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Emily Nonko | August 25, 2021

Why Better Data Can Help Parents Make Tough Decisions

This fall, schools will reopen their doors in an uncertain new stage of the pandemic, as the Delta variant poses new questions and potential risks. For parents, navigating yet another unknown can be daunting. That’s why Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University and writer of data-driven books on pregnancy and parenting, advocates bringing some business thinking into your household. “It’s not about your baby needing a briefcase, or using spreadsheets to optimize or make your kid do more stuff,” she said. “The piece I really want to pull on is the deliberate, intentional decision-making, which a lot of times, in our families, leads us to do less instead of doing more,” said Oster, who this month published The Family Firm: A Data-driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, the third installment in her ParentData series. Oster joined Bryan Walsh, the Future Correspondent for Axios, for a one-on-one conversation at From Day One’s August virtual conference, “Learning From a Crisis About What Working Parents Need.” Oster has grown in notoriety over the course of the pandemic, especially following an opinion piece in July 2020 suggesting that schools and child care centers might be able to reopen safely. Some parents religiously follow her work, while others–including some teachers, epidemiologists and labor activists–have pointed out that she is not an infectious-disease expert or public-education professional. As Walsh put it, “you were willing to follow the data even if it meant going against the generally-accepted beliefs about certain practices,” he said, mentioning her earlier book that challenged some conventional pregnancy rules. Replied Oster: “All you can do, in that situation, is try to be honest, try and be right, and try to be helpful to push forward conversation and understanding. This year has been more complicated for those things than almost anything else I’ve done.” Speaking on parenthood at From Day One's virtual conference: moderator Bryan Walsh of Axios, left, and Emily Oster, bestselling author of the ParentData book series (Image by From Day One) It’s clear the pandemic–and its devastating effect on working moms–has deeply informed Oster’s data-driven work and will continue to do so. During the discussion, she used the return-to-school dilemma as an example of the importance in families to carefully weigh all their choices. The Family Firm provides a framework to do so: the four Fs. “The first F is to frame the question, to have two or three concrete options,” she explained. Instead of just weighing whether to send your child to school or not, you want to flesh out the options you’ll have if you decide not to send them. That’s followed by “fact find–an overarching step in which you gather all the information you need in one place,” Oster said. For the Covid situation, you might consider the risk level of Delta, the types of safety protocols local schools are taking, or the characteristics of alternative learning choices. The third step is making the final decision–as opposed to dragging the process out indefinitely. The fourth is following up. “In almost all of these choices, we could have the opportunity to rethink them,” Oster said. “While we’re making the decision, we want to have a plan to re-make it or re-visit it in some way.” While the uncertain future of the pandemic makes it difficult to set a follow-up for Covid-related plans, Oster pointed out that most decisions have an obvious follow-up time. “You choose a school for your kid, the obvious time to follow up is in the next school year,” she said. Other decisions, like buying your child a phone, should include a built-in “trial period” that establishes a follow-up ahead of time. An unexpected lesson of the pandemic, Oster said, was that families staying at home together have an opportunity to make new, intentional decisions about the future, rather than simply returning to the way things used to be. “It is a moment to say, we don’t need to re-introduce everything we were doing in 2019,” she said. “And if you really liked having a weekend day that was free to go to the beach, is there a reason you couldn’t retain that?” The pandemic also forced employers to acknowledge the flexibility needs of working parents. Oster referred to her pre-pandemic Atlantic article, “End the Plague of Secret Parenting,” which urged parents to speak openly about child care obligations. The pandemic brought those needs to light and workplaces