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Carrie Snider | February 21, 2024

Helping Employees Organize Their Lives Now for When They're Not Around Later

On the proverbial starting line of her new life, excitedly using wedding planning websites and apps, Abby Schneiderman started wondering about the finish line. Where were all the websites and apps and guides for end of life?That was the small beginning of what would eventually become Everplans, a platform that helps people get prepared for the unexpected. Schneiderman detailed the company’s story and pillars at From Day One’s conference in Atlanta. A tech entrepreneur, her curiosity wasn’t that out of the ordinary. She researched and found plenty of resources for having children, buying a home, financial planning, and retirement planning. But that’s where it ended. “There were no other life stages covered online,” she said. Schneiderman brought her findings to tech veteran Adam Seifer. “I said, who's helping people deal with death?” It’s interesting to note that not all big life stages happen for everyone. Not everyone gets married or has kids, but each person will face death.“Everybody has to deal with this one day,” she said, whether it’s for themselves or for their aging parents, but this is something we can’t avoid.”To fill the online gaps, Schneiderman and Seifer started writing content. Over 500 articles worth of content at first, which has grown into the thousands. It covers every conceivable end-of-life topic, such as how to write a will, what to wear to a funeral, and how to name a health care proxy. Everplans was born. They immediately saw the value of their work.“We started coming up very highly in Google searches for every article we were writing.”A New PerspectiveThen came hard, personal experience. Schneiderman’s 51-year-old brother was killed by a drunk driver. In an instant, everything changed for her and her family. Thankfully he had life insurance, but that was where the documents and pre-planning stopped. No will, no organization of his accounts, no funeral wishes. That’s when Everplans made a major pivot. Rather than only provide articles and resources, Schneiderman and Seifer wanted to do more. “We wanted to help people get a plan in place ahead of time, so that when the time does come or when an emergency strikes, families have access to what they need.”Today, Everplans is a technology platform that helps people to organize, store, share, and everything from wills to policies to health directives to online accounts up to date. To date, over 30 million have engaged their resources since we launched, and over 160,000 people have created “vaults” on the platform, with over 3 million pieces of information stored and shared.Abby Schneiderman, co-founder and co-CEO of Everplans, led the thought leadership spotlight in Atlanta (photo by Dustin Chambers for From Day One)The co-founders also wrote a book, In Case You Get Hit By a Bus: How to Organize Your Life Now for When You're Not Around Later, in the hopes of helping people be better prepared for what’s to come. That’s why Everplans has entered the benefits space—to help companies help employees get the peace of mind that comes with getting things in order. “There’s a major tie between personal productivity and workplace productivity,” Schneiderman said. Speaking of full-time employees in the U.S., here are some statistics she reported: 65% feel anxious when critical information and documents are all over the place, 84% are less productive when they feel disorganized, and 86% are less stressed when they feel more organized. And Everplans aims to help remedy that. After creating an Everplans vault, you can upload documents and pertinent information, as well as designate “deputies” or loved ones who should have access to your vault now and after you die. Below are the four pillars Everplans recommends each person looks at when adding to their vaults. The platform also nudges you at regular intervals to make sure everything is up to date.Documents: Things like legal documents, wills, assets, power of attorney, advanced directives, and more. Since end-of-life documents like power of attorney can be hard for many people, Everplans give pointers on how to broach this topic with different people in your life. Insurance: Policies like life, health, auto, home, property, pet, disability, and more. Schneiderman explained that every year, billions of dollars go unclaimed because of policies family members don’t know about. Assets: This includes financial accounts and digital assets. Making sure that bank accounts, safe deposit box information, credit card accounts, 401k and other retirement accounts, and every other account are in the vault is vital for loved ones to be able to access them after you pass. At the very least, put in what the account is even if you don’t put usernames or passwords. As far as digital assets go, did you know the average person has 240 passwords? Social media, cryptocurrency, cell phone, unlock computer code, email accounts, and just about everything else. Schneiderman said they did a study, and 65% of people keep track of passwords in their heads. She recommends using two password managers, one for work and one for personal. Leaving a Legacy: Think about the different types of things that matter to you that you want to pass down, Schneiderman said. Recipes, videos, photos, stories, and anything else you can think of that leave a legacy. The great thing about putting your affairs in order is this: you can have peace of mind knowing that if anything does happen to you, your loved ones don’t have to scramble. They can access all of the needed information without searching for it or worrying they’ve missed something. That would make any employee sleep better at night.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Everplans, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Feature

Apprenticeships: a Classic Solution to the Modern Problem of Worker Shortages

The U.S. labor market has become like a crazy quilt: mass layoffs in certain industries, along with dire shortages of workers in businesses ranging from accounting to trucking. To close the critical gaps, industries are turning to modern versions of an age-old institution: the apprenticeship. “Apprenticeships are the most promising solution to addressing the current labor shortage. Why? Because apprenticeships are jobs first and foremost–jobs that pay a living wage–not just training programs,” Ryan Craig, author of Apprentice Nation: How the Earn and Learn Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America, told From Day One. “They’re accessible to anyone with the potential and willingness to work hard–and much more accessible than tuition-based, debt-based college, or other training programs.”Causes of the labor shortage are many: A workforce quickly aging into retirement, the slowing of population growth, the burdensome cost of post-secondary education, lack of access to affordable childcare, and an increase in entrepreneurship. All of these have contributed to a shrinking workforce. As of January, the U.S. labor force participation rate is 62.5%. A couple decades ago, at the beginning of 2001, it was 67.2%.Employers are attacking the problem on many fronts. Some are pulling out the stops to retain older workers who might otherwise retire, and some are coaxing the semi-retired back to the office with flexible new arrangements. Others are dropping four-year degree requirements to broaden their talent pools, or bulking up benefits packages to include childcare, paid leave, and fertility benefits to attract and retain workers. Apprenticeships have joined that medley of solutions, with employers, advocacy organizations, and policymakers exploring and investing in the “earn-and-learn” model to fill talent pipelines from hospitality to healthcare to finance. Apprenticeships Beyond Blue CollarsApprenticeships represent a mutually beneficial way of hiring and training workers. Apprentices get on-the-job training, related instruction (often in a classroom or virtual classroom), and a paycheck all at the same time. Employers get the workers they need, trained to their specifications. In the U.S., apprenticeships are most often associated with skilled trades–it’s normal for plumbers, electricians, construction workers to complete apprenticeships–yet white-collar professions are only beginning to forge a connection with earn-and-learn programs. In 2020, professional services firm Aon announced that it would invest $30 million in its apprenticeship program over the next five years, with a goal of creating 10,000 apprenticeships in the U.S. within Aon and its partner organizations by 2030. In 2022, IBM committed to putting $250 million toward apprenticeships and other “new collar” programs by 2025.Aon’s program includes three tracks: insurance, HR, and IT. Apprentices take courses in insurance and business administration at partner colleges. Francheska Feliciano, the director of Aon’s apprenticeship program, told From Day One that career changers have found a home there. “We have found that those that thrive in our program tend to be career changers, but our program has a wide range of candidates with varied backgrounds, customer service, hospitality, or other service type roles.”Last year, the Biden Administration announced that it will invest $330 million to expand federally registered apprenticeships programs. In July, the Department of Labor awarded $17 million to expand existing apprenticeships and promote the model in new industries. In November, Maryland Governor Wes Moore committed $3 million to developing apprenticeships for public-sector jobs and $1.6 million toward the development of hospitality industry apprenticeships. “Maryland has set ambitious goals for expanding apprenticeship and we mean to meet them,” said Portia Wu, Maryland's Department of Labor secretary, in a press release. “Registered apprenticeship is key to our state’s economic success. We’ve already hit historic highs in apprenticeship adoption and today’s investments will accelerate our progress.”Alleviating the Local Labor ShortageApprenticeships could help solve local labor shortages for companies whose workers must be on-site–crucial for skilled trades like manufacturing or nursing–which are experiencing a pipeline problem of their own. Rather than recruiting the skilled talent from elsewhere, employers can use apprenticeships to develop the talent in their community. As housing inventory trails demand, employers who can tap their local talent markets will have the advantage, said Renee Haltom, the VP of research communications at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, during a panel discussion last month at the Richmond Economic Forecast “The regions that figure out housing are going to be ahead of the curve in terms of dealing with the coming demographic shifts,” Haltom said, referring to the aging U.S. workforce. Annelies Goger, who studies how to scale earn-and-learn models at the Brookings Institution, sees the advantages for local employers. Apprenticeships are a way to draw on local talent, and employers are more likely to retain locals than workers who have relocated, she told From Day One. “Rising rents have made it hard for employers to find and retain people only with the normal ways they’ve recruited people, so they’re looking into a lot of other ways and channels for finding talent,” Goger said. Apprentices Enter Finance and AccountingIn accounting and finance, more workers are retiring than are entering the field. According to a 2024 analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “even if every unemployed person with experience in the financial activities or professional and business service sectors were employed,” the report reads, “only 42% and 44% of the existing job vacancies in these industries would be filled, respectively.”In 2022, the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) launched the first federally registered apprenticeship for finance and accounting professionals, and in its first year signed up 17 employers from 15 industries, including healthcare, industrial gas, banking, and manufacturing. One hundred apprentices have registered with the program in its first year.When AICPA and CIMA set out to create apprenticeships, the aim was to address the worker shortage in the accounting and finance field with early career talent. “When we started talking to employers who would want to hire people from these programs, we found that they were more interested in reskilling workers,” said Joanne Fiore, AICPA’s VP of pipeline and apprenticeships. Rather than recruit new talent, employers wanted to use apprenticeships to retain their current workforce and train them as strategically minded contributors. The purpose of the Registered Apprenticeship for Finance Business Partners is to develop management accountants for the finance function of the future–not just number-crunchers, but “key players in strategic decision-making and broader business transformation,” said Fiore.Even if this program is able to shrink the skills gap, the labor shortage is likely to persist. There just aren’t enough young people entering the field to balance out their retiring elders. One problem: the profession has a reputation for being, well, dull.To fill the talent pipeline, and help rebrand the profession, AICPA and CIMA have piloted a youth apprenticeship program in Maryland high schools, aiming to drum up excitement and interest in the field among young people.Customizing the Programs Organizations, employers, and educators have found ways to tailor apprenticeship programs to their needs. They’re not just for recruiting, they can be deployed for talent development as well. “With the digital transformation of our economy, tens of millions of jobs now require workers to use tools to build things–only the tools are digital and workers no longer need to wear hardhats,” said Craig, author of Apprentice Nation.Often, those skills are software related. Where hospitals and healthcare providers use Epic, marketers use HubSpot, and HR uses Workday. “Companies are increasingly demanding that applicants for these jobs already have these platform skills–skills which are much harder to learn in a classroom than on-the-job via an apprenticeship,” Craig said.“Apprenticeship brings an organic culture of learning into any workplace and helps business perform better,” writes Jean Eddy in Crisis-Proofing Today’s Learners: Reimagining Career Education to Prepare Kids for Tomorrow’s World. “An apprenticeship program breathes new life into workplaces and lets employers quickly tap into a culture of learning that so many now are desperate to build.”Scaling Earn-and-Learn to Quell the Labor ShortageApprenticeships are difficult to start, and they’re difficult to scale. Few employers have the infrastructure to both employ and train unskilled workers at the same time, and most require the help of intermediaries like the AICPA and CIMA, which provide the instruction and the infrastructure.While it may be a while before apprenticeships alone make a dent in the labor shortage, analysis of the success of existing programs is promising. Not only are retention rates high–Aon, for instance, retains 80% of its apprentices–the Department of Labor estimates that employers get a 44.3% return on investment for apprenticeship programs.“While traditional apprenticeships emphasized hands-on skill acquisition under a mentor, modern apprenticeships often integrate technology-based learning, including virtual simulations and online coursework, to complement on-site training,” said Katie Breault, SVP of growth and impact at YUPRO Placement, a recruiting firm focused on skills-based hiring. Finance and tech roles are particularly suited to apprenticeships, she told From Day One. “Industries undergoing digital transformation, for example, greatly benefit from such programs. They offer real-time learning opportunities, crucial for staying relevant in dynamic fields.”The problem with apprenticeships as a solution to the labor shortage is that we just don’t have enough of them yet, said Craig. Plus, in his estimation, they’re under-funded and under-marketed on both the demand and supply side. “Many young people and their parents think of apprenticeships as a ‘second tier’ option–if they think of them at all,” he laments in Apprentice Nation. White collar employers may be thinking much the same. Yet as investment continues and apprentices pop up in surprising places, like the finance department, enthusiasm may spread. “It certainly fits the accounting profession,” Fiore said. “And if it fits the accounting profession, my sense is that it will fit many professions.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.(Featured photo by Amorn Suriyan/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | February 14, 2024

