diverse and use it as a euphemism for women, for black employees, for those with disabilities, you’re then saying it’s not the default group, it’s something else. We must stop doing that,” she said. “We’re not going to move forward by not having white men as part of the conversation or not having those who are abled as part of the conversation. I went to a conference where the entire panel was either blind or had low vision. And [one of them] said, ‘I keep hearing this term, you know, around creating accommodations, and how much does it cost if you have an employee with XYZ disability? Do you know how much you pay for the lights? As a blind person, I don’t need the lights. We’re paying for all you people to see, to not walk into things. I can do the job without lights.’ So, it's the language that sends a message of inclusion or exclusion, whether or not you intend that. And it’s not about your intention, it’s about your impact.” Schmiedl added: “Wayfair ran a natural-language process analysis of our performance reviews and identified words or phrases used to describe opportunity areas. We found that the word ‘confidence’ came up more often as a differentiator between men and women. We told everyone in the organization that we might be using this word in a biased way, and if it’s not tied to business results, then why is it important? In one performance cycle, women were on average rated higher in their performance reviews than men and that has been sustained over the last four or five cycles.” “Plus,” said Lobban, “confidence is a very Western quality. [We are] a global company headquartered in Japan, with additional operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and India. In many countries a woman saying I’m confident is not something you would ever hear because it’s taboo, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t just as capable. There are also cultural differences that require consideration when you rate people.” The New York Times story was based in part on a survey of more than 700 readers, plus over two dozen interviews. Lobban noted that, “these surveys say the reason that underrepresented groups don’t want to go back to the office is that they don’t want to deal with the daily micro-aggressions and code switching that they have had to do. [In addition], over the past two years, people’s lives have changed in such a way that you need more flexibility in your life, not just in work. It’s not really flexible work, but it’s sort of a flexible life. And so in my division of the company, we’re looking at creating what we call an Exceptional Employee Experience. Because all of this is linked to well-being.” The panel’s consensus: The more people feel good about themselves and their organizations, that’s when they feel included. They’re also tend to be more productive and they stick around,   whether working from home or in an office. Angie Chatman is a freelance writer who covers business, technology, education and social justice. She earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.  

Angie Chatman | May 23, 2022

The Role of Coaching and Listening in an ‘Inclusion Revolution’

The terms diversity, equity and inclusion have been blended together so many times that many people don’t know the differences between them. Daisy Auger-Domínguez, chief people officer for Vice Media Group, has a way of clearly break them down and telling you the role each value needs to play in the workplace. “Diversity asks, Who is in the room?” said Auger-Domínguez, referring to a framework originally designed by the professor Dafina-Lazarus Stewart. “Equity asks, Who is trying to get in the room, but can’t? And inclusion asks, Have everyone’s ideas been heard? While equity responds, Whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously, because they’re not in the majority?” Auger-Domínguez has worked two decades in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); most recently she published Inclusion Revolution: The Essential Guide to Dismantling Racial Inequity in the Workplace, designed to equip managers with the knowledge, skill set, and courage necessary to build lasting change. She joined TIME magazine staff writer Raisa Bruner for a fireside chat at From Day One’s May virtual conference on coaching and recognition to talk about her book as well as explain why “support scaffolding” is crucial to overcoming racial inequities in the workplace. Inclusion Revolution, Auger-Domínguez emphasized, was designed for managers. “There wasn’t a book that spoke to the employee life journey, and tried to be practical in the day-to-day,  but also inspiring, bold, and get up and do something.” Author and Chief People Officer Daisy Auger-Domínguez, right, in a fireside chat with Raisa Bruner, staff writer for TIME magazine (Image by From Day One) How can managers build such “support scaffolding” within workplaces? The first step: listen to employees. The second step: take accountability for change. “When you ask why there’s not enough diversity in the workplace, you’re placing it on individuals as if that scarcity is someone else’s job,” she said. “When you ask, What are the conditions we’ve created so it’s a predominantly white institution?, you take on that responsibility for yourself.” Consistent questions from leaders to the people they manage–like, “What is holding you up right now?” and “How can I help you overcome those challenges?”–are crucial, Auger-Domínguez  said. And white leaders have to get used to conversations that might make them uncomfortable at first. She spoke to her own experience at Vice Media Group, which she joined two years ago following reports of workplace sexual harrassment. In her effort to rebuild the culture, which coincided with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed, she and Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc conducted a listening tour among hundreds employees. “We went boldly into what we were asking, we talked directly about white supremacy,” she said. Employees strongly desired pay equity and more career-path clarity, they told the two leaders. Employees with marginalized identities wanted to feel less isolated, and more protected, by the company. Auger-Domínguez rolled out a “people and culture strategy” including a pay-equity study, which led to a redefinition of the company’s compensation philosophy and recurring “compensation health checks.” The company made an investment in upskilling managers to better support their teams, as well as building “global job architecture” to bring transparency to different roles and career paths. Finally, a DEI Dashboard was made easily accessible for employees to check on ongoing projects, the company’s DEI philosophy, and four pillars of the work. The progress, including the growth of the female workforce to 56% of the staff, has been noteworthy. Auger-Domínguez emphasized that “managers have the power to drive change.” The more they embrace DEI, the more it’s normalized within the workplace and contributes to a larger culture shift. “It should be integrated into our recruitment, interviews, onboarding, project management,” she noted. “Building inclusion—it’s not like this magical unicorn that’s going to show up at your door one day,” she said. “It’s just about doing the work every day.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | May 20, 2022