should continue to acknowledge them, she said. “As people think about the life they want, they’ll think about the times they want to spend with their families. Is there a way firms can provide that kind of flexibility in order to make it possible to have a job and that time?” she asked. Oster spent a significant amount of effort last year contributing to the Covid-19 School Response Dashboard, given the absence of federal data on how schools addressed Covid-19 and the kind of impact those decisions had. This year, she is working on a larger data project focused on the opening modes of schools. It’s expected to become publicly available this fall. “The reason for that is research and policy, and thinking about how the implications of these schooling disruptions over the last year are going to be vast,” she said. “We’re starting to know some short-term things–we’re seeing some pretty significant evidence of kids facing challenges.” The long-term impact, however, is less certain. “I think it’s up to us,” Oster said. “If somebody hasn’t learned to read, we can teach them how to read. There’s all these ways we can try to fix this problem.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Feature

How Teenagers Have Helped Fill the U.S. Worker Shortage

After a bleak summer-job market in 2020, when the pandemic wiped out millions of jobs, this year teenagers are having their best season in decades. To provide a snapshot of the roles they've been filling, From Day One’s summer intern McKenzie Krow talked with teen workers and their employers in her home neighborhood of Middlesex County, N.J. Her report: At a time when U.S. companies have been desperately seeking workers, it was teenagers who answered the call this summer. Rachelle Estinvil, a high-school student from Woodbridge, N.J., couldn’t find a job at all last year, but this summer she found employment as a cashier at an ice-cream parlor. “I was looking for a simple job to introduce me to the workforce because I have never had a job before,” she said. “I was looking for something lenient that could accommodate my tight track schedule during the summer, that wouldn’t be too difficult.” Tipped off by a friend about the job opening, Estinvil found that it perfectly suited her needs. She has been using her earnings primarily for spending money, but hopes to put some of it away some for college. Like Estinvil, teenagers across the U.S. have been helping fill much-needed gaps in the labor market, especially in restaurants and retail stores. In May, 33.2% of teens ages 16 to 19 were in the workforce, the highest since the Great Recession year of 2008, the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, their unemployment rate was the lowest since 1953. With so much demand for their labor, teens were not only finding jobs that suited them, but also getting higher wages and even signing bonuses. “There are still so many employment opportunities and there are jobs that remain unfilled,” said Karen Barnes, president of Woodbridge Township’s Chamber of Commerce. At the Kiddie Keep Well Camp in Edison, N.J., camp director Sarah Cruz said she often struggles to fill the gaps. “We have enough camp counselors to get through the summer, but we are short-supplied in the kitchen. The kitchen staff is often working overtime,” she said. The camp, which provides services for underprivileged children, has benefited from the enthusiasm of teen workers, though it needs more older counselors. “Teen counselors are often more eager to apply, simply because it is most likely their first job,” she said. All told, she is heartened by the work ethic of her young employees, who are “willing to go above and beyond, in terms of creativity.” The Kiddie Keep Well Camp in Edison, N.J., found plenty of eager teen counselors, but was short on kitchen workers (Photo by McKenzie Krow) The situation is a huge improvement from the summer of 2020, when the stricken U.S. economy and the lack of vaccinations not only shut down businesses, but made teenagers and their parents wary of the kinds of front-line roles that teens often fill. Cristina and Caitlin McNish, both high-school varsity soccer players in Woodbridge, had been actively hunting for summer jobs early in 2020. “I was looking for a seasonal job that would help occupy my time along with our busy soccer schedules,” Cristina said. But then came Covid-19. “Our parents completely shut that idea down. Realistically, working during the pandemic was not going to work with our family dynamic, especially having high-risk family members.” This summer Cristina works at the front desk of her community swimming