Wanly Chen | February 13, 2024

Fostering Workplace Well-Being Amid Today’s Stressors

With 81 at-home baseball games a season, Atlanta Braves’ executive vice president DeRetta Rhodes knew her employees would need to catch a break during their shifts.Introducing the wellness room: a room that mirrors a living room, equipped with a sofa, TV, and refrigerator for anybody who simply needs time to rest. “It’s about creating space for individuals who need to be able to take care of themselves,” Rhodes said. “In the wellness room, people have the opportunity to go and take a relaxing break if they need to.”In a recent survey, 77% of employers saw an increase in mental health concerns, with 16% anticipating an increase in the future, indicating that health and wellness will continue to be a pressing issue for employers and employees in 2024.Rhodes’ approach is one of many other health and wellness strategies employers are taking to meet their employee’s needs. At From Day One’s Atlanta conference, leaders joined moderator Kelly Yamanouchi, business reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to discuss their health and wellness focal points for the new year.Changing Traditional Financial ProcessesWhether it’s due to the rising cost of living, inflation or the flexibility of remote work, more workers are working two jobs than ever before. Eight million Americans reported working more than two jobs this past January alone. For workers who take on a second job to make ends meet, timely pay matters, says Jon Lowe, chief people officer of financial services company DailyPay.“Today, the number of people who have more than one job is quite high and that creates a very high degree of stress. If you were a bartender around Christmas, you probably made a killing. But come January, when you’re working your part-time job and bartending on the side, there’s this degree of very high variance that we start to see,” Lowe said.With more than 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, employers need to rethink the two-week pay cycle, Lowe said.“When we look at this idea of earning wage access, we need to be disrupting this idea that two weeks is the right cadence to be paid,” Lowe said. “Today, we’re able to offer access to tools that technology allows us to do, where it recognizes the evolution of what work looks like and allows that degree of flexibility to be able to go and tap into resources that otherwise would not be available.”Building Wellness into the CultureFor Kimberly Rath, vice president of home builder company PulteGroup, wellness programs play a key role in building a healthy foundation for a company.The full panel of speakers from left to right: Steven Lester of Mayo Clinic, Josh Crafford of Synchrony, DeRetta Rhodes of the Atlanta Braves, Kimberly Rath of PulteGroup, moderator Kelly Yamanouchi of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Jon Lowe of DailyPay (photo by Dustin Chambers for From Day One)“At PulteGroup, we build homes. If you think about how wellness comes to life for you, a lot of what you do or how you take care of your well-being is done in your home,” Rath said. “At work, it’s similar. Wellness is the health of an organization and how people show up for work. If we’re strategizing how we take care of our employees and build great places where people work, we're going to get so much more from our employees.”From higher retention to increased productivity, employers can yield the benefits of happier and healthier employees. At healthcare clinic Mayo Clinic, professor of medicine and cardiologist, Steven Lester, M.D., discusses how supporting employees both in and off work can strengthen the overall performance of businesses.“As an organization, we are optimizing our business performance by incorporating well-being into the design of work,” Lester said. “We have programs supporting the financial, physical and mental well-being of our employees at work and we are also thinking about how we identify and allow people to have purpose, meaning and belonging at work.”Leading With EmpathyAn overwhelming 90% of U.S. employees believe empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction, underlining the strong value employees place on leaders who lead with purpose and care.One part of empathetic leadership is active listening which helps in engaging with employees, Lester said. “We want to be actively listening to the needs of individuals and give them that safe, comfortable opportunity to engage and be heard, and know that the organization is here to support them and their well-being,” Lester said.With the emphasis on supporting employees, leaders will need to shift their priorities, Josh Crafford, vice president of technology learning and development, of financial services company Synchrony, said.“We're teaching leaders to be coaches and mentors and not care as much about the numbers,” Crafford said. “The numbers will come but the happier, safer and the more secure and connected your workers feel, the more productive they will be.”Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.

Mary Pieper | February 12, 2024

Does Your Corporate Culture Promote Overwork? How to Tell–And How to Fix It

When Malissa Clark was in graduate school, she went into labor with her first child right before spring break. Instead of going to the hospital right away, she waited until her contractions were less than six minutes apart so she could finish a midterm. “I spent a couple more hours at the coffee shop, occasionally doubled over,” she said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s conference in Atlanta.Clark told moderator Nicole Smith of the Harvard Business Review that “I didn’t feel like I could stop. I didn’t feel like I could ask for support. I just felt like I had to push through.” At the time Clark realized she had a problem. However, she said she didn’t really address it until she began writing her book, Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture is Bad for Business – and How to Fix It and doing research on workaholism. Today, many people are feeling burned out in their careers and are trying to find a healthier work-life balance. However, workplace culture far too often gets in the way, says Clark. “Companies just aren’t listening to employees,” she said. Despite people learning during the pandemic that they could do their jobs from home and be productive, organizations are still pessimistic about remote work and insisting workers return to the office.“One of the biggest misconceptions about burnout is that the employee is just not managing stress well enough and needs to learn more coping skills and mindfulness, and then they can handle this,” Clark said. “That’s just not accurate. It’s the organizational and societal factors that are the stressors building on top of each other, and cumulative stress has a toll on our bodies.”When individual employees are overworked, it lowers not only their performance but that of others, says Clark. “You’re not as good of a teammate or boss, and so that hinders the morale of the group,” she said. Breaking the “Always On” MentalityA key contributor to the current culture of overwork is the belief that employees should be available 24/7, says Clark. Sometimes this attitude comes from the top of the organization, but lower-level employees can perpetuate it.“I think during Covid, we learned some bad habits,” she said. For example, parents who had to supervise their children during the day tended to contact their colleagues in the evenings about work, which put pressure on those colleagues to respond.Clark says some companies are encouraging those who have different work hours than other team members to go ahead and write the emails, but to use the schedule send feature so they aren’t received outside of working hours.Incentives for Using Vacation TimeAnother way employers can promote a healthy work-life balance is by encouraging workers to take paid time off. However, offering unlimited vacation days doesn’t work, says Clark, noting companies that have tried this found employees were taking even less PTO than before.Author Malissa Clark signed copies of her book Never Not Working for From Day One audience members (photo by Dustin Chambers for From Day One)Some companies are finding innovative solutions to encourage workers to use their PTO. Medtronic found a way to encourage employees to use their allotted days. In their ‘Earn Time to Win Time’ program, the more workers use their vacation time, the more opportunities they have to enter drawings to win even more days off.“It’s like a positive reinforcement for actually taking vacations,” Clark said. “I thought that was pretty ingenious.”The Four-Day Week MovementSeveral years ago, some companies began experimenting with four-day work weeks, in which employees worked 32 hours a week but were paid the same as they would have been for a 40-hour week. Revenue at those companies grew, while 70% of workers reported less burnout, according to data and employee surveys.“Almost every single employee said they wanted to continue with this,” Clark said. “One of the most astounding things is that 15% said they would not go back to a five-day week for any amount of money. It was life-changing for them.”A 32-hour work week doesn’t have to mean working eight hours a day, four days a week, says Clark. It can be five days a week from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm, which is popular with parents.“We don’t need to be working 40 hours a week,” Clark said. “We have technology, we have AI, we have all these tools that help us to be more productive. We equate hours worked with productivity, and we need to stop doing that.”Mary Pieper is a freelancer reporter based in Mason City, Iowa.