How an Effective Recognition Program Can Improve Engagement and Retention

For 20 years, Achievers, an employee-recognition platform, has collected and analyzed data related to the impact that recognition programs can have on companies that use them. Over and over, the data has showed that implementing an effective program can improve retention, engagement, and thus the success of a company. At a recent From Day One webinar, Achievers’ Chief Workforce Scientist Natalie Baumgartner, PhD, released some of the results from the latest research, The Great Recognition report, and discussed what makes for an effective recognition program with Teresa Logue, head of manager excellence for the insurance company Zurich North America. The report, based on input from nearly 6,000 employees and HR leaders, had some thought-provoking results, which the two speakers outlined in the webinar, titled, “The State of Recognition in 2022: Empowering Managers to Create a Culture of Appreciation.” Among them: Employees are not willing to work for companies that ignore what workers view as important, including work-life balance, flexible work, and career progression. Employers are struggling to attract and retain talent. There is a strong correlation between frequent recognition and commitment to a job. Workers who are recognized at least weekly are twice as likely to say they rarely think about leaving their job as those recognized less often. Half of respondents said feeling recognized can outweigh a salary increase in terms of job satisfaction and loyalty. Training managers in recognition methods has a tremendous impact on retention and engagement across an organization. Organizations with optimized recognition programs are 39% more likely to have monthly recognition than those without. Managers who are regularly recognized are more likely to recognize others and this is a fundamental catalyst for building a recognition culture. The relationship between recognition and the likelihood of recommending one’s manager, or Manager Net Promoter Score, is three time higher among those who are meaningfully recognized. Zurich North America’s recognition program began back in 2017, says Logue. It was created with use of internal data, as well as information from the Achievers Workforce Institute. One of the more recent endeavors involves collecting information from both managers and their employees regularly to determine whether and how well their recognition efforts are paying off. The surveys were piloted in 2021 and began a full company rollout in the first quarter this year. Questions are keyed towards the main management framework, which consists of four areas: performance, development, engagement, and trust. Logue provided some examples of questions. In the performance category, one questions was, “To what extent did your manager engage you in goal-setting?” In the engagement category, one question asked if employees felt their manager cared about their well-being. For trust, there were just two yes/no questions: “I believe that my manager and I have a trusting relationship” and “I believe my manager follows through on their commitments.” Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist for Achievers (Photo courtesy of Achievers) The surveys for Zurich are anchored to the manager framework, but also the performance-management cycle. “The timing of when we will go in and ask specific questions is very much aligned with it,” Logue said. For example, the survey most recently conducted was tied to the categories of performance and goal setting for 2022. As teams begin to migrate back to in-person work, there will be more questions about engagement. The process includes robust support for managers, which Zurich is providing in part through peer-to-peer discussion groups. The 1,350 managers have participated in more than 550 of these groups so far, said Logue. Managers are required to engage with their teams prior to surveys and share expectations for the team members, as well as of themselves. After the survey results come in, managers should take time to self-reflect, says Logue “and sit with the results to give themselves time to absorb the data and the verbatim comments.” Managers should ask team members clarifying questions based on the results. “These discussions are where the magic begins. While the data is important, it’s also important to marry the quantitative data with the qualitative information from the discussions that are happening after the survey occurs.” Finally, the survey should inform a development plan for action related to the results. The survey was delivered to nearly all of the 9,000 employees at Zurich North America, and reports created for the 1,350 managers. Nearly ¾ of the employees participated. While in 2021, 90% of managers used the spotlight recognition program at Zurich, it is a process that they will continue to try to improve, based on results from the surveys and conversations that employees and managers are having. Every month, managers get a dashboard of their recognition program use–who is being recognized, who isn’t. “That can help trigger actions to ensure we are leaning into the culture of recognition,” Logue said. On a monthly and quarterly basis, company “listening champions” bring back key metrics to managers to foster transparency and show where the successes and opportunities are. While Logue said it’s too early to see if the efforts to empower managers through feedback and recognition efforts has had an impact on retention and engagement, company leaders know from the verbatim survey feedback that recognition is a way that helps workers feel cared about. “The most recent survey included a specific question about whether the manager regularly recognizes the employee in a way that makes them feel valued. We are very keen to study those results,” she said. Teresa Logue, head of manager excellence for Zurich North America (Photo courtesy of Zurich North America) Getting managers to buy into this expanded use of surveys and recognition isn’t something that you can do a single training on and then be done with it, said Logue. “All of our managers have a formal accountability as a people manager. Recognition is also a core expectation.” To keep the program front-of-mind among managers, the company created a training module on the recognition programs for their onboarding process, as well as online resources, a playbook designed to give specific examples of good recognition and how to use elements of the program, and the peer-to-peer circles. Continued training is important, said Baumgartner. While 90% of HR leaders in the survey said they provide training in recognition, only half of managers say they have received it. “I think part of solving that disconnect is ensuring that we’re providing the training in the in not only in the right way, but at the right cadence to ensure that employees and managers are really feeling like they’re being grown,” she says. Achievers research has identified four guidelines for promoting a high-impact recognition program, said Baumgartner: 1.) Focus on both quality and quantity of recognition. “Having employees only recognized a few times a year does not move the needle on engagement and retention and neither does issuing of superficial recognitions,” she says, recommending that companies invest “in a platform that’s intuitive for employees to use, like those that mimic popular social-media sites, encourages at least monthly recognition, and has mechanisms to support recognition that is specific, personal and impact-oriented.” 2.) The program should make it possible for recognition to occur within the flow of work. “An effective platform needs to integrate with the tools your employees are living and breathing every day. More than half of employees want the recognition to happen in the flow of work rather than having to log in to a specific platform every time.” She also says to look also for a mobile app solution that’s simple to use, regardless of location, as that drives participation and visibility for both online and offline populations. 3.) Fuel your program with a proactive communication strategy. An effective platform will include turnkey resources for frontline managers to support their training goals in a continuous way. 4.) Measure the metrics that matter. It’s not just about retention and engagement. Track and monitor program usage, as it is helpful indicator of a recognition program and can also demonstrate sustained impact to the business’s bottom line. Editor’s Note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Achievers. Lisa Jaffe is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle with her son and a very needy rescue dog named Ellie Bee. She enjoys reading, long walks on the beach, and trying to get better at ceramics.