pool, while Caitlin found a job at a smoothie shop. “Our parents are much more comfortable now than a year ago,” said Cristina. Even so, with the Delta variant taking hold and sometimes-lax enforcement of vaccination and masking requirements, teens have had to navigate anxiety-producing situations. At times, said Cristina, she “wished there were more special rules.” Kohav Dantara found a job as an intern for a New Jersey member of Congress (Photo by Bonnie Watson Coleman Office) While many teens have taken jobs that fit their short-term needs, others have pursued roles within their long-term career interests. Kohav Dantara, a high-school junior from the town of West Windsor, found a job as an intern for New Jersey’s U.S. representative for the 12th Congressional district, Bonnie Watson Coleman, which has proven well-suited to his interest in public policy. “I felt it would be a great way for me to make an impact on society, no matter how small or big. The learning aspect of it gives you a whole new scope on real-world issues,” he said. “I see that I’ve developed many different skills.” Mehr Narula, a high-school junior from West Windsor, found an internship in the HR department of a mortgage company. “I was looking for something that would align with the career I hope to pursue in Human Resources," said Narula. All of her extracurricular activities, in fact, “align with what I hope to do,” said Narula, who is a member of many clubs in her school and serves as president of its Culture and Climate Club, which is dedicated to creating a positive school environment. Narula credits her regional school district, West-Windsor Plainsboro, for providing ample opportunities for its students. “My resume and work experience that the district has been able to provide me has helped,” she said. “Regardless of Covid-19’s impact on employment, making connections and networking is important in terms of putting yourself out there when it comes to looking for jobs and climbing your career ladder.” The teen-worker surge has one problem for employers, however. Most of these seasonal workers will be going back to school, and business owners are already looking for other solutions. McKenzie Krow is a high-school junior from New Jersey, currently attending Cheshire Academy in Connecticut. She has pursued many writing opportunities and has a strong interest in law and public policy.

McKenzie Krow | August 20, 2021

Sheila Flynn | August 18, 2021

Help Wanted: Tools for Solving the Hourly-worker Shortage

From highway billboards advertising jobs at McDonald’s to regional ads on movie theater screens trying to attract workers to Shutterfly, the push to recruit hourly employees has reached something of a zenith across the U.S. And there’s good reason for that. As Covid vaccination rates increase and the U.S. economy recovers, fewer and fewer people are looking to start back up at their old jobs. Both surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate that many workers, including those paid hourly, are no longer satisfied to return to industries that proved particularly vulnerable during a pandemic, including the hospitality industry. Some workers have learned new skills, decided to switch careers, or simply searched for better and different opportunities. That’s left a hole for many employers looking to fill hourly-wage positions, with employers facing a level of competition that hasn’t been seen for decades–or possibly ever. “I’ve been doing this for close to 40 years. I have never seen this type of market during last Q4 in my lifetime. We were able to meet the hiring demands, but we struggled with that,” said Peggy Anderson, head of talent acquisition at Shutterfly, during a recent From Day One webinar titled “Solving the Hourly-Worker Shortage Using Recruiting Tech and Data.” Employers have responded with a range of tools, including the use of AI to place job ads and virtual job interviews on Zoom, but they also still rely on techniques that are “a little old-fashioned,” as Anderson put it. While the tech tools facilitate the search and vetting process, some managers remain loathe to onboard frontline or hourly employees without first getting to meet them in person. “I really want to emphasize that speed is not everything,” said Kerry Royer, head of global talent acquisition for Verizon, adding that “it’s making sure you keep a human in the process, too, because there’s a lot of things you can do in your process to hire people in a week–let technology do it right for you all the way through–but we believe at Verizon that there should be a human in the process.” Speaking on the