Cynthia Barnes | February 09, 2024

Embedding DEI in Grantmaking: From Vision to Action

Embracing our differences and lived experiences enhances innovation, creativity, decision-making, and better problem-solving. But it’s not always easy to turn aspirations into tangible actions. In a thought leadership spotlight session at From Day One’s Denver conference, Tanya Odom, director of equity and inclusion at the Walton Family Foundation, shared practical strategies and real-world examples of embedding DEI principles and practices into philanthropy, both internally and externally.Odom painted a vivid picture of the Walton Family Foundation’s legacy, tracing its roots to its founding by Sam Walton and Helen Walton in 1987. “We’ve been in the space of diversity, equity, and inclusion for over 25 years,” said Odom. In 2020, the foundation awarded $749.5 million in grants. “We actually fund in three very specific areas that are determined by the family, which are education, which has taken different pathways and ways of looking at it, but that’s been since the beginning. Another is the environment, more specifically oceans and sustainability. And the third is the home region, Bentonville, Arkansas, and Arkansas’ Mississippi Delta,” said Odom. “We infuse all of them with a sensibility about diversity, equity inclusion.” “Our framework centers around three key pillars: embed, align, and amplify,” said Odom. Through these pillars, the foundation aims not only to incorporate DEI principles into its own operations, but also to foster similar initiatives among its grantees and partners. This holistic approach reflects the foundation’s recognition of the interconnectedness of issues, and its commitment to driving systemic change. “It's not just about what we do internally,” she said. “It's about how we leverage our influence to effect change on a broader scale.”Navigating the Last Few YearsThe conversation turned towards the challenges faced during the pivotal summer of 2020, a period marked by widespread social unrest and calls for racial justice. Odom reflected on the intense global efforts during that time. “Many of us had never worked as hard as we did in the summer of 2020,” she said. “That summer and I would say the year after that. And I think there was a sense of people finally understanding what we did.”Tanya Odom of the Walton Family Foundation was interviewed by From Day One co-founder Steve Koepp during the thought leadership spotlightDespite the challenges, Odom recalled this period as a catalyst for change. “We’ve been saying this, this is not new. Odom mentions the curb-cut theory, an awareness that once you find a pathway to address some of these inequities, or structural issues, you usually find ways to address other issues. “So while the summer of 2020 was called a racial reckoning, in Europe, it was also often called a social reckoning. It just highlighted so many other things.”Leadership Buy-In and the Importance of CourageOdom underscored the importance of courage in leadership and the willingness to take bold action. This call for courageous leadership highlighted the need for organizations to confront difficult conversations and actively engage in the work of dismantling systemic barriers to equity.At the Foundation, Odom says, they held an interview with their board chair on the subject of diversity. “And that was very unusual. Our comms department actually got permission to have that go out onto social media. What was really important was that our board chair talked about how DEI connected to the thoughts and beliefs of Sam Walton. Sam Walton wasn't saying ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’ But Sam Walton talked about access. So how do we connect it to the mission of the organization?”Philanthropy's Roadblocks and Future ChallengesDespite the foundation's commendable efforts, Odom acknowledged the roadblocks and challenges facing philanthropy in its quest for DEI integration. “Dr. King has a quote,” she said. “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances, economic injustice, which makes philanthropy necessary.”Odom remained optimistic about the future, emphasizing the importance of collective action and ongoing dialogue. “While the road ahead may be challenging,” she said, “I firmly believe that by working together, we can overcome these obstacles and create a more inclusive and equitable future for all.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, the Walton Family Foundation, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Cynthia Barnes has written about everything from art to zebras from more than 30 countries. She currently calls Denver home.

Keren Dinkin | February 08, 2024

Getting Ahead of Attrition Through Career Equity and Recognition

In the age of hybrid work and digital transformation, companies face the challenge of meeting rising employee expectations despite strained profits. Aside from wages, how might companies ensure that their employees’ needs are being met?At From Day One’s recent Atlanta conference, Jeff Cates, CEO of Achievers and Kumari Williams, VP of belonging and diversity at Workday, discussed exactly this. According to research from Achievers, the number of people who are job searching in 2024 is going up by 10%. For most people, the number one consideration is wage, which makes sense given today’s cost of living and expenses.How do we solve the wage problem when most organizations are actually looking to reduce wage increases this year? Research shows that on average, in the U.S., employers are looking at wage increases of about 3.9% in 2024 compared to 4.4% last year.Emotional salary supports retention. Two-thirds of individuals reported that if they felt supported and connected at an organization, they would take that over a 30% increase in wage.This cultural environment fosters a strong sense of belonging, increasing the likelihood of individuals pursuing long-term careers within their organization. Belonging creates the difference between ‘I work at an organization’ versus ‘I’m connected; I have a career at this organization.’Creating a sense of belonging is ultimately what helps create the stickiness that can help offset the lure of wages. For Williams, belonging is an output of inclusivity—and building inclusive spaces and inclusive leaders are the cornerstone workplace belonging.“It’s even a KPI for our organization. And so at the highest level in the organization, we are focused on increasing belonging, not just maintaining it,” she said.Williams, left, and Cates, right, led a thought leadership spotlight titled “Getting Ahead of Attrition Through Career Equity and Recognition, Using HR Tech” (photo by Dustin Chambers for From Day One)So, how do you create an environment where people feel connected and fulfilled? At Achievers, equity and transparency are vital in creating employee-friendly talent practices. “Individuals that report a feeling of career equity are two times more likely to not job hunt,” Cates said.One key area where they dialed in on transparency was performance ratings, where workmates were free to share performance ratings as well as their ratings from a potential standpoint and how they could do better, he says.It’s time to shift the idea of recognition from a reward to a sustainable practice that nudges people forward. It’s not just about using money (but you can, in small doses), but about using recognition to drive behavior, Cates says. It’s also important to use data to draw relevant insights regarding employee performance and how recognition can further propel that.“It’s really when we think about recognition that’s not tied to the monetary that we can drive behavior—and if we are going to use monetary rewards, then it should be used in very small doses,” said Cates.When you think about all the things you can do that drive behavior, such as recognition, gamification, and things that create a sense of accomplishment, it’s important to note that even micro-nudging or micro-rewarding can add up to help build positive habits. By helping to create habits and drive behavior, you can really drive scalable impact on how people feel. By accomplishing smaller tasks and micro-rewarding, you help people achieve a sense of fulfillment and action.It also comes down to leadership accountability. “Oftentimes, we’re focused on the message at the top of our organizations and making sure that our executives are aware of what we're trying to drive,” said Williams, “and it just doesn't permeate the layers in the middle.”For Williams, being intentional about how you drive accountability among leaders in the middle of the organization is essential so that they can carry the work forward. Most of your employees’ experience is shaped by your middle managers, not the executives, she says.Staying competitive in the job market and reducing attrition is challenging, especially now that employees are increasingly focused on finding better wages. However, the one thing that employees do value more than higher wages is company culture, particularly a sense of belonging where they see a path forward career-wise, where they’re being recognized, and feel that they are seen and heard.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Achievers, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Keren's love for words saw her transition from a corporate employee into a freelance writer during the pandemic. When she is not at her desk whipping up compelling narratives and sipping on endless cups of coffee, you can find her curled up with a book, playing with her dog, or pottering about in the garden.

Katie Chambers | February 07, 2024

In Employee Experience, What Is True No Matter What?

Katharyne Gabriel, chief of human resources, North America at the Coca-Cola Company, has fond childhood memories of heading to the McDonald’s drive-through window with her mother to enjoy a Diet Coke from the fountain “because it just tastes better.”She’s not alone in this, she says. Most Coca-Cola employees have a strong connection with the brand. “We are very proud of our company’s purpose, which is to refresh the world and make a difference,” Gabriel said. “And there are many ways that we’re able to then draw from our employees and help them find connection to their career and the community.”Since the lesson of recent years is that the workplace will be buffeted by one disruption after another, employers need to focus on fundamental values that resonate with workers in any season. In a fireside chat session at From Day One’s conference in Atlanta, Gabriel shared how the Coca-Cola Co. focuses on employee fulfillment.Gabriel cites three tenets that hold true in elevating employee experience. The first is transparency, or employees feeling like they have full context for why and how certain decisions are being made. Next is autonomy, which Gabriel describes as allowing employees to make career decisions that benefit their personal professional growth and the lives of their families. Lastly is recognition: helping workers be appreciated for their individual identities as well as their workplace contributions.Katharyne Gabriel, the Coca-Cola Co.'s chief of human resources, kicked off the conference in a fireside chat titled “In Employee Experience, What Is True No Matter What?” (photos by Dustin Chambers for From Day One)These have been especially valuable during recent years, during which society has faced a pandemic, natural disasters, war, and economic recession. “No matter what is coming at us, how can we best serve our population?” Gabriel said. By focusing on core values like transparency, autonomy, and recognition, corporations can provide a steady foundation even in times of uncertainty.A Practical Approach to Recognition“Recognition and specificity around behaviors or goals, those are cultural icons for many companies, including the Coca-Cola company,” Gabriel said. “But [what’s also important is] broadening that definition so that my unique individuality is recognized.”Coca-Cola’s Thrive Career Network is an example of employee engagement through a combination of recognition and career development. Gabriel says that the corporation’s values of transparency and autonomy are at the forefront of the program. “We’ve tried to be very transparent about the tools and the resources we have for each of us as employees to drive a career in the company,” she said.They’re also focused on being clear about leadership behaviors that are especially important, she says. “We’ve put our employees in the driver’s seat with meaningful tools to help them effectively navigate what that career path looks like.”Part of building out an individualized career path for an employee is updating the definition of growth. “We always hear growth, and think it means more–bigger title, bigger remit–and that isn’t what the growth aspiration is for everyone,” Gabriel said. Instead, she prefers the word “fulfillment.” This allows space for those interested in a more traditional vertical growth, but also those who see professional development as an opportunity to try out a new department, mentor others, or learn new skills.Leroy Chapman, editor-in-chief of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, interviewed Gabriel in the fireside chat“We’ve started with broadening out how we define a career. How do we then make sure that we’re meeting individual needs and recognizing what they’re looking to get out of the Coca-Cola company?” Gabriel said. With 80,000 workers in their network, moderator Leroy Chapman, editor-in-chief of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution pointed out, “That’s a lot of employees to support!”Subsequently, that’s a lot of pressure to potentially put on managers hoping to guide and nurture their workforce. Gabriel shares that the company developed a set of manager tools that encourages leaders to facilitate conversations and think critically and creatively with team members about what they need to succeed. This strategy releases managers from feeling the need to have all the answers, but instead to simply be accountable for having the conversation to lead colleagues to the proper resources for their version of fulfillment.Building a Culture Rooted in Diversity, Equity, and Belonging“The 800,000 employees between the company and our bottling partners are dispersed in 200 markets across the globe. And we know it’s imperative that we represent the markets that we’re serving in order to stay in front of the consumer needs,” Gabriel said.“We aim to create equal opportunities for our employees in order to meet that growth mission for the company.” This involves creating an inclusive environment in which employees are set up to bring their individual selves to the workplace and build a career that best serves themselves and their families.Coca-Cola has the goal to become 50% female-led by the year 2030, Gabriel says. Already, its board of directors and executive leadership team have hit that benchmark, and its North America operating unit is being led by its first female president, Jennifer Mann. The company also hopes to soon have its own demographics in the U.S. reflect current racial and ethnic census data.One way to cultivate a sense of belonging, especially in a workforce increasingly defined by a rift between older and younger workers, is through listening. “We’ve checked ourselves not to make assumptions about what the workforce entering wants or doesn’t want, and how different they are from other generations. [Instead], we ask,” Gabriel said.Coca-Cola works to instill its values in employees early, before they move into leadership roles. The organization is finding volunteerism is increasingly important among younger generations, and in return has increased its paid volunteer hours for employees and created a “Kindness is Refreshing” campaign. This spirit of generosity among younger employees is perfectly aligned with Coca-Cola’s values and bodes well for the company’s sustainability. “Coca-Cola has been at this for a long time, 137 years to be exact,” Gabriel said. “And we’re looking to live this purpose for another 137 years.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