Lisa Jaffe | May 20, 2022

Who’s Afraid of the Resume Gap? How the Pandemic Changed Minds

Two years ago, a gap on your resume might earn you a sidelong look. That seemingly empty space without a conventional job was often a point of discomfort for applicants and suspicion among prospective employers: Was this person doing anything relevant with their time away from the grind? After a pandemic and the child-care crisis that came with it, the answers to that question are being treated with more open minds. Thankfully, the stigma of the resume gap may be fading. “Compassion is definitely more felt because of Covid,” said John Gulnac, VP of direct hiring and search at the staffing firm Adecco. “I think so many people have relatable experiences and hardships at home or work-life balance situations that they needed accommodations for. I do think tolerance and compassion are higher than they’ve been in the past, but the demand is also no small factor here,” he told From Day One. Indeed, the combination of the pandemic and the worker shortage in many industries has changed a lot about the way job candidates are evaluated. Old barriers to employment are falling away, possibly for good. If employers are increasingly willing to overlook resume gaps, the change could have a tremendous effect on the careers of women, who are more likely than men are to have a resume gap due to caregiving responsibilities—pandemic or no pandemic. The effects of Covid, particularly school closings and loss of child care, set back women’s representation in the workforce significantly, opening up millions of resume gaps. It was primarily women who left paid work to handle caregiving responsibilities at home. In 2020, women with children under the age of 10 were the segment mostly likely to leave the workforce, according to research by McKinsey & Company. Two years later, far more women than men still remain out of the workforce. “Men have now recouped all their labor force losses since February 2020,” said a report by the National Women’s Law Center, “while over one million fewer women were in the labor force in January 2022 as compared to February 2020.” Job Searching With a Resume Gap Resume gaps have traditionally made it hard for job seekers to get a chance to make their pitch. Applicants with a gap on their resume are 45% less likely to get job interviews than are those without a gap; the longer the gap, the more difficult it becomes to get a job. Being a caregiver can make job searching with a career gap particularly hard. Maria Healey, who now works in content marketing in the internet-gaming industry, has two gaps on her resume: She left in 2012 to take care of her son for five years, and in 2021 was laid off from her copywriting job at a data-analytics company. Healey believes that the first gap, taken for caregiving responsibilities, is what made finding work so difficult in 2017. While applying for jobs in San Diego, she was forthright about her time being a parent, but “none of that was taken well,” she recalled. Healey said job searching was markedly different in 2021 than it was in 2017–and that having a gap was more accepted. “I just feel like Covid has just changed everything. I think that people realize it’s almost a stupid question to ask why there’s a resume gap.” Maria Healey, who works in content marketing, had two gaps in her resume  (Photo courtesy of Maria Healey) Still, she suspects the resume gap problem will never completely disappear for mothers, and fears what another gap might mean for her career prospects. “If I were to have another child, how would I do it? I’m really turned off by staying home for another five years. That really scared me. I don’t know that I could do that again, career wise.” Women often feel that a resume gap due to caregiving isn’t a hindrance when they’re able to “smooth it over,” as Prabha Kannan put it, with work not associated with being a caregiver. Kannan, who is a California-based writer, stepped away from the paid workforce for seven years to care for her two children. When she returned in 2017, as a writer for Apple’s voice assistant Siri, her resume gap wasn’t a terrible problem, she thinks, because she could show part-time consulting work. “I think it’s because I was able to sort of smooth over my resume gap so it doesn’t appear as a seven-year period where I wasn’t working. It just appears as a period of time where I was working at a lighter level.” Working mothers worry about appearances because they know what many of their colleagues are thinking about them: 41% of workers view working mothers as less devoted to their work, and 38% of workers “judge them” for needing a flexible schedule, according to a 2019 study by child-care provider Bright Horizons. When mothers reentering the paid workforce are asked by an employer to provide a reason for their resume gap, their answer can prove problematic. “Explaining that gap could require disclosing that she is a mother, which would invite stereotyping and discrimination,” said Elizabeth Gedmark, VP at the caregiver-advocacy group A Better Balance, in a recent webinar on equity for workers with employment gaps. “The person who is on the other end of the job interview may deem that person less devoted of an employee simply because they have caregiving responsibilities, which is absolutely discrimination.” The Growing Influence of Compassion and Inclusion Since the impact of the pandemic on work lives was so sweeping, it was a relatable thing for employers to consider in evaluating resume gaps. When Maria Healey was looking for work after her second career gap in 2021, she was told by recruiters to use Covid as an explanation for the six-month gap on her resume, even though the pandemic had nothing to do with her being laid off. “Recruiters were telling me, ‘If you get asked about the gap, everybody can use Covid as an excuse right now. Always do that. Don’t say you were laid off. Just say Covid,’” Healey said. While the pandemic effect may be fading, the emphasis during the past two years on the need for workplace compassion as well as inclusion may be inspiring employers now focus more on capabilities than on professional or educational history. Many companies show more willingness to consider candidates without four-year college degrees, for example, and many have made commitments to hire more people who were formerly incarcerated. If acceptance of resume gaps is to last, the motivation must be a change in thinking, not just the need to fill jobs quickly, said Gulnac. He suspects renewed interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and the growing understanding of parental duties have made progress toward a greater understanding that not all promising resumes look alike. “The pandemic has opened people up to have a little more humanity when it comes to small gaps or periods of time where people had to change direction,” Gulnac said. “The need for workers is forcing employers to change behaviors, but I do think the compassion piece is giving people a little bit more flexibility.” Ebony Travis Tichenor, a veteran of the DEI field and practice, believes openness to career gaps reflects a more permanent change. “Companies are being a little bit more forgiving because it comes down to creating more equitable opportunities and being more inclusive, to opening our minds, to stop judging someone by the cover of how they look or what their initial resume looks like,” she said. “Get to know the person and see what skills are transferable, see what they can bring to the table.” Gulnac too, sees a deeper change at work here, and, as a parent himself, he’s hopeful. “There’s a fear that people will just kind of return [to the old normal] when the labor market changes, but I think there’s too much governing dynamics with the changing in the workforce,” he said. “I hope this is just the beginning of several other changes that take place when we look at how we’re evaluating the right fit for an organization.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, Va., who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | May 19, 2022