hourly-worker shortage, top row from left: Kyle Leigh of Appcast and Peggy Anderson of Shutterfly. Bottow row, from left, Kerry Royer of Verizon, moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company and Marshela McDaniel of McDonald's (Image by From Day One) At the same time, however, the current demand for hourly workers everywhere from fast-food chains to Amazon means that, to some extent, now it’s the employers who need to compete with each other, rather than the candidates. So even if employers aren’t making snap decisions about prospective hires, they need to be responsive. “Just responding to the applicant the same day is huge,” said Kyle Leigh of Appcast, which makes software for programmatic job advertising. “If you’re Applebees and you get a candidate for a line cook, that line cook needs a job yesterday, right? That person is not going to wait two to three days to hear back from you.” The candidate will go elsewhere, like Amazon. The immediacy is the “biggest challenge that our clients get,” Leigh added. “It’s a competitive market,” confirmed Marshela McDaniel, a field people officer for McDonald’s. “If people are looking to apply, they’re not just looking at one location, they’re looking at multiple locations and trying to understand, Who’s going to get back to me? Which is going to give me the best opportunity to fit my needs as an employee?” “We’ve been able to really reduce that time-to-hire process,” she added. “Right now, we’re roughly at about eight days. And we’re continuing to see improvements in those numbers. And so our goal is going to be to continue to create that experience where not only does the employee feel engaged in the process, but we’re really able to really set that great first impression in that hiring process.” On top of finding candidates in the first place, many companies have added sweeteners to seal the deal: better pay, signing bonus incentives, more flexible hours, additional benefits, and a more curated overall image of their corporate culture. “A lot of our operators have joined into the sign-on bonus idea to try to help attract and bring in people quickly,” McDaniel said. “Many of our operators are looking at flexibility in regards to scheduling, understanding that we do serve a population that many people either go to school or they have a second job or maybe they’re supporting and serving their family.” She added: “Many of our operators have looked at various additional benefits, such as maybe free or discounted meals, free or discounted uniforms. Really, they’re trying to appeal to the community in which they serve.” That involves casting an even more thoughtful eye on forums for advertising, wording of job postings, and general demographics when it comes to prospective workers, participants said. “When you look at restaurant and retail workers, about half of the population, historically, have been women,” Appcast’s Leigh said. “And that is exactly the population that left the workforce to take care of children, take care of elderly parents.” “That said, there are keywords in job descriptions that you should be cognizant of, gender-coded keywords, male-coded keywords like ‘superior,’ like ‘decision,’ ‘confident,’ vs. female-coded words like ‘interpersonal,’ ‘cooperative,’ ‘warm,’” he said, pointing out that such phrases can dissuade and “turn off certain folks who’ve read those descriptions.” Another consideration is focusing on a company’s employee-focused initiatives, which can make an employer more attractive. At Verizon, for example, the company’s hiring rate fell to essentially zero when the pandemic hit, but the telecom giant focused on redeploying retail and other workers to more immediate jobs within the corporation, rather than laying off or furloughing staff, Royer said. She continued: “We really doubled down on how we showed up during Covid. We had Covid sick leave where we paid them 100% of pay for up to eight weeks and 60% of pay for 16 weeks, really just showing how, in unstable times, we showed up.” Now that hiring has picked up, Verizon’s Royer said, the company’s track record can help attract more quality candidates. Frontline workers, she said, are “often really interested in, what is my opportunity for moving up in the company? What are you going to do to develop me?” she said. “And so we really focus, in our messaging, on the importance of, ‘There is a career path here for you.’” Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the Sunday Independent, and the Irish Daily Mail. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | August 11, 2021

What Motivates Ultra-high Performing Teams?