Mary Pieper | February 06, 2024

Diverse Perspectives, Unified Goals: Embracing Diversity in the Workplace

Kristin Taylor, executive vice president of workforce solutions at Avenica, knows what it is like to have an identity that is often misunderstood.During From Day One’s conference in Atlanta, Taylor shared that she is bipolar. “That does not mean that I’m unpredictable,” she told panel moderator Ernie Suggs, race and culture reporter for the Atlantic Journal-Constitution. “I just get really sad sometimes, and I struggle with things like public speaking and networking.”At Avenica, Taylor feels supported. For example, if things are too much for her while attending a conference, she can always ask a colleague at the event to step in for a bit, she says. “How fabulous is it that we can all be our authentic selves, and really feel like we can articulate our needs and our preferences?” Taylor said. “We are really welcoming that conversation [around] diversity of thought but also diversity of preference.”Taylor’s story illustrates why it isn’t enough for companies to simply invite people of color, women, and others who traditionally have not been part of the dominant culture to join their team.The executive panelists discussed the topic “How to Embrace Diversity of All Kinds in the Workplace” at From Day One's Atlanta conference at the Georgia Aquarium (photos by Dustin Chambers for From Day One)Karlene Gordon, senior vice president and diversity and inclusion officer at Ameris Bank, said she once heard Creative Artists Agency global DEI speaker Nzinga Shaw say at a conference: “If you’re inviting people into a dirty house, they’re not going to stay.”“If you go to someone’s house and it’s filthy, do you sit down? Do you take a glass of water from them? Or are you trying to find your exit real quick?” Gordon said.Many people of color already have imposter syndrome, says Gordon. If the leader of the company that hires them is unaware of this common issue, “they’re not going to perform.”Kitty Chaney-Reed, chief leadership, culture and inclusion officer at IBM said the company has eight communities for employees with various identities, including veterans and neurodivergent folks.“It helps in terms of giving people a place to fit in,” she said. “And there’s intersectionality. People can belong to more than one community. For us, that has been a huge game changer.”IBM also ensures that a college degree is not a necessity for entry, says Chaney-Reed. Over the past three years, only 50% of the available jobs with the company required applicants to be university graduates.Making the Case for DEIThe highest performing organizations worldwide are those that focus on building a strong culture based on diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, according to a recent partnered study between Fortune magazine and the Institute for Corporate Productivity.Liz Pittinger, VP of customer success at Stork Club, a family building and reproductive health company that helps employee groups design benefit packages, says that’s something she emphasizes when working with HR leaders.“One of the things that we do whenever we’re partnering with our customers or prospects is help arm their teams with the data points they need to go in front of the decision maker who controls the budget,” she said.Part of Pittinger’s job is to explain why Stork Club has certain benefits, like its doula program, and how they can impact company culture. Research shows that having a doula in the room with the person who is in labor can save lives.This is especially crucial for women of color, who have a far greater maternal mortality rate in the United States than their white peers, says Pittinger. “A wealthy, highly educated Black woman with access to great care is still three times more likely to die than a poor white woman in a rural community,” she said.Getting to Know the WorkforceAn important step toward fostering a workplace that embraces diversity of all kinds is to build relationships with the employees, says Cheryl Kern, vice president of DEIB at MillerKnoll.“As I came into our organization three years ago, the first thing that I wanted to do was understand our people, because through understanding you truly get to know the culture and identify the areas that need to be transformed,” she said.Another advantage of this approach is “when people see you are about them, they will care about the work you’re doing,” Kern said.Now that DEI efforts nationwide are experiencing pushback, Kern’s relationship-building efforts are paying off. “While the external waters are really choppy, we have brought along advocates and allies that have said, ‘I’m on this journey with you,’” she said.Mary Pieper is a freelancer reporter based in Mason City, Iowa.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | January 29, 2024

Small, Consistent Interventions for Employee Mental Health

“Our employee population is changing,” said Marielaine Yepes, the VP of human resources at NBCUniversal. “Post-pandemic, job candidates are asking about mental health benefits. Whereas in 2019, it was ‘Do I get health care? Do I get vision, dental, and a 401k?’ Now their questions are, ‘What about my flexibility? What about parental leave? What about mental breaks?’” No longer the taboo it used to be, mental health, for many, is becoming part of their standard measure of health care. “I used to pride myself on being sick but still coming to work, but it’s kind of embarrassing to say that in a post-Covid world,” said Andrea Cooper, chief people officer at virtual mental healthcare company Talkspace. During From Day One’s January virtual conference on making a fresh commitment to a culture of well-being, Yepes and Cooper shared their thoughts on the shifting view of mental health in the workplace as part of an expert panel titled, “Enhancing Employee Mental Health and Wellness Benefits.” I moderated the discussion in which panelists shared their outlooks for workplace mental health in the coming year, and their best advice on caring for a changing workforce.“There was this notion that being a workaholic was a good thing,” Cooper pointed out. “Now it’s about acknowledging that we should take care of ourselves–not just our physical selves, but also our mental and emotional selves.”Building Engagement WithinDespite the new-found freedom many people have with talking about mental health, it doesn’t mean that mental health issues or that seeking care are entirely without stigma, or that everyone is comfortable talking publicly about their wellbeing, especially at work.Business process management firm eClerx experienced this reluctance first-hand. The company’s early mental health and wellness programs were greatly lacking in engagement, yet employee surveys showed that its workforce wanted wellness initiatives. In response, rather than administering initiatives only from HR, the company recruited its own employees to be wellness ambassadors, people who want to play an active role in the well-being of their colleagues. “We hope [the wellness ambassadors] reach out to engage and talk about the programs that we have, because sometimes resources can just be resources in your intranet or in your HR platform. So how do we get the word out? By engaging with our employees,” said Alvarine Syiem, the company’s head of total rewards and HR operations.The panelists spoke to the topic “Enhancing Employee Mental Health and Wellness Benefits” at From Day One's January virtual conference (photo by From Day One)Aware that some employees might be unwilling to approach their manager or HR about their needs, Syiem hopes that training up ambassadors among management and the rank-and-file can open more avenues for people to seek the help and resources they need.“You might not have huge programs, you might not have a ton of resources, you might not even have a lot of engagement—but what is important is to get that conversation going,” said Syiem.Interventions for Workers Exposed to ViolenceAt NBCUniversal, Yepes is in the unique position of caring for journalists whose jobs take them to war zones, violent environments, and tragedies. Supporting workers who have been in highly stressful or traumatic work environments requires structured and predetermined touch-points, said Yepes. When they return, the company has mental health checkpoints already installed so no one goes unnoticed. Workers receive outreach at seven days, two weeks, and one month post-return, plus a suite of resources at their disposal. Among them, access to on-site mental healthcare—a talk therapist in the company offices available for sessions during the workday.Yepes said her best advice is to establish processes that are as flexible as the employee needs them to be. “It’s always good to have discipline, but understand that people are unique, so having a portfolio and being flexible on how you offer your resources is best.”Mental Health Support for Working ParentsEveryone is susceptible to mental health problems following the birth or addition of a child to the family, said Corrinne Hobbs, the general manager and VP of employer market at reproductive healthcare provider Ovia Health. Both men and women can experience depression and anxiety, sometimes called perinatal mood and anxiety disorder (PMAD), up to a year after the birth of a child. This can make up a significant part of the workforce: In 2022 in the US, in more than 91% of families with children under age 18, at least one parent was employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.“Many [parents] may not know that they have it,” Hobbs said. People who experience PMAD are “already dealing with the difficulties of being parents, but they also struggle with attention to detail, being present in the moment, and remembering all the steps required in their daily work. Enabling mental health supports that address this are really important.”To care for the parents in your workplace, Hobbs recommended employers take three steps. First, increase the number of screenings available to encourage prevention and early intervention for mental health issues. Second, train managers to get comfortable talking about postpartum needs. And third, invest in digital tools that give workers access to 24/7 care. “Provide an end-to-end women’s health solution,” she said.Small Interventions Along the WayGood mental health encourages productivity. “Leaving conditions untreated can really result in costly emergency room visits, urgent care visits, time away from work,” said Cooper of Talkspace. “We as employers want our employees to be healthy, but also do a good job at work, and all those things work together.”The panelists agreed that incremental, personal interventions early on make a difference in the health of a workforce. “I encourage leaders, managers, employees, to think of the small, everyday thing that you can impact,” said eClerx’s Syiem. If she senses that a member of her team is having a rough day, Syiem encourages them to step away from work for a few hours. If she notices an employee hasn’t taken a vacation day recently, she tells them to. “Even if you don't have plans for a vacation with family, take a day off and just go get your nails done, spend time at the library, or just go catch up with a friend.”Keeping close tabs on the temperature of the team can help prevent burnout and mental health problems. “My aim is prevention,” Syiem said. “Imagine if not just one manager did that, but the entire team. Imagine the impact of it all as an organization.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Keren Dinkin | January 24, 2024