How Employee Feedback Can Bridge the DEI Gap

There’s a yawning gap between companies’ aspirations when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and how their employees expect they will actually perform.  That’s the takeaway from a survey of more than 2,000 HR professionals conducted in late 2021 by Momentive, the maker of SurveyMonkey. Nearly nine in 10 respondents said their organizations had made DEI commitments over the prior 18 months, but only 20% expressed confidence that their companies would achieve those DEI goals. The gulf suggests that at many companies, employees doubt either the sincerity or capacity of their organizations to meet their commitments. That suggests a culture problem. Antoine Andrews, chief diversity and social-impact officer at Momentive, calls it a “confidence gap.” At From Day One’s March conference in Chicago, Andrews said the disparity could speak to a serious issue in the way employees at those organizations think about their jobs, and about how serious their employers are about the values they espouse. “What does it look like for your employees to have that [skeptical] lived experience around the commitments you’ve made?” Andrews asked. When combined with another Momentive statistic—that nearly 80% of workers say it’s important that their companies prioritize DEI—Andrews said companies have a powerful incentive both to ensure that they follow through on their DEI commitments, and that they work with their employees to bring them to life. That last piece is especially important, said Andrews, but can prove elusive. DEI conversations can be delicate, which means its especially important to keep close tabs on employee sentiment and experience, to ensure that the organization’s efforts are on-track and having the intended effect. “That feedback is a gift,” Andrews said. Given the sensitivity of the subject, as well as the value of frequent communication with a broad range of staff members, companies can benefit from working with an external partner such as Momentive, said Andrews. “You have to make sure you ask the questions in a way that provides some sensitivity and some nuance.” Even more important than asking the right questions, said Andrews, is that leaders show that they’re taking the feedback seriously. “Make sure you listen,” he said. “Once you get that information, you’ve got to learn about what you've been doing, and how you've been showing up for your employees.” The final step for companies is to translate that employee insight into action by refining their DEI efforts based on the feedback they’ve gathered. That’s the trickiest part, according to Andrews, and its success depends on how well companies have handled the asking and listening phases. “That feedback is a gift,” Andrews said. “But your employees say, ‘If I’m giving you that information, I need you to do something with it.’” Editor's note: From Day One thanks the sponsor of this thought-leadership spotlight, Momentive, an AI-powered, experience-management platform.

the Editors | May 18, 2022

How to Be More Effective in Your Sexual Harassment Prevention Training

Consider these facts: Seven states require companies to provide sexual harassment training requirements. Other states recommend it, and others have a requirement for public agencies to provide it for their employees. More than a fifth of the U.S. population lives in one of the states requiring private companies to provide this training. The pace at which states are considering mandates is increasing, with two states added to the list in the last 18 months. Sexual harassment occurs at alarming rates. According to one study, more than three quarters of women and more than a third of men have reported verbal harassment; 49% of women and 18% of men reported unwanted touching; 30% of women and 12% of men reported unwanted genital flashing; and 23% of women and 9% of men said they were sexually assaulted. That some states require training doesn’t mean that harassment necessarily declines in those states. Indeed, the quality of the training matters very much, and creating content that does more than merely tick the box of state mandates is vital to stemming the tide and changing behavior, said Christian Murphy, founder and CEO of Catharsis Productions, which develops both in-person and online training on interpersonal violence prevention, sexual harassment, and diversity and inclusion. He spoke at From Day One’s April virtual conference on managing the human impact of digital transformation. “Although the intention behind the mandates may be noble, many companies invest in simply getting out required material,” said Murphy. “This typically means info-dumping policies, procedures and resources that employees are expected to read. The result may be checking the compliance box, but it does nothing to move the needle in cultural competence or workplace behavior.” He asked the audience to think of their experience as HR professionals. “When was the last time someone said to you, ‘Wait, you’re offering a state mandated online training on sexual harassment in the workplace? I love reading policies! Sign me up.’” Never, of course, nor will anyone be excited about the training because they've always wondered if harassment is good or bad. “Employees are insulted by the presumption that they don’t already know [it’s bad] and are further bored to tears by the focus on legal language and policies. Seldom does the training address the why behind the policies and the nuances where misunderstandings of these issues lie,” Murphy said. What’s required for optimal training is a real conversation, he noted. “When someone frankly says, ‘I know harassment is wrong,’ and then follows up with honest and yet often misinformed, victim-blaming comments, that keeps so many from really understanding what sexual harassment is when they see it. You need to engender real interaction and to meet your audiences where they are to generate real shifts in attitude and behavior.” Best practices in harassment prevention were included in the landmark 2003 study, What Works In Prevention Principles of Effective Prevention Programs. Such programs need to be: Comprehensive Shared at appropriate times Based on the employee’s role and length of service in the company Composed of multiple sessions or offered on an ongoing basis Taught by varying methods Based on a sound theory of change Culturally relevant Focused on positive relationships, not negative ones Inclusive of an evaluation of outcomes Shared by a well-trained staff or be designed for autonomous learning “Most would agree that in order to change attitudes and behavior, an institution cannot rely on one-and-done programming,” he said. Among many companies, onboarding is the only time employees get sexual-harassment education—a time when they are swimming in orientation materials and have no direct knowledge of the company’s workplace and social culture. “No matter how good a training might be, a lack of follow up programming inhibits the long term–and even short-term–impact.” A slide from Murphy’s presentation (Image courtesy of Catharsis Productions) Your job, as an HR manager, is to facilitate a change to the kind of programming that is shown to work. Murphy said such programs should include four elements: 1.) Credibility: Base it on the most credible research there is. “That doesn’t mean older research should be dismissed–especially if no more recent data refutes it.” But do recognize new best practices, trends in education, psychology, and cognition. Pay special attention to advancements in technology and how people interact with it. As an example, online training has been found by multiple studies to be more effective than in-person training in specific circumstances, he said, noting that the training must be engaging and interactive. 2.) Engagement: There is strong evidence that active involvement in the learning process is vital to the mastery of skills like critical thinking and problem solving, Murphy explained. “Having an employee watch a 45-minute video with no need for an engagement creates a passive learning environment. Without ongoing touch points of active learner engagement, it’s far too easy for a learner to disengage.” That doesn’t mean just adding a few pop-up quizzes or continue buttons. “For a truly dynamic, engaging experience, the training should be built to meet the learner where they are.” At Catharsis Productions, trainings include built-in content changes based on how the user interacts with it. “The multiple-choice answers and various host responses make trainings almost seem like a one-on-one conversation.” 3.) Relatability: Murphy said one study showed that multimedia presentations with prevention messaging are more likely to positively influence beliefs, attitudes, and behavior if they are interesting, can hold the attention of the audience, are personally relevant to the audience, and are easy to understand with simple messaging. Because sexual harassment is uncomfortable to talk about, it can also be hard to think critically about–people get defensive. “By using colloquial dialogue and relatable scenarios, the training tries to generate an authentic dialogue that may challenge learners to discover and reflect on some of their own unconscious biases–but in a way that doesn't shame them.” Christian Murphy, CEO of Catharsis Productions (Photo courtesy of Catharsis Productions) 4.) Innovation: Catharsis uses non-conventional strategies, like an intentional and appropriate use of humor, to make content resonate with the learner, said Murphy. “There is educational research that shows humor’s ability to decrease anxiety and stress in the receiver when teaching taboo topics.” It reduces apprehension, which makes the learning environment a safer one. Research also shows that humor has a physiological effect in the brain, making it easier to recall information that was presented using it. Humor can also serve to broaden self-awareness, he continued, and can help us view ourselves and others more objectively, unlocking rigid viewpoints. However, you can’t use humor for its own sake. “Never make light of sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, or victims of any kind.” He ended with these recommendations: Engage with relatable training that doesn't shame. Build on and support positive relationships. Ensure the messenger you use powerfully delivers the message, which means administering it by a well-trained staff. Maintain credibility by basing your training programs on sound theories of change. That also includes constant outcome evaluations to be sure you’re on the right track. Ensure training is ongoing while using various teaching modalities that ultimately make the training more comprehensive and keep that dialogue going. “The more you can stick with these lessons, while keeping up with the technology, the more you will be on your way to going beyond just checking the box.” Editor’s Note: From Day One thanks our partner Catharsis Productions, who sponsored this Though Leadership Spotlight. Lisa Jaffe is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle with her son and a very needy rescue dog named Ellie Bee. She enjoys reading, long walks on the beach, and trying to get better at ceramics.