When Capt. Paul Carelli was in the Navy, he would step into a new leadership position every two to three years. During each transition, it was standard practice to get a “pass down,” the former leader’s take on the team’s strengths and weaknesses. “I refused the pass down,” Carelli said. “I would never take anybody's pass down on who was who and what they could do. Because what you would find out is that those people may have been put into a position that they weren't suited for. I didn't want to know about the people from the perspective of the previous leadership. So everybody started off with a clean slate. That was my first step into arranging a high-performance team.” New eyes, a fresh take. Carelli, who is currently the director of North American flight operations at Kodiak Aircraft Co., which makes short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, shared his philosophy for building elite teams during a recent From Day One webinar titled “The Need to Exceed: Harnessing Motivation Within Ultra-high-performance Teams.” The webinar featured a panel of five leaders across multiple industries discussing how motivational needs differ when it comes to ultra-high-performance teams, and what tools and techniques leaders can use to drive their elite charges to bold new heights. Panel moderator Lydia Dishman, a staff editor at Fast Company, opened the conversation by asking panelists to define ultra-high performers in three words. Mathian Osiski, senior director of talent management at Becton, Dickinson and Co., an early manufacturer of syringes that today produces some of the most sophisticated medical technology in the world, said she sees ultra-high performers as those who “consistently exceed expectations.” “Results, consistency, alignment,” is what Casey Wahl sees in ultra-high-performers. Wahl is the CEO of Attuned, a company that studies intrinsic motivation in the workplace. Why is it relevant to explore the motivations of such high performers? “Organizations and teams have had to pivot from their traditional ways of working into a more creative, and sometimes radically different, way of working. Individuals who are agile and made that shift are the ones who not only survived, but they also thrived,” said Janet Ghosh, global director of HR at Stanley Black & Decker. The industrial tools manufacturer has been rapidly digitizing its products and piloting new means of using AI to improve tool integration into customers’ operations. Speaking on ultra-high performers, top row from left, Paul Carelli of Kodiak Aircraft Co. and Janet Ghosh of Stanley Black and Decker. Middle row, from left: Casey Wahl of Attuned, moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, and Nick Allen of Gensler. Bottom row: Mathian Osicki of Becton, Dickinson and Co. (Image by From Day One) “So, what are some of the common traits these individuals have?” Ghosh said. “What we have experienced in our organization is they have the courage to innovate and do things differently. They are agile in the way they think, they’re inclusive, and they collaborate well, both internally and externally. They're highly resilient, and they are problem solvers.” Panelists said that being an ultra-high performer is about more than consistently hitting key performance indicators (KPIs) or adapting quickly. Some of the speakers called the necessary element authenticity, others emotional intelligence or social intelligence, but all agreed that there is a qualitative, deeply human element common among ultra-high performers. Osiski offered this observation about how leaders with such traits helped their employees thrive during the pandemic: “A lot of the folks that float to the top, they're not always the nicest folks. They’re tough and they get there through grit, and sometimes there's a little bit of a trail of destruction,” she said. “Whereas the ones that floated up to the top during Covid were the ones that were actually kind and nice and did it in a way that was not rude, and helped their colleagues along. They're the ones that got discretionary effort as leaders, they're the ones that were able to break boundaries and speed up when necessary.” Spotting the Ones With Potential So, how do employers evaluate ultra-high-performance potential? It can be easy to spot metric-based potential by looking at past performance, but panelists emphasized focusing on that authentic, emotionally intelligent quality when vetting candidates both internally and externally. Wahl said a simple addition to their job descriptions–“we want people with a kind heart”–elicited an emotional reaction from applicants and helped them winnow their candidate pool. Wahl said his customers use Attuned’s intrinsic-motivation assessment, which looks at a person’s value hierarchy, to get a sense of an employee’s EQ, or emotional quotient, and how their values align with team and company goals. In a workplace culture that puts so much value on metric-based performance, EQ can get ignored, the result being teams that start to look like a homogenous bunch of ladder-climbers. But emotional intelligence is what can turn a strong performer into a high-performer into an ultra-high performer–and elevate others with them. Speakers on the panel cautioned against trying to replicate the success of one high performer by scouting or hiring a duplicate. “Ultra-high performance does not equate with groupthink,” Dishman pointed out. Nick Allen, a regional talent-development leader for the global