People, Place, Purpose: An Employer’s Role in Employee Mental Health

For Nivati Founder and CEO Amelia Wilcox, the issue of mental health hits close to home. When she discovered that her sixteen-year-old was struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts, she became acquainted with the difficult realities of mental health. “She had to undergo a whole year of intensive treatment outside of our home,” Wilcox said. “This was one of the hardest and most gut wrenching experiences that I have ever had, and it actually triggered some of my own issues with anxiety.” According to the American Psychological Association, 81% of workers consider mental health support an essential factor when looking for a new job. Even college students are looking for colleges with strong mental health support programs. Wilcox approaches the subject of employee mental health with a level of passion and empathy that can only come from someone who knows just how important it is. She spoke about the important topic in a recent thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s January virtual conference.A Brief Timeline of Corporate Mental HealthWilcox started with a simplified timeline of corporate mental health: How it started and how we got to where we are today. It all began in the 1930s with employee assistance programs (EAPs), which were a response to workplace alcoholism. Over time, EAPs became the industry standard for HR to have in place for employees, and they've seen little innovation or change in the last 90 years.Then, during the 2000s, EAPs were considered to be part of mental health support at work. That essentially checked the box for HR, and it was good enough for most companies. In the 2010s, in many offices, mental health benefits took the form of distractions like ping pong tables and video games. Things like onsite massage and nap rooms provided distractions from work to give the brain a break to refresh, and it worked for a while.Then came 2020, when the world was on fire. We learned that mental health is real; it affects everyone, and it needs some serious attention. But people still weren’t quite sure what to do about it. In 2021 and 2022 trends like the great resignation and quiet quitting became prevalent to a workforce that felt failed by their companies. Employees became less connected, less engaged, less appreciated, and ultimately overworked.“I know it’s controversial to talk about it, but what I think is really cool about this phase is that workers really started to revolt against the hustle culture and set their own boundaries,” Wilcox said.The Present and FutureThen came 2023, during which eggs reached upwards of $6 a dozen in different parts across the U.S.. Inflation peaked at over 8%, and employees started adding financial stress to the growing list of mental health challenges they were experiencing. During this time, some forward-thinking companies started to get ahead of quiet quitting by proactively addressing boundaries and culture in the workplace. For the past 90 years, mental health support at work has stayed roughly the same. Before 2020, the focus was mainly on pre-existing and diagnosable conditions. But over the last four years, we’ve seen that focus start to evolve very rapidly. It includes all of us; it’s not just people who have diagnosed mental illnesses—it’s everyone. The Road to RecoverySo, how do we shift work from being a source of burnout and mental health challenges to becoming a source of mental health support? Dr. Thomas Insel, who wrote Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, forwards some powerful methods to reverse the mental health crisis that we’re in the middle of.According to Dr. Insel, the road to recovery comprises three Ps: people, place, and purpose. With those three structures in place, people experiencing mental illness can experience the support and care they deserve. PeopleConnection and belonging are essential for everyone. In the workplace, that means employers have to find ways to foster this positive social interaction, and ensure the company culture is conducive to connection-building. For example, in “Blue Zones,” or areas where people consistently live to 100-years-old, one of the most common components is a strong sense of community connection and belonging. So, not only can this help with morale and employee mental health, but having that connection can help people live longer.PlacePlace is about the environment. It can be virtual or your physical environment in the office. It’s the space employees work, and has to be where they feel physically, emotionally, and psychologically safe. One of the best ways to build psychological safety is to promote vulnerability, leadership needs to be involved in this to have an impact. Leaders should be able to discuss their struggles and what helps them. That allows people to feel safe and start to open up. Purpose(photo from thought leadership spotlight session)All humans need to feel a sense of purpose. In the workplace, this translates to employees knowing what they do matters. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has also defined workplace well-being as one of his top six priorities as surgeon general. His ‘five essentials’ framework aptly illustrates the correlation between the various factors that impact workplace wellbeing.Both the three P’s and the ‘Five Essentials’ tell a very similar narrative: the ultimate goal is to bring the workers’ voice back into the workplace. The bottom line is that the whole organization requires a cultural shift to put this in place and genuinely have a safe and supportive culture for mental health at work, says Wilcox.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Nivati, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Keren's love for words saw her transition from a corporate employee into a freelance writer during the pandemic. After having made her mark as a Top Rated Writer with over 2000 positive reviews in the extremely competitive Upwork space, and having been featured on various magazines and publications, Keren has now moved on to bigger and better with her own digital marketing agency aptly named Epic Owl. When she is not at her desk whipping up compelling narratives and sipping on endless cups of coffee, you can find her curled up with a book, playing with her dog, or pottering about in the garden.

Toby Mohr | January 23, 2024

How to Take a Strategic and Equitable Approach to Worker Well-Being

Dania Alarcon has always had an enthusiasm for wellness and helping others stay healthy. As a fitness instructor, cancer researcher, and leader in pharmaceutical advertising, she has always been focused on the health of her clients.Now as chief medical officer at Wunderman Thompson, Alarcon continues pushing for better health for the clients she works for, while also supporting a healthy workplace for the people she works with.At From Day One’s January virtual conference Alarcon met with Siobhan O’Connor, Atria Institute’s chief content officer, for a fireside chat about working toward a healthier world while balancing workers’ well-being.Health for EquityAt the height of Covid, Wunderman Thompson established the Health4Equity Center of Excellence to fight forms of health inequality rooted in cultural bias.“It happened at a very unique time in our history collectively,” Alarcon said. “2020 represented the height of both the racial injustices that were occurring across the U.S. and other parts of the world, a pandemic that was felt most acutely throughout historically marginalized communities and countries, and a number of other things that compounded the lack of access for health and wellness.”Siobhan O'Connor of the Atria Institute, right, interviewed Dania Alarcon of Wunderman Thompson, left, in a virtual fireside chat (photo by From Day One)Health4Equity focuses on increasing access to healthcare in those communities that historically have been left out by targeting three disease areas: prostate cancers in Black men, bladder cancers in Black women, and maternal health for Black mothers.“There’s no shortage of health inequalities,” Alarcon said. “Our biggest challenge was making the most of this and deciding what to prioritize. One of the things we focused on was not just going deep, but going broad.”A broad approach looks different for each group. Health4Equity campaigned for Black men to get screened for prostate cancer at 40 years old instead of 50 to catch cancer in the early stages. They also connect women with urologists for bladder treatment, providers who are not usually a part of women’s regular healthcare team.Black women in the U.S. are about 3 times more likely to die during pregnancy or delivery than women of other races, according to the CDC. Health4Equity addresses the Black maternal health crisis by connecting Black soon-to-be mothers with licensed doulas for personal care during their pregnancy. Doulas provide personalized support and advice during pregnancy and delivery and they can act as patient advocates to close the racial gap in maternal healthcare.Health4Equity takes direct approaches to support the well-being of their clients. “That’s exactly what the ‘4’ in Health4Equity stands for. It’s a four step strategic approach and process that’s very intentional to help identify those highest priority and need areas and match them with what might have the biggest impact,” Alarcon said.Commitment to Employee Well-beingEmployee well-being isn’t just a set of corporate goals and boundaries. It takes a daily direct commitment to respecting those boundaries, which can be especially difficult while working from home.“It was almost like you were always on 24/7 and don’t know where the separation stops between life, feeding a dog or a child and then going back into my online work to finish up the day,” Alarcon said. “I think that lack of boundaries really took a toll on people.”A direct approach to employee wellness also needs intentional moments of separation for employees to catch up on work and take care of themselves.“We have something called Focus Fridays, where the back half of our Friday afternoon is reserved for catching up on emails, doing actual work because when you’re in meeting after meeting there’s not much opportunity to get things done,” Alarcon said. “So I think just understanding those boundaries, creating those intentional moments of separation, and also being respectful of others’ calendars.”Purpose Plays a Role in WellnessThe adage “If you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life” isn’t entirely true. Work can be tough and days can be hard, even when employees love what they do. But being passionate about the work and finding purpose in it helps keep motivation even when the work is difficult.“As much as that health inequity movement was really tough to acknowledge, it almost renewed the enthusiasm for showing up at work and doing something that I felt brought purpose and meaning to my life and to those who maybe have been ignored in the system for far too long,” Alarcon said. “That’s very motivating, just being in a space where you feel like what you’re doing matters.”When employees are passionate about their work and they receive support and respect for their boundaries, they feel more motivated and can thrive in the workplace.“Workplace well-being is where you feel engaged,” Alarcon said. “Where you feel motivated, where you don’t dread Monday morning on a Sunday night, because you know that there’s exciting things coming in the week ahead.”Toby Mohr is an editorial intern at From Day One and journalism and political science student at University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire.

Mary Pieper | January 22, 2024

Cultivating Well-Being Through Workplace Culture

“Being able to support our employees’ mental health in multiple ways is probably one of the most important things that we can do,” said Judith Harrison, chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for Weber Shandwick. Nearly 75% of American workers are moderately or highly concerned about workplace well-being, according to a recent study.The report also found the same percentage of workers had a similar level of concern about their own emotional well-being or mental health. Harrison and a panel of other leaders spoke on this subject in a session titled “Cultivating Well-Being Through Workplace Culture,” during From Day One’s January virtual conference.Another panelist, Charman Hayes, executive vice president of people and capability technology at MasterCard, told moderator Lydia Dishman that it’s essential for companies to take a holistic approach to their employees’ well-being. She said this approach addresses the mind, body, financial security, and the social aspects of workers’ lives, which encompasses inclusion.“Those four pillars are really important to MasterCard in terms of how we want our employees to be their best selves,” Hayes said. “We listen. We are constantly doing employee pulse surveys to understand what’s on people’s minds.”Kimberly Ardo-Eisenbeis, vice president of HR and recruiting for Allied Universal Security, said that in a post-pandemic world, many workers are focused on their ability to bring their whole selves to work.“Some of that has been mental health-tied, but some of it is just being free from the burdens of financial stressors, environmental stressors, and the ability to find the things that are important to them,” she said.Allied is focused on creating an environment where employees feel comfortable taking advantage of resources offered by the company, whether it is mental health or financial assistance, says Ardo-Eisenbeis.“It really comes down to feeling that there’s a safe place, removing the shame of asking for help, removing the risk of being seen as less than in anybody’s eyes,” she said.Flexibility in the WorkplaceAlicia Mandel, chief human resources officer at Garten, said for her the most important thing for her personal well-being is flexibility.“During Covid everybody was very flexible. And then it seemed that flexibility went out the door suddenly. So, my personal thing is, how do we create a workplace that is still flexible enough to give people the peace of mind that they need and still perform?”Mandel said Garten is committed to maintaining a fully remote workforce even after the pandemic to give employees some flexibility. However, working from home can cause workers to feel isolated and lonely. Therefore, the company tries to bring people together once a quarter “to give them a chance to break bread together, to go play a game or do a thing.”Lydia Dishman of Fast Company moderated the panel among speakers Judith Harrison, Kimberly Eisenbeis, Charman Hayes, and Alicia Mandel (photo by From Day One)Hayes said as a mother of two school-age children, “what really thrills me is that I have flexibility through MasterCard. I’m able to come into our tech hubs around the world to work a few days a week and also work remotely where I need to.”This flexibility also allows Hayes to maintain a healthy lifestyle. For her, this includes having time to walk, go to the gym, prepare nutritious meals, and being centered mentally.“And then the last thing that’s extremely important to me has kept me through the past few years in my happy and healthy mantra is committing to the community,” Hayes said. “I’ve been able to do volunteer days with my family, bringing my children along to several nonprofit agencies in New York City to help and contribute to the community.”Providing Financial Security for WorkersTwo years ago, MasterCard conducted a study to see how employees felt about the rewards and benefits packages the company offered and did a listening tour to get feedback.“After that listening tour, we had a very good understanding of what our employees wanted, more of what they appreciated, what they valued,” Hayes said. “And that gave birth to our approach to financial wellness and financial fitness.”Workers not only want a competitive base and bonus pay, but also the ability to save for retirement and other goals, such as buying a house or sending their children to college, according to Hayes. She noted MasterCard offers a retirement plan with a 10% employer match and one-on-one financial consulting through an outside vendor.“What I appreciate most about the benefit investing is that it’s not bespoke to any one scenario,” Hayes said. “We recognize that colleagues have very different scenarios and are on very different journeys with different goals and objectives.”The Role of DEIThere’s been a recent pushback against DEI policies and initiatives in workplaces, but DEI is essential, says Harrison.“DEI covers the waterfront in terms of well-being, creating a connected community in which people are encouraged to bring their authentic selves to work, and encouraging others to understand who they are,” she said.The sponsorship program at Weber Shandwick, in which senior leadership mentors promising employees, “has been a game-changer for us,” Harrison said. “There’s nothing like giving underrepresented people the opportunity to connect with executives that they would never have met in any other way.”Mary Pieper is a freelance reporter based in Mason City, Iowa.