Lisa Jaffe | May 18, 2022

Since It's OK to Talk About Mental Health, What Should Employers Say—and Do?

The Covid-19 pandemic was not just an assault on physical health. It helped trigger a cascade of mental health challenges, as well. According to the World Health Organization, in the first year of the pandemic alone, rates of anxiety and depression increased by 25% worldwide. Yet at the same time, perhaps because of the ubiquity of suffering, the stigma around mental illness is beginning to dissipate. Nearly 90% of Americans in a poll said they believe having a mental health disorder is nothing to be ashamed of, according to a survey from the American Psychological Association. So with more strain on mental health, and people feeling more open about broaching the subject, how can employers best support their team? Experts discussed this question and more in a From Day One webinar titled, “Since It’s OK to Talk About Mental Health, What Should Employers Be Saying—and Doing?,”  for which I served as moderator. On the panel were Jackie Bassett, director of people strategy at UChicago Medicine; Shauna Harrington, senior director of outreach and executive talent at VSP Vision; Tamika Simpson, care advocate lead at Ovia Health; Rachel Tyler, HR business partner at Houston Methodist; and Pamela Berman, chief talent officer for North America at Publicis Health. What Has Changed? A cultural shift began to occur even before the pandemic, with many employees becoming much more open about discussing mental health, Berman said. “It wasn’t that long ago that employers and employees just never talked about mental health or mental wellness. In the last two and a half years, younger employees maybe just coming out of school were much freer about, say, whether or not they’re seeing a therapist–much more liberal at talking about it.” And with the added stressors of the pandemic, mental health quickly became a topic employers couldn’t afford to sweep under the rug. For one thing, the experts explained that the epic surge in workers leaving their jobs for better work situations has contributed to widespread understaffing, requiring many employees to essentially take on multiple jobs. For another, added stressors at home–particularly the precarious nature of child care in a pandemic, Simpson noted–have made it difficult to be fully present at work, and have led many working parents and caregivers to worry about their performance and growth opportunities. A panel of experts speak on mental health, top row from left: Pamela Berman of Publicis Health and Rachel Tyler of Methodist Health System. Middle row: Tamika Simpson of Ovia Health, moderator Anna Maltby, and Shauna Harrington of VSP Vision. Bottom: Jackie Bassett of UChicago Medicine (Image by From Day One) In the health care industry, workers are under added stress because of the widely reported pandemic-related strains on the system, among other factors, Tyler and Bassett noted. And finally, while the option to work remotely has come as a welcome source of both Covid safety and flexibility for those who have it, sitting in front of a computer at home all day can be stressful for both the mind and the body, Harrington said. Unfortunately, employers aren’t always innocent here: Expecting full productivity during difficult times, ignoring the realities of pandemic life, and not moving quickly enough to provide employees with the resources they need to reach their goals–all these lapses can contribute to stress and burnout, the experts said. How Should Employers Respond? Thankfully, many smart policies, benefits, and other resources can help companies support their teams’ mental health, respond appropriately when mental health concerns arise, and ease some of the most common stressors that affect employees. It’s not just the humane thing to do, the experts said–it’s a strong investment in the health of the organization. Bassett cited a recent University of Chicago study that found for every dollar an employer spends on mental health treatment, the company sees an average return on investment of $4. The experts shared a wealth of ideas, including: Upgraded employee-assistance programs (EAPs) with a concierge service to help employees seamlessly find a mental health professional Presentations and webinars to help employees understand the mental health benefits available to them Free counseling sessions made available to employees and their entire households Text-based counseling programs Bonuses to help hourly employees with unexpected costs during periods when they aren’t able to work Eliminating co-pays for mental health services Financial wellness services such as student loan forgiveness to help ease financial stress Flexible time off policies Weekly or daily check-ins as a team and one-on-one meetings with managers, making it clear that it’s okay to discuss stress, self-care, and any needs for additional support or flexibility Hiring contract staff to support understaffed teams In some cases, a combination of time-off and stress-relief policies come together as a comprehensive solution. At Ovia, the company offers unlimited paid time off for employees, as well as mental-health days, said Simpson. “Another thing that I really enjoy personally is no-meeting Wednesdays. It’s pretty simple. It’s a very easily enforced policy, but it allows for that heads-down time, really focusing, not having your day broken up by meeting after meeting. Just little things like that can really make a huge impact in the mental health of the employee,” she said. Finally, the experts agreed that equipping managers with information and training on how to appropriately discuss mental health and self-care with their employees—and what benefits are available to them—is critical. It’s a balance: “We have to partner with our leaders and managers to help them recognize signs of burnout and check in with their team,” Tyler said, “but we’re not expecting them to pull a theoretical couch into their office” and attempt to take on the role of a mental health professional. The key, the experts said, is to keep things professional while still tapping into empathy, normalizing self-care, and encouraging folks to take advantage of the benefits and policies available. Anna Maltby is an editor, content strategist, and exercise specialist. She has served as executive editor of Elemental, the health and well-being publication on Medium, as well as deputy editor of Real Simple and Refinery29.