design and architecture firm Gensler, said many leaders have a go-to manager they ask to head-up critical teams and projects, but that this is a poor way to maintain strong results because exceptional performance depends on heterogeneous teams and leadership. Each team should be composed with fresh eyes, he said. The Team Benefits of Diversity Wahl said diversity is a must if employers are going to build a team that consistently exceeds expectations. “We need it from an ethical and a moral point of view, but also a strategic [point of view] to create innovative products for different markets.” While diversity of experience and thought is necessary, everyone must be united around a common goal, a common value, Wahl explained. “I don't have it from a scientific point of view, but I have it from a lot of data. Teams that are generally aligned by their values are more high-performing,” he said. Denying the importance of diversity is likely why many companies can identify high-performers here and there, but fail to cultivate teams that operate at the ultra-high level. In order to innovate, and therefore take risks, employees must feel that their environment is safe for risk-taking, whether or not they fall into the ultra-high-performing niche. “You can tell employees to be courageous, you tell employees to really speak up, that we want to hear diversity of thought, but if they don't have that sense of psychological safety, they're not going to,” Allen said. Psychological safety is motivating for these high-potential outliers. It’s also what you’ll need to create if you want undiscovered outliers to rise up. “You need, as a leader, to foster the culture that allows people to be courageous,” said Carelli. “Because I can tell you, you can be iron-fisted, you can have a great vision, but if you don't foster that culture throughout the whole organization, nobody's going to be courageous in that organization.” When he served as Naval commanding officer, Carelli said he made a point to acknowledge mistakes. “When we were doing combat operations and I screwed up as the commanding officer of the squadron, I would stand up first and say, ‘Here's what I screwed up this week.’ And I would go into detail.” He said this was how he fostered an environment where it was safe to ask questions, safe to be courageous. Carelli also said motivation depends on feeling a sense of ownership. “If people don't feel like they have ownership in the process, then there's not going to be a motivation for it. People don't feel valued if they're not given a task, and I can't emphasize that enough. If people aren't valued, there's no way they're going to be courageous. Ownership, I think, is fundamental to getting people to be motivated. You have a goal, inspire them with that goal, give them a vision, give them ownership, and then let them go.” The Challenge of Sustaining at a High Level Top-performing employees are especially prone to burnout. Employers have to be aware of this to keep these workers delivering at peak level. Wahl said this is a fact many are aware of, but few address. “The prevailing school of thought is, ‘Push people and create pressure to get results, and if they don’t like it, then this is not the right job for them,’” Dishman observed. But the panelists proposed a new way of taking care of workers. The speakers encouraged careful distribution of work and constant evaluation of duties, a good practice for any company wanting to prevent burnout across skill levels. Allen said his organization rotates talent through their most challenging projects. “We're thinking about other talent that might be sitting on the side that has that potential, that interest or that passion to come in,” he said. “Because for every team member that's feeling burnt out, there's another team member that's feeling forgotten.” Wahl reminded employers to be conscious of such structural stressors as international time zones. High-performers will often eat into their free time and weekends to make the meeting or accommodate the schedule. Ghosh said she’s making sure Stanley Black & Decker employees have ample mental-health benefits and employee-assistance programs. She also noted the importance of ongoing performance management: Do you have mentors for these workers? Are you creating clear career paths for them? Is there coaching available? In other words, if you want to maintain ultra-high performers, you must not only motivate, but sustain. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Sheila Flynn | August 11, 2021

Making Employee Recognition a Priority in Your Hybrid Workplace

Morgan Chaney has been taking pottery classes as part of her “quarantine gift” during the coronavirus pandemic, indulging in the type of activity that helps employees to “get away from our screens and into the world to spend time with the ones we love–to help escape those pressures from life and the workplace overall,” said Chaney, the senior director of marketing and employer branding at Blueboard, an employee rewards and recognition platform. She remarked upon her personal experience in a thought-leadership spotlight at From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” The aforementioned life and work pressures have never been greater than during the Covid-fueled turmoil of the past 17 months, making it even more important for employers to focus on employee satisfaction and retention as increasing numbers of employees return to brick-and-mortar offices for at least