Katie Chambers | January 17, 2024

Failing Well: How Your Company Can Provide Room for Failures That Foster Success

Tennis legend Billie Jean King once said, “For me, losing a tennis match isn’t failure, it’s research.” Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, shares this quote in her latest book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, which won the “Best Business Book of the Year Award” from the Financial Times. The book illustrates how we and our organizations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. It’s the key to pursuing smart risks and preventing avoidable harm.At From Day One’s January monthly conference, which focused on making a fresh commitment to a culture of well-being in the workplace, Edmondson shared specific strategies for how organizations can benefit from failure, a skill that is becoming more and more important in today’s business environment. “In turbulent times, failure is even more likely. And in more turbulent times, innovation and problem solving are more important than ever, and they bring the risk of failure.” While it’s easy enough to recognize this intellectually, Edmondson said, “being able to put into practice the truth of those behaviors is something else altogether.”Good vs. Bad Failure“A good failure is the undesired result of a thoughtful experiment,” Edmondson said. That experiment, to be considered a “good failure,” should meet four criteria:It’s in genuinely new territory–it really has never been tried before. It should be as small in scale as possible. It should be in pursuit of a specific goal, “not just playing around with resources,” Edmondson said.And thanks to some thoughtful research, you should already have a sense that the experiment may work.A “bad failure,” Edmondson posits, happens when you violate any one of those four criteria. For example, she shared, “You roll out an uncertain product in your entire market, rather than pilot testing it somewhere smaller. So even something that’s potentially good violates the size criterion, and then isn’t so good.”Simple failures can be forgetting to check a basic safety feature, but there are complex failures as well: “The multi-causal, ‘perfect storm’ kinds of failures that arise when a variety of things come together in just the wrong way, any one of which, on its own, wouldn’t have caused the failure.” The recent debacle with the door plugs on Boeing 737s, she says, is a perfect example.Pivoting to a Productive FailureModerator Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Business Review, posited a scenario that many modern business leaders are all too familiar with. “You have a strategy that’s based on a big product rollout that takes years to develop. And then near launch, the CEO decides this is not the right approach, and this massive project with all these people attached to it is suddenly stopped. How do you handle the disappointment? How do you make this a productive failure?” he asked.Amy Edmondson spoke about her book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well in conversation with Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Business Review (photo by From Day One)Edmondson views this instance as an intelligent failure, suggesting that reframing it as a learning opportunity and acknowledging the effort invested can transform it into a productive experience. “You do it explicitly out in the open. You frame it as a really worthy effort that wasn’t able to achieve what you had hoped it would achieve,” she said.Some companies even celebrate failures. For example, in the pharmaceutical space, the vast majority of projects fail. It’s just the nature of the scientific experimental process. Eli Lilly, Edmondson says, has parties at the end of failed clinical trials to still celebrate its achievements. This achieves three goals: it satisfies the need for recognition, potentially prevents the same failure from recurring, and it makes the team more likely to end a failing experiment in a timely and cost effective way, knowing that there will still be some sort of positive outcome.At Takeda they don’t celebrate failure, that’s a bridge too far for their traditional Japanese culture, Edmondson says. But they do celebrate the pivot. “The difference is that the failure is the end, it's looking back, whereas the pivot is looking forward. Same ritual, different language,” she said. “For their culture, they are celebrating the fact that they worked hard.”Learning From and Admitting to Failure“Our temptation is very strong to gloss over it. No one wants to dwell on a failure,” Edmondson said. But the formal post-mortem process is important. Rather than placing blame on any one individual or entity, companies should approach it simply, briefly, and effectively: What happened? This is essential especially for multi-dimensional projects with potentially conflicting viewpoints and experiences.“Rather than a lengthy research project, this should be a quick compiling of the narrative so that we understand it better and resist the temptation to just say, ‘we'll try harder next time’ or ‘it wasn’t our fault, it was bad luck,’” Edmondson said. Organizations should walk away with key learnings as to what went wrong and how to improve on that process in the future.It can sometimes be challenging for certain individuals to admit to failure. But that’s exactly why it helps to have a ritualized process for acknowledging and addressing it. “If this is what we do around here, they’ll want to play the same sport,” Edmondson said. Organizations should build trust with their employees that there is a safe environment for acknowledging fault. “We are fallible human beings, and we have to be fine with that,” she said. “We are better team members when we are fine with that.”Building Psychological SafetyHow you handle failure as an organization should be a part of an overall strategy for building an environment of psychological safety. “The most important thing is to early and often call attention to the attributes and aspirations of the work that involves unfamiliar territory, stretches, or challenges,” Edmondson said. “We’re sending the intellectual message that ‘we need you, we need your voice and we need you to speak up if we’re to do well on these ambitious goals.’”Companies should also encourage a culture that welcomes inquiry. “The more facile we get at asking good questions, the kinds that give the other person a clear signal that we really want to hear from them, the more we’re creating psychological safety for speaking up,” Edmondson said. The safer employees feel communicating with leadership teams, the more likely they are to address failures early and often–turning them into opportunities for learning and growth.Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

Feature

DEI Starts Over: How It Needs to Adapt to Survive the Battles of 2024

When Elon Musk and other headstrong billionaires start using you as a punching bag, it might be a smart time to duck. In his latest tirade against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Musk attributed the door plug blowing off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet earlier this month to the aviation industry’s efforts to diversify their workforces. “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Citing no evidence, Musk’s claim echoed the conspiracy theory asserting that DEI led to last year’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which proved to have no basis in fact. While corporate America proudly carried the banner of DEI in recent years, 2024 is shaping up as the year in which many companies will be lowering the profile of their efforts and changing the approach of their programs. Recognizing that the term DEI has become another cudgel in the culture wars, joining “wokeness” and ESG, corporate leaders are responding to a wave of legal and political challenges. Among them: The Supreme Court is considering a case that could inspire a raft of regulatory complaints against DEI programs, charging them with reverse discrimination; conservative billionaires are funding a wave of lawsuits against such programs; and red-state politicians are threatening to follow the example of Florida and Texas by passing new laws threatening to limit the scope of DEI. “They’re starting with letters, but I don’t think that they’re bluffs,” said Zamir Ben-Dan, a Temple University assistant professor of law. “It’s going to be a problem,” he told the AP. “It’s going to lead to a decline in racial diversity in the workforces.”Corporate America doesn’t want that to happen. In a survey late last year by the Conference Board, none of the 194 chief HR officers said they plan to scale back DEI initiatives, programs, and policies; 63% said they plan to attract a more diverse workforce. Employers say that an embrace of diversity and inclusion has become an important corporate value when it comes to recruiting the workers they need, especially younger ones who tend to favor diversity. As Fortune put it, “DEI Is Dead. Long Live DEI.” Yet companies are looking for ways to step away from the term “DEI” as well as aspects of programs that could make them legally vulnerable. “Companies are really starting to look at other ways to do the work without saying that they’re doing the work,” Cinnamon Clark, cofounder of Goodwork Sustainability, a DEI consulting firm, told Axios. Among the pressures and the responses that will characterize the evolution of DEI this year:The Supreme Court’s Other Shoe to DropOnly a day after releasing its historic decision last year to outlaw affirmative action in higher education, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could have a parallel impact on DEI programs among corporate and government employers. In Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, a police sergeant alleges that she was transferred out of her prestigious job because of her gender, thus violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination according to race, gender, and other protected characteristics. Lower courts have upheld the city’s argument that Muldrow failed to demonstrate that the transfer amounted to an “adverse employment action” that caused material harm.The Biden Administration has supported Muldrow’s case because it could enable more people to file discrimination cases with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], yet a broad interpretation of Title VII by the Supreme Court, relaxing the need to prove harm, could also “open the door to a flood of reverse discrimination claims against certain workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs–such as mentoring and training programs for underrepresented groups–that ordinarily would not survive in court,” the Washington Post reported. “Such complaints have become more common since the Supreme Court overturned race-conscious college admissions in June.”Well-Funded Legal ChallengesEdward Blum (pronounced “bloom”), a white, 73-year-old former stockbroker, has made it his life’s work for more than three decades to stamp out affirmative action. He does not have a law degree, but he spends his day planning lawsuits to challenge affirmative action in the Supreme Court, helping to persuade the court to hear eight cases. Most recently, in June, he was in large part responsible for bringing the case that led to the court’s decision to outlaw affirmative action in higher education (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College).Since then, he has been suing elite law firms over their DEI language. Many firms have yielded and made changes to avoid litigation. While Blum told Bloomberg Law that he’s done suing law firms–“There’s nothing left for us to do in that space,” he said–legal experts are watching where he’ll turn next. “Well, I think employment is one area that I think will garner greater attention, not just from me, but from other organizations, other legal policy foundations,” he told the New York Times. “I also think that some of the things that we associate with higher education–internships, scholarships, certain research grants–those need to be revisited if they have been race-exclusive.” One group that Blum founded, the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER), filed a lawsuit last August against Fearless Fund, “an Atlanta-based venture capital firm run by two Black women, alleging that the fund is engaging in racial discrimination by running a grant program exclusively for early-stage companies owned by Black women,” the Washington Post reported.While Blum has often been portrayed as a one-man-band, challenging major institutions on his own, a study by the Democratic Policy & Communications Committee, produced by seven prominent Democratic senators, called Blum’s various organizations “fronts for corporate mega-donors seeking to change the law through the courts.” In particular, the report cited Students for Fair Admissions as “funded primarily through the Koch [Brothers] operation’s shadowy dark-money operation DonorsTrust, known as the ‘dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.’” Blum has a fellow traveler in Stephen Miller, the arch-conservative former Trump Administration advisor best known for his hard line on immigration issues. Miller has been zealously targeting corporate DEI programs through his well-funded group America First Legal. Since 2022, his group has filed 25 complaints against companies with the EEOC. Miller’s organization has notched few legal victories, but that may not be the point. More than 85% of the AFL’s budget went to advertising, while only 4% was spent on legal services, the Daily Beast reported. Even so, “at least six major U.S. companies including JPMorgan Chase have modified policies meant to boost racial and ethnic representation that conservative groups threatened to sue over,” a Reuters review of corporate statements found.How Corporate Employers Can RespondWhile corporate leaders in the Conference Board survey said they don’t intend to pull back on DEI, the combination of corporate austerity and high-profile backlash is surely depleting the resources available to DEI. In a report last October, Forrester, a research and advisory company, found “the percentage of companies that funded a DEI function with an endorsed strategy and personnel dropped from 33% in 2022 to 27% in 2023; we predict that this number will fall to 20% by the end of 2024 in the wake of cuts that disproportionately affect DEI teams. As a result, too many companies will default to ‘check the box’ efforts such as heritage days, leading to performative–rather than substantive–DEI programs.”Organizations that are still motivated to maintain their commitment the principles of DEI will need to adapt their approach. “As the law inevitably evolves in a more conservative direction, the new legal standards will be absorbed into the field of DEI, transforming it as an enterprise. While this shift will occur organically, smart organizations can avoid a lot of pain and expense by thinking about how to adapt in a more intentional way,” reports Harvard Business Review. In their HBR story, Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, lawyers at New York University and authors of Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice, identify three aspects that can make a DEI program legally risky: it confers a preference for some individuals over others, the preference is given to member of a legally protected group under Title VII, and the preference relates to a palpable benefit, like a job, promotion, or L&D opportunities.Given those criteria, write Yoshino and Glasgow, the specifically risky programs include hiring quotas, tiebreaker decision-making for hiring and promotions based on identity; group-specific internships and fellowships; and tying manager compensation to diversity goals. While all of those measures may be designed to compensate for systemic biases, “it is clear that the conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court does not agree with such a worldview.”Reshaping Programs as Well as the LanguageTo avoid charges of reverse discrimination, employers can make several changes to existing plans. Among other things, they can make DEI initiative more identity-neutral yet still designed to remove bias, like making employee-resource groups and other affinity groups open to all, rather than restricted based on identity. “These approaches do not ‘lift’ certain groups above others, but ‘level’ the playing field for everybody,” write Yoshino and Glasgow.The language, too, is shifting, with more focus on the “inclusion” aspect of DEI, as well as “belonging” and “well-being.” Reported the Post, “While some demographic-specific efforts will probably remain, overall, corporate DEI is likely to shift and focus more on ‘universal’ efforts to make recruiting, hiring and retention more successful for everyone.” Even as they adjust to the risk of being sued for reverse discrimination, employers have to make sure they don’t over-correct in the opposite direction. “Getting sued for a regular discrimination claim from someone who belongs to an underrepresented identity in the workplace is still more common than a reverse discrimination claim from a white person,” reports Thomson Reuters. Companies shouldn’t abandon DEI initiatives that help to make those from underrepresented backgrounds feel more welcome or offer more opportunities to succeed, NYU’s Glasgow told Reuters, “because doing so could create an environment that is more hostile and unwelcoming to people who belong to these marginalized groups.” For example, he said, eliminating mentorship or sponsorship opportunities that were helping more women advance through an organization might lead to a more one-dimensional leadership team–a prospective setback to decades of progress.Andrea Sachs, a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, began her career as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., at the National Labor Relations Board, then spent nearly 30 years in New York City as a reporter at Time magazine. (Featured photo by Violeta Stoimenova/iStock by Getty Images)