Anna Maltby | May 15, 2022

Discovering Where You’re at Your Best in Life and Work

If there’s something in workplace culture that Marcus Buckingham can’t stand, it’s the outside-in method. “It starts in school, where pupils are vessels who have to absorb notions, which will then be measured in standardized tests,” he said. “All your life you’re measuring against the model, and your uniqueness is an impediment,” he said. In the last four to five years, Buckingham, the best-selling author and leading researcher in the field of human performance, has taken a long look in the mirror to take stock of his own life. The years were marked by grief, loss, rebound, and the sale of his company. “What are you doing? What kind of mark are you leaving?” he would ask himself, Buckingham said in a candid conversation with Harvard Business Review editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius at From Day One’s Boston conference on the realignment of the relationship between workers and their employers. Buckingham has just published Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life, a book that is meant to debunk what the adage “do what you love” means in practical terms and how we can achieve that. “Most people don't love what they do, but they do find love in what they do,” said. “When you find highly successful people in their job, you see the love in it. You can feel yourself vanishing into what you're doing.” Because of the pandemic, we are, ultimately, changed creatures, and companies that get in sync with where we are emotionally are going to be the best for people, Buckingham said. At the core of this emotional and professional shift is a more thorough understanding of love in work. Managers Need to Love Employees  Relationships can be about complementing one another, about sharing values, about giving or finding protection. Ultimately, though, it’s to “see” the other person, which in a working relationship requires an investment of time. For example, in a health care setting, when the ratio between supervisors and nurses is 1:60, Buckingham observed, it’s a recipe for burnout. “Love means seeing a person, and have another person feel seen.” This means a good manager would not want to perfect you, because they see you in your entirety, he said. They help the employee become a more intuitive version of themselves. “Tough love, sometimes, it’s necessary, I am sure some of you felt that,” he said. “But a loving relationship at work is I want you to grow. Why? Because I care about you. That isn’t easy. Humans are complicated.” This extends to HR leaders. “We’ve just done research on HR, and what the experience of people of HR is,” said Buckingham. “If you see HR as value-promoting, you are eight times more likely to advocate for the company as a place to work for friends and family and four times less likely to say that you have an intent to leave.” Performance Evaluations Are Obsolete   The traditional, annual evaluations are not a reliable metric, Buckingham believes. “If you wanted to make a better system, first of all, you’ve got to bifurcate performance measurement and performance development,” said Buckingham, who adds that development is happening all the time. Thus, weekly check-ins are ideal. After all, each society on Earth came up with seven-day-week calendars. And when you were in school, you were not asked to take stock of your grades just once a year. “If you can’t check in each week, you are managing too many people,” he said. “If you don’t want to do it 52 times a year, don’t manage people.” Standard performance evaluations are also unable to harness uniqueness, and there’s a good argument for that. Case in point: In an emergency room, 60 nurses are bound to be unique, have different strengths, and give different outcomes. If they all had the same set of competences, that would not be reflective of the real-life situations they deal with. “We make teams to make a home for uniqueness,” Buckingham said. Starting With Simple Behavioral Modifications  In terms of talent outreach, HR should scream loudly “we’re interested in you as an individual,” Buckingham recommended. A manager, by contrast, should make a team a home for a wide variety of individuals. The notion of there-is-no-I-in-team, he said, is obsolete. “We make teams to make a home for uniqueness,” he said. Buckingham added some personal advice: If you begin your day with “getting through it” as your main goal, you should start finding activities you look forward to, aiming to love at least 20% of your work. “While you’re doing it, time flies by. When you’re done, you feel mastery,” he said. “Look for moments like that in your everyday life.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | May 13, 2022