part of their work schedules, she said. The pottery classes were part of an employee-rewards system implemented by Blueboard, and Chaney emphasized that corporations can benefit from such recognition programs for workers across the board, regardless of industry or location. “Employee appreciation shouldn’t be one day; it should be all year round,” particularly as both managers and employees attempt to navigate the rapidly evolving hybrid workforce, said Chaney. Morgan Chaney, senior director of marketing and employer branding at Blueboard (Photo courtesy of Blueboard) “We found that over 70% of HR leaders are wanting to make the shift to hybrid work this year,” she said, adding that workers “should all be good at self-regulating” and “taking care of our own mental and physical health,” she said. “The pandemic has totally thrown us off from that,” she said. “Productivity is at an all-time high, but so is employee burnout. So as an employer, it’s really important for you to intentionally encourage employees to self-regulate.” It’s also imperative to offer resources and follow a strategic, well-thought-out plan that looks at several components: “Fostering wellbeing, fostering inclusion, and offering power,” she said. “Retention is becoming more and more top of mind for all of us,” Chaney said. “You’ve probably heard the term ‘the Great Resignation’ floating around. It’s upon us. Recent data for Microsoft is showing that over 40% of employees are planning to leave their jobs this year, which is up from 15% pre-pandemic–nearly triple growth in just one year’s time.” “So if you don’t take care of your employees, your competitors will,” Chaney said. “And we’d love to help prevent that through meaningful recognition programs, programs that let your employees feel like they’ve made an impact and show them that they’re seen and valued.” And that doesn’t necessarily have to mean pottery classes, she said. There has to be a general attitude change, commitment to recognition, and personalization of what works best for different employees. “Ultimately, we’re all juggling our personal responsibilities, we have unique passions and interests, and a one-size-fits-all approach will not work anymore, especially in a hybrid environment,” she said. “So it’s really important, as an employer, to consider offering a wide range, or more types [of rewards and recognition] that meet employees where they are today.” How to achieve that at scale? “Ultimately, at Blueboard, we understand and support that all employees want to do different things. They don’t all drink coffee, so that Starbucks card might fall flat–or they might not want to go skydiving. That might make them totally scared to death. So ultimately, we have a recognition platform that lets employees choose the reward that’s most meaningful to them, not to everybody else, and choose what matters to them today–not tomorrow.” Recognition programs can include apps through which employees can earn points and select rewards, or a regular forum for peers and bosses to publicly acknowledge good work. Employer awareness, flexibility, and communication are key to ensuring the success of any recognition and reward program, Chaney said. “This is where you can encourage managers to host conversations one-on-one with their direct report,” she said. “Or if you want to make it into a more systematic process, you can add questions around recognition preferences into your onboarding surveys to help create a kind of a repository of employee preferences that managers can access on their own.” A sampler of some of the experiences Blueboard offers for employee recognition (Graphic courtesy of Blueboard) Among the things to consider, she said: “Does your employee like public shoutouts? Or would they prefer one-on-one, more intimate thank you’s from their manager? Do they want you to celebrate their birthday or work anniversary, or would having that be announced at a company all-hands make them totally cringe? And these are important things to understand, because beyond learning about your employees’ motivators, you also want to really dial into their languages of appreciation.” By paying attention to those languages and individualized needs of employees, “recognition can foster inclusivity,” she said. “A lot has changed with the pandemic. And it might be that for certain employees, or even teams overall, the performance bar needs to be reassessed. Maybe there’s new behaviors to evaluate, maybe there’s new benchmarks that really point to that team being successful.” The task, then, is to “work with your team leaders to best evaluate individual KPIs and ultimately determine what does signal great work [and] what has changed in the pandemic–and what do we want to adopt into our performance cycles.” Chaney added a note about fairness and equity: “As you’re setting new performance bars, you also want to make sure that you’re resetting our own personal standards for how we’re grading what great work looks like–and this is where we talk about things like unconscious bias. As we migrate to a hybrid work model, it’s really natural for the managers who might have employees in office with them, versus working from home, to prefer the employees that you work side-by-side with. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that these relationships are naturally deeper when you get to have more one-on-one water cooler, lunch, happy-hour time with these employees. But in a hybrid workplace, we need to work with our