Andrea Sachs | January 17, 2024

Erin Behrens | January 12, 2024

Get It Together Today: The Guide for a Better Tomorrow

In the midst of planning her wedding, Abby Schneiderman reveled in the resources at her fingertips, transforming the daunting tasks into an exciting journey towards her big day. Websites, guides, and videos gave her all the dos and don’ts and provided ample space for organization and management. But she found herself thinking: what’s next? Where are the resources to guide her through the rest of those big life moments?She found information for many life stages, from having kids, to home buying, to retirement planning. But in her research, she discovered that these resources end at retirement. Who’s supporting people with what comes next? While not everyone gets married or has children, everyone encounters aging, estate planning, and death. So, why is there a gap in support? One reason may be that most people would rather not think about these later stages, but postponing such considerations can leave a person’s survivors in a difficult spot. Shocked by the lack of coverage, Schneiderman and business partner Adam Seifer co-founded Everplans, the first modern consumer brand in life and legacy planning.From Day One interviewed Abby Schneiderman, co-founder and co-CEO of Everplans (company photo)Schneiderman and Seifer recognized that the first step was to publish helpful planning advice and evaluate if there was an audience actively seeking it. “We started writing content. We wrote 500 original articles on everything like ‘How do you write a will?’ to ‘How do you name a power of attorney?’ to ‘What do you wear to a funeral?’” Schneiderman told From Day One. They posted the content as a blog and were inundated with readers. “This told us that not only was there a need for the content and the resources that we were putting out there, but that there was just a huge gap out there that nobody was helping people with,” she said.Everplans evolved into a digital vault for storing, organizing, and updating all of the important plans and documents to guide the later stages of life–and afterwards. Shortly after launching, Schneiderman experienced a tragedy that changed the trajectory of everything. Her 51-year-old brother was killed in a car accident. He had life insurance, but Schneiderman’s family struggled to access his accounts, get policies and documents in place, and ultimately, make the decisions no one wants to make on behalf of their loved ones. The pain of losing her brother complicated the hardship of making these difficult decisions.This tragedy led to the realization that in order to be effective, Everplans needed to reach people before they even started thinking about life and legacy planning. All too often people just begin planning when it’s overdue. “That’s my story, but everyone has a story,” Schneiderman said. And a common theme in these stories is disorganization: our stuff is everywhere.The average person has hundreds of online accounts to keep track of, on top of sticky notes, notebooks, desk drawers, and other means of storing important information. “And when the time does come, family members should not have to go searching around frantically in the middle of a fog having to find important information,” said Schneiderman.“Our mission is to help people get organized for themselves today, so that they can sleep better at night. In the event that their families need it, they have access to all the important information,” said Schneiderman. Everplans helps people organize, store, and securely share wills, life insurance policies, health care directives, online passwords, and even the small but important things like family recipes. “We cover all aspects of life, whether they be everyday practical pieces of information that you want to make sure don’t get lost, or extremely critical information that family members need to have access to.”One of Schneiderman’s key goals is making life and legacy planning accessible to everyone, even folks who tend to be put off by legal, healthcare, and technological complexities. Everplans gives people the toolkits to make informed decisions and make these complicated topics less overwhelming. In addition to all of the content on their website, Schneiderman and Seifer co-authored In Case You Get Hit by a Bus: How to Organize Your Life Now for When You’re Not Around Later and started a podcast to give people the resources they need in a bite-sized, colloquial way.The company’s founders see their platform as a great equalizer. “Everplans is really leveling the playing field for employees who may not have access to financial planners, accountants, or estate attorneys. It’s inherently educating all employees on the benefits of getting organized. The simple interface, easy-to-use platform, resources, and guidance engine will help get you organized for your family,” said Schneiderman. Everplans was available initially in a retail version as well as through financial services organizations. More recently, the platform became available as a benefit for employers to offer their workers.This inclusive approach not only helps Everplans’ customers, but also appeals to employers interested in offering Everplans as an addition to their total-rewards programs. Schneiderman pointed to the recent development of a management toolkit, which serves as a “resource for employers, specifically leaders in the organization, on how to have conversations with employees during challenging or pivotal moments.” Many well-intentioned managers lack the necessary guidance to support their employees and navigate tough conversations about life-changing events. Companies run the risk of losing employees when support feels inauthentic. The management toolkit provides employers with culturally relevant guidance to authentically support their employees.The benefits to employers don’t stop there, Schneiderman says. In a study conducted last year with 1,000 full-time U.S. employees, “we found a direct relationship between productivity and organization,” she said. “When my desk is messy, I’m less productive or when my closet is a mess, I’m frustrated. But also, when you don’t know where vital information is, you are more concerned and you’re less productive–there is this real relationship there.”By getting people organized, Everplans has a direct impact on productivity, the company asserts. People that are more productive or less stressed generally feel a greater sense of control about their lives. “Over time, as more and more people started using Everplans, we realized the site wasn’t about death–it was about life. Because getting organized lets you live to the fullest, knowing you’re prepared for anything, having done your very best for those you love.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Everplans, for supporting this sponsor spotlight.Erin Behrens is an associate editor at From Day One.

Cynthia Barnes | January 10, 2024

Strategies for Upholding and Rewriting Values in a Corporate Merger

Integrating two separate corporate cultures into one during a merger is essential for success–but what’s the best way to achieve that? In the opening fireside chat at From Day One conference in Denver, Denver Post reporter Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton sat down with Peter Leckemby, head of talent management at DISH Network, to discuss his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities that come with a merger.Leckemby was getting his degree in criminology when he started a job at The Home Depot “for college beer money.” His role led him into management, and he stayed with the company for 16 years. He quickly learned how much he enjoyed leadership development, went on to earn a coaching certification, and then joined DISH as a leadership development specialist.“It’s been an interesting year,” said Leckemby of 2023. “Back in February, we were, like a lot of big tech companies, a victim of a cyber attack. That started the year off in the spirit of adventure, which is one of our core values, but not the kind of adventure you want to be on. It was a challenge. We were reeling a little bit, and we had a lot of big goals to hit this year,” he said.Leckemby discussed some of their goals and reflected on their achievements for the year, including “providing coverage on our network to 70% of the population.” Then right on the heels of that in late summer, “we announced that we are merging with our sister company, EchoStar,” he said. They also launched Boost Infinite, their first postpaid network offering.Chairman and DISH co-founder Charlie Ergen spun off satellite operator EchoStar from DISH in 2008, but remained in charge of both companies. Then on December 7th, after this chat, the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger, reuniting Ergen’s telecom empire.Pete Leckemby, DISH Network's head of talent management was interviewed in the fireside chatEven with common ownership, the merger will prove a challenge. “We have similar cultures, but different values as they’re written out. The values at DISH began as “Pride, Adventure, and Winning,” said Leckemby. They went on to add “Curiosity” to the mix, and are working through that.“For us, it’s about going back to what the values are as they’re lived out, and what is important to our team members. I like to think that curiosity, pride, adventure, and winning will carry over, because we have that anchored to all of our talent management practices.” As they go through the merger, they’re making sure they do the right thing for team members, he says. The employees are top of mind and the focus of all the efforts in place.Building trust with team members during the upheaval caused by a merger can be an ongoing challenge. “We haven’t always done this right,” said Leckenby. But this year they launched a new listening strategy to get better. The first step is to listen to employees and understand what’s important to them. What are they stressed about? What are their anxieties? What are their pain points? Listen, and then be clear and transparent about the decisions, says Leckemby.“Our leadership team has done a really good job of being more transparent and having more upfront communications with all team meetings, announcements, and just being very upfront about ‘here's what we know, here’s what we don't know,’” he said.In spite of the challenges, Leckemby has found great opportunities in the changes presented by a corporate merger. “The merger has presented a tremendous learning opportunity, where you really find out how resilient your employees are. In recognizing that resilience and tenacity, there has been a lot of positivity in the workforce and excitement for the future. People are jumping in, they’re curious, they want to learn. So we’re seeing our values show up a lot throughout the process, and that will carry us into the future.”Cynthia Barnes has written about everything from art to zebras from more than 30 countries. She currently calls Denver home.