Nurturing Candidates With Potential in Your Talent Pipeline

There is a short game to talent acquisition, and there is a long game to talent acquisition. It can be difficult to think about the long game when there are more jobs than there are workers, and recruiters are just trying to scoop up the best talent they can as quickly as possible. Yet it still behooves employers to build a relationship with workers who show a great deal of potential, even if the company isn’t ready to bring them on right away. “The people we will hire and the capabilities we’re going to be injecting in the next five to ten years—it hasn’t existed. If we keep doing what we do, keep going to the same places, same universities, same talent pools, then we’ll get the same outcomes,” said Basant Pandey, global director of executive recruiting at Goodyear Tire & Rubber during an expert panel discussion hosted by From Day One. The panel, titled “Nurturing the Candidates with Potential in Your Talent Pipeline,” which I moderated, included Pandey and three other leaders in recruiting and people operations. The group discussed ways employers can enrich their pipelines and build relationships with potential hires.  Sourcing a Better Talent Pool Filling your pipeline with talent requires new methods of candidate sourcing, panelists said. One habit that desperately needs to be broken, they agreed, is recruiting based on “pedigree,” or the notion that the best talent comes from a certain strata of school, geographic location, social circle or employment history. Corporate real-estate brokerage, said Miriam Brilleman, a leader of people partnering at the commercial real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, has “traditionally been a pay-to-play or a friends-and-family type of industry, and it’s pretty clear that most of the power players in commercial real estate, specifically brokerage, have been white men, and we’ve worked really hard over the past several years to make commercial real estate a viable career option for everyone.”  Brilleman said  the company has taken three steps to redesign hiring: launching paid training programs to attract people from untapped talent pools, encouraging the talent acquisition and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) teams to work together to identify and build relationships with prospective employees, and changing the culture in ways that has earned them spots on lists like the Human Rights Campaign’s list of the best places to work for LGBTQ+ equality. Speaking on nurturing talent, top row from left: Miriam Brilleman of Cushman & Wakefield and Tonya Tucker Collins of Twitch. Bottom row: Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Basant Pandey of Goodyear Tire & Rubber, and Benjamin Martin of Scaler (Image by From Day One) Of course, even when new methods of recruitment are adopted, the problem of volume often remains. There are plenty of jobs to fill, so recruiters are increasingly turning to AI and other tech tools. Tonya Tucker Collins, the VP of talent experience and DEI at the live streaming service Twitch, cautioned against removing people from the process of pipeline development. Otherwise, it’s prone to becoming stagnant. “The tool is not going to replace the recruiter,” said Collins. “It’s not going to replace the relationship, and more importantly, it’s not going to replace your ability to examine and measure the outputs of any system you have in place. If you are not seeing a population that is underrepresented in your org today, then I would question your AI tool.” Benjamin Martin, a senior recruiter at the cloud-security company Zscaler, feels strongly about this. “I see AI like a Band-Aid to a bigger problem, which is the bandwidth to be able to have those deeper connections, versus just having to make it very transactional to keep pace,” he said. Keeping Your Leads Engaged Along the Way As you fill your funnel with candidates who show potential for hiring down the road, you have to keep those leads warm. “Bringing them on is an easy piece,” Goodyear’s Pandey said. “The challenge is to keep them motivated and engaged throughout their journey.” He believes this is most difficult when companies need to nurture a potential hire for longer than nine months. “The foundation of keeping anyone warm is being a ready communicator.”  Zscaler’s Martin said he communicates with prospects via text, email, or phone at regular intervals. Every six, eight, or twelve weeks, for example. If he knows a position will open in the near future, he can contact those leads and get the process started early.  What he might say to a prospect: “We don’t have a role right now, but we’re excited and you sound excited. Why don’t we have a meet with the team?” Because they’re already engaged with the company, said Martin, the hiring process is more relational than transactional.  “We’ll slow-roll a formal process, so when we get to the point of approval, they’ve met the team, or most of the team, and it’s just a matter of one or two more conversations.” Facilitating a Mutually Beneficial Interview Process Like much of the way we work, interviewing is undergoing a redesign. Companies are looking for ways to make the process more equitable for candidates, and this, in turn, is creating a better environment to nurture future employees.  According to Collins, coaching candidates through a transparent interview process is a way to build that relationship. “If you took a traditional path of traditional education, most schools are going to teach you how to interview, and therefore you’re going to interview well, and if they have a relationship with that employer or an inside track—or maybe they have friends who work there—they’re going to give you what I call the ‘cheat codes,’” she said. “By having the cheat codes, you have that advantage of being the candidate who’s most likely to get hired. That’s not everybody’s story.” The interview process should provide an accurate reflection, not an idealized version, of the company, said Collins. “Don’t give them all unicorns and rainbows. Tell people the truth. The recruiter makes that initial contact and starts to do an informal contract, and we have to understand every touchpoint in that informal contract and ask ourselves, how are we being intentional? If I over-promise in the interview process, that employee is going to hold me accountable when we hire them.” “A realistic job preview,” as Collins put it, has three parts. The first two are being frank about your strengths and weaknesses as an organization and showing candidates an accurate reflection of your company makeup. “We have to make sure that our panels are representative of our employee population,” she said. Collins shared the example of an employee who meets with a diverse panel of interviewers only to find that, upon being hired, the panel does not reflect the employee population and that they’re an “only.”  “That’s an uncomfortable moment for that candidate,” she said. “Being clear about those things and being very intentional in the design of the interview process will help us to get better outcomes, and, more importantly, will also help anybody that we hire go, ‘Oh, I belong here.’” The final element Collins identified is candidate feedback. “If we do decline a candidate, what type of feedback and what type of experience are we dealing with after?” If there are 10,000 applications for one position, a candidate might like to know they made it to the top 100 applicants, even if they didn’t get the job. “Just telling that person you were at the top, that’s a completely different message,” said Collins. “If they don’t get it, but know that they’re in the top three out of the crème de la crème, that is a completely different message than ‘You just didn’t get the job.’” Working Toward Relationship Over Rejection The idea of providing feedback to rejected candidates is a new one, and it naturally leads to a better relationship with the candidate. “The biggest concern candidates tell us is that applying to companies is a black hole. I mean, they don’t give you anything,” said Pandey. “And, by the way, working for an agency or sending it through a search partner is sometimes worse. It’s such a transactional thing, so a lot of candidates get burned by that flow.”  Pandey said he’s tried to remove the idea of “rejection” from the interview process and help point candidates that show real potential toward future opportunities. That only works when there is a relationship. Martin said this: “It’s about making everybody a winner, right? You can’t hire everyone, but if you [have to reject someone], at least they walk away knowing ‘OK, I was set up to succeed. Unfortunate, sure, but respectful process, awesome employer. I’m going to spread the word.’ It’s important to send even the folks that we can’t hire away feeling good.” Don’t neglect the fact that your current employees are part of your talent pipeline too. Providing a positive employee experience is not only necessary for business, it’s also important for future hiring.  It even comes down to maintaining a healthy relationship through an employee’s departure. “Making sure that employee leaves with a proper exit and making sure they leave with dignity and respect is super important,” said Brilleman of Cushman & Wakefield. Not only does word travel, but Brilleman said her company also sees its fair share of “boomerang” staff. “If we didn’t keep those relationships, and if we didn’t offboard in the proper way, we would have discouraged people from returning.” Editor’s Note: From Day One thanks its partner who sponsored this webinar, the talent-engagement platform Gem. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, VA, who writes about workplace culture and policies, hiring, DEI, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others, and has been syndicated by MSN and The Motley Fool.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | May 06, 2022

A Publisher's Plan to Make His City More Connected and Inclusive

Veteran entrepreneur Jonathan Sposato, the new publisher of Seattle magazine and Seattle Business, is always thinking about what's new—really new. “Not only do I think about what would be fun for me to do, but also what is the sort of negative space,” he said in a fireside chat at a From Day One conference in Seattle. “There’s the positive space of all the things that exist currently. But there’s the negative space of what doesn’t yet exist. I felt Seattle was missing a certain type of journalism,” he told Steve Koepp, From Day One’s co-founder and chief content officer. Sposato is the chairman and co-founder of Geekwire, a technology news website, an investor in numerous technology companies, and he also founded, grew, and sold two companies to Google. His vision in purchasing two of Seattle’s premier publications is to strengthen Seattle’s voice as a world-class city on the forefront of technology, biotech, quality of life, and so much more. He’s looking to do more long-form journalism and delve into topics such as social inequality in housing and the tech industry, as well as in other booming industries in the region. One of Sposato’s goals is to deepen the editorial content at both publications. That means being unafraid to take on local business giants when there’s a story worth telling. “In some ways Geek Wire has normalized me to being thicker-skinned with someone thinking our coverage is not fair,” he said. “If a CEO doesn’t like a certain piece, they don’t call the editors, they call me. Maybe they think I’m the nice guy they can squeeze or something, and I understand the impulse. This may sound a little cliché but we do need as much independent journalism as possible. I’m very proud of the fact that Geek Wire is wholly independent. There’s no other stakeholders that we are beholden to, other than ourselves or the public and doing a great job.” Sposato on affordable housing: “We have to move with conviction, we have to move with intelligence, and we also have to be patient” Deepening content also means coverage that creates a more connected and inclusive environment. Sposato, 55, grew up in Seattle and was often the only Asian American kid in the room. Sposato said he would never have imagined being in the position he is now, to facilitate a platform for quality journalism that promotes inclusion and equality, back when he was getting beat up on a schoolyard for being different. Seattle is more diverse now, and the city’s news coverage needs to reflect diverse backgrounds and experiences. In Sposato’s case, he was raised by a single mom who couldn’t afford to care for him so she sent him to live with his grandparents in Hong Kong. All this has shaped his worldview and commitment to widening the editorial lens of the journalism he publishes. One issue he’s particularly passionate about is affordable housing. “We have to move with conviction, we have to move with intelligence, and we also have to be patient,” he said. “And I believe that if you can kind of cut through all the noise, regardless of what you think about the issue or what you think about the city council or the mayor, whatever, that at the end of the day, we have a supply-and-demand problem with regard to affordable housing.” “And how much do we want to address fundamentally at its core, the high-order bit, as we engineers like to say in technology? The high-order bit is: How much do we want to allocate the city’s resources to creating that affordable housing stock so that people who are teachers, nurses, and firefighters and who are not making $175,000 a year at Amazon can afford to live close to the city?” Another major consideration, he said: “Investing in the right infrastructure–light rail, all of that public transportation.” Sposato also pointed out that we can deconstruct the homelessness crisis as being two-thirds about affordable housing and one-third other things. “But we shouldn’t over-focus on the other things at the expense of folks who are marginalized despite the fact that they have jobs, despite the fact that they’re not drug addicts and thieves.” Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.

Jennifer Haupt | May 01, 2022

Lessons of Boeing’s Cultural Decline–and How It Can Recover 

Boeing, a creator of the jet age, was once seen as a prestigious American corporate icon. Yet the company’s relationships with employees, investors, and business partners went into a tailspin after its merger with rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997. That’s the thesis of journalist Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, who spoke at a From Day One conference in Seattle about how this revered corporation went astray by neglecting some of its original core values, and what other companies can learn from this cautionary tale. “The conflict ensued almost immediately with a strike that was the largest white-collar strike in U.S. history at the time,” said Robison, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. “A federal mediator talked with an engineer I also interviewed who said, ‘This company is doomed.’ The reason he gave was that on one side you had hunter- killer assassins, the McDonnell Douglas side, which was more stockholder focused, and on the Boeing side, you had boy scouts who were customer- and product-focused. So when you look at the Max tragedy, you have to look at the DNA that started with that merger. It had impacts that lasted that long,” he said in a fireside chat with Marissa Nall, staff reporter of the Puget Sound Business Journal. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the Boeing 737 MAX airliner worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 passengers died in two crashes. This was the longest-ever grounding of a U.S. airliner, which cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation and legal fees, with indirect losses of more than $60 billion from 1,200 cancelled orders. Engineering reviews uncovered design problems, and lawmakers investigated Boeing’s incentives to minimize pilot training for the aircraft. Author Peter Robison (Photo courtesy of the author) Nall asked about the impact of the merger on leadership and what that meant operationally for Boeing. “When you think of an aircraft, it's a product that has such a long product cycle, and decisions made at the management level filter down to the employee level,” said Robison, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Boeing engineers. “Culture is a word that seems so amorphous, but it’s amazing how specific people get about it.” The culture of Boeing, he said, became all about “its schedule, its cost, its shareholder value. And that stems directly from the influence of some of the top leadership who came from McDonnell Douglas in the late 90s.” Robison explained that the leadership focus was centered on cost containment. He looked at one engineer’s evaluation that said ideas are measured in dollars. Another engineer was given specific performance and time requirements tied to reducing costs. The culture became one stemming from the idea that corporate executives ultimately make the best decisions about allocating resources, and ultimately about safety. The leadership was under pressure from stockholders to reduce costs, and that trickled down to managers and their teams. The compliance regulation of Boeing by the FAA lapsed, since the regulators were under pressure to cut costs as well, so both the FAA and Boeing were rewarded by stakeholders for speeding designs through production. This tension between Wall Street and the more product-focused engineers corroded the corporate culture that had defined Boeing in its heyday and helped to make the company so successful. The good news is that Robison believes corporate America has learned something from the MAX tragedy. “In the late 90s, the Business Roundtable put out a statement and said, essentially, the shareholder is right and a company’s first duty is to the shareholder,” Robison said. “Everything else will take care of itself as long as the shareholders are rewarded. But in 2019, the roundtable revised that stance and said companies owe a duty to everyone, including customers, employees, and communities.” And, Robison said, Boeing has shifted its business practices to reflect a closer alliance with its former corporate culture’s product focus. For example, Boeing's current CEO, David Calhoun, is getting weekly reports from his engineering team and there's a safety committee on its board. So how does Boeing build back its credibility with both the airlines and the flying public? “I think that will take showing integrity,” Robison said. “Part of the reason that Boeing struggled so much with the MAX crisis was that there were multiple moments when it was found to be saying things that weren’t true. There was a moment I described in the book where Boeing was claiming after the first crash that it was maintenance errors. But pilots in America knew that was not the case. Boeing, both in public and behind closed doors, needs to show absolute integrity.” Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.

Jennifer Haupt | May 01, 2022