Matthew Koehler | January 09, 2024

The Future of Talent Acquisition: Perfecting the Human Experience in the Age of AI

Gen Z will make up the majority of the workforce by 2030, and they’re a bit of an oddity in the hiring process. They want their transition from college to career to contain a bit of the old, like internships, work experience, and completed classes but especially the new, like quick and easy online applications. “What we’re seeing is that the ease of modern applications and technology is really contributing to this high volume of applications,” said Kate Beckman, executive manager of RippleMatch. “Students today are taking advantage of the way that technology is designed for volume without necessarily taking into account what happens after that application is submitted.”RippleMatch is a job matching AI technology and the brainchild of Andrew Myers, founder and CEO, who experienced his own turbulent entry into the job market after college. Beckman and Myers joined freelance journalist, and former managing editor of CNN Business, Kelly Bourdet, for a From Day One webinar. The platform started in Myers’ dorm and was “created to make life easy on companies so they can provide really strong candidate experiences and access the right candidates, regardless of race, background, or where the candidates come from.”Eliminating Bias and Streamlining the Hiring Process“We’ve been conducting a lot of research on Gen Z through the years, but new data really shows that the next generation of candidates are influencing the recruitment process for everyone,” Beckman said. She provided some key insights and research to head the conversation on how AI can perfect the human experience in talent acquisition.According to Beckman’s research for RippleMatch:50% of students said they'll submit over 100 applications (just this past autumn), a third of those will submit closer to 200.More than two thirds believe companies should respond to them within 5-7 days.72% of candidates say they would feel frustrated if they took the time to file an application and never heard anything back. They’d prefer an impersonal rejection notification over nothing at all. Gen Z job seekers expect no more than four weeks to get a response on a job, even if it's a rejection. About 70% say if they’ve gone through some kind of interview process that not hearing back lends to a negative experience.Lack of information on what to expect going forward is another contributing factor to a negative application process.A lack of diversity amongst interviewers is another factor that weighs on the minds of job seekers. Black and Hispanic women select that lack of diversity among interviewers is the number two factor that will contribute to a negative experience interviewing. The biggest hurdle for AI in talent acquisition is not reproducing the bias of their human creators as early platforms did. Myers says the goal and success of modern AI is to fix the mistakes of the past.Previously, recruiters would focus on the same top schools for candidates, which exacerbated biases. The same was, and still is, done in corporate America with diversity recruiting. Recruiters end up at the same HBCUs or HSIs, but neglect other talent pools.“There are incredible HBCUs and HSIs all over the country. But if we’re speaking from a representation perspective for Black or Latine candidates, many of those candidates don’t go to HBCUs or HSIs," Myers said.But as other From Day One panel experts have discussed, without proper monitoring, AI will reinforce human biases. To better train bias out of the AI recruitment process, Myers says you have to focus on outcomes, not intentions.Moderator Kelly Bourdet spoke with Andrew Myers and Kate Beckman of RippleMatch at the From Day One webinar (photo by From Day One)“This is a really new space. And even the regulators are having to learn how to do this really thoughtfully on the fly,” Myers said. The technology is there. “There just hasn’t been a very AI-focused diversity company that’s really existed on a massive scale before.”One of the regulators Myers referenced is a New York law seeking to regulate how companies use AI in the hiring process. The law requires employers to have annual third-party 'bias audits' to show that the AI technology they use is free of racist or sexist bias, according to reporting from Axios.However, as Beckman points out, modern AI tools are helping companies move beyond academic prestige, “which inhibits representation and diversity” by pushing them to “expand their reach and sort through those candidates in a more efficient manner.”Efficiency, though, has created an arms race of submitting applications where neither the candidate nor the employer wins. To avoid this, RippleMatch sends job seekers opportunities that truly fit their skills and qualifications. They quickly send a rejection if they’re not a fit for the role, or help companies move forward quickly if they are, Beckman says.“The beauty of AI is you can instantly tell that probably 50-75% of candidates don’t meet a basic qualification for a role,” Myers said. “We sometimes picture AI being this black box, doing all these weird scores. But the reality is, AI can be really transparent as to why a candidate isn’t qualified.”To accurately and efficiently match candidates, RippleMatch does two things. On the company side, they figure out what’s missing from their talent pipeline. On the candidate side, instead of getting “all these messages that feel a lot like spam,” Myers says they’re getting sent opportunities directly related to their skills. “If you’re getting this opportunity, it means you’re really qualified. The company’s missing a candidate like you, and you should certainly pay attention to the opportunity.”Beckman says that with Gen Z, a cohort that’s just entering the workforce and may not have a lot of experience, RippleMatch can point them in the right direction, or towards jobs they didn’t know existed. “If you’re at a career fair, you go to the most recognizable companies. So many companies out there offer amazing pay and awesome culture, and candidates just aren’t discovering them organically. But this technology automates that career discovery process."Applying for Jobs and Starting a New OneWhat are the challenges RippleMatch sees going forward? Balance and nobility.Beckman points to the convenience AI lends to the application process, especially for Gen Z, but says a balance must be struck between using the technology to enhance career discovery and starting a job, not just endlessly applying for hundreds of jobs.“Submitting 200 applications because you just have to click a button instead of considering, is this an organization I want to work for? Am I invested in what this company is doing? Am I excited about this job description?” Myers said.Myers sees a noble cause in connecting people to the right jobs but touched on the apprehension and risk in AI. “I think being in the TA space, especially early career, is incredibly noble. Connecting people with the right jobs is a really meaningful thing to do. Jobs have such an impact on people’s identities, their livelihood, and on their families.”“My biggest push on AI in general is, if this is something that you’re passionate about, don't avoid it because you have some concerns. Engage in how we can design the course of this technology in a way that’s actually really good for humanity and for the values that you care about," Myers said.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, RippleMatch, for sponsoring this webinar. Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

Wanly Chen | January 05, 2024

Evolving Workforce Expectations: Key Areas for Leaders to Focus on in 2024

With the start of the new year, leaders are reflecting on a past year dominated by conversations about return-to-office and AI. Businesses also faced challenges like appealing to a new generation of workers and including diversity and inclusion practices, all while trying to meet their bottom line.Where did they succeed? What could they improve on in 2024? These are the types of questions leaders discussed at From Day One’s December virtual conference, in a panel conversation moderated by Steve Koepp, From Day One’s chief content officer. The leaders shared what they learning in 2023 and what they’ve planned for 2024. Among the highlights:Out With the Old, in With New ApproachesWith a mixture of vague expectations and a lack of appealing reasons for returning to traditional office hours, the transition has been a challenge for leaders to tackle since the end of the pandemic. However, 90% of companies express a plan to create a formal return-to-office policy by the end of 2024, suggesting that RTO conversations will still be a dominant theme in the new year.Leadership’s approach to this conversation needs to be different, said Khalil Smith, VP of inclusion, diversity, and engagement at Akamai Technologies. To get employees’ buy-in, leaders need to set their expectations clearly from the beginning and show the value proposition of well-spent office time.“Ambiguity creates a lot of tension and a lot of frustration for folks. We need to think about things like how do we stay connected and continue to invest in our culture?” Smith said. “Every organization needs to choose the right path for themselves but they need to be incredibly articulate, unapologetic, and unambiguous about what they're doing and why.”Setting clear expectations is only one part of the equation, said Paul Rubenstein, chief customer officer at software company Visier. Leaders need to model those behaviors for employees to follow as well to get their full support.“There’s nothing worse than coming to the office to find no one else there. The value proposition of coming to that space has to be there and leaders have to be there,” Rubenstein said. “People follow leadership behaviors so if they see dissonance in what they say everyone should do and what leaders actually do, you’re done.”Creating Better Pathways to LeadershipMore women have moved into high-ranking executive jobs over the past few years. McKinsey’s 2023 Women in the Workplace report showed a positive growth of women in C-suite positions from 17% to 28% since 2015. But while overall women’s representation increased, women of color continue to be underrepresented in leadership roles.This can be an alarming issue for Generation Z, who are set to be the most diverse workforce, said Giselle Battley, global head of early career talent at real-estate company JLL.“If Gen Z is looking up and not seeing themselves in their immediate leadership, that’s an issue,” Battley said. “Leaders need to understand the landscape and know they are on the front lines driving the culture and the success, especially for those underrepresented members of your team.”To support employees from underrepresented demographics, leaders, especially middle managers, need to provide their teams with the proper tools, Battley said.“I can’t tell you how many times people get promoted and they’re never trained formally on DEI and they’re not given the tools to be effective,” Battley said. “Companies need to give them the tools to have that awareness to understand they are leading the charge to create this culture and change.”The full panel of speakers included, top row from left: moderator Steve Koepp of From Day One, Paul Rubenstein of Visier, and Mekayla Castro of Praxis Labs. Bottom row: Khalil Smith of Akamai, Kenya Jacobs Davis of Trane Technologies, and Giselle Battley of JLL (photo by From Day One)From championing their employees to providing mentorship and support, leaders are instrumental in supporting employees’ development into leadership roles. Kenya Jacobs Davis, HR leader of manufacturing company Trane Technologies, explained how providing key opportunities to employees not only demonstrates trust but can be pivotal in their overall growth.“One of the most powerful things that I’ve had happen over the last couple of years is not having someone speak for me, but sending me in their place,” Davis said. “Let’s not just talk about trust in terms of ‘I trust this person on my team, I know they’re capable,’ but demonstrating that trust by saying ‘You go instead of me.’ So when we talk about trust, it’s really important that you also model it when you have that opportunity.”Building Up Employees for Success, Individually and CollectivelyAccording to a Glassdoor poll, 76% of employees said they value a diverse workforce, and inclusive leadership leads the forefront of encouraging DEI in the workplace.To do so, leaders need to nurture a strong one-on-one relationship with their employees to understand them, said Mekayla Castro, head of curriculum at immersive learning and development company Praxis Labs.“To celebrate someone for their uniqueness, leaders need to have a strong one-to-one relationship with them.” Castro said. “Managers need to reflect on that dynamic they have with individuals and commit to understanding needs, motivations, expectations and goals that people have so they can then support them more equitably and inclusively,”From there, leaders need to cultivate a sense of belonging with employees as well. Castro said engaging employees in team-building activities and exercises can help build interpersonal connectedness at a team level and increase overall employee engagement.“Employees want to feel like they are part of a larger group,” Castro said. “Establishing a team identity or shared mental models can be helpful to build that high-quality connection at the team level.”Wanly Chen is a writer and poet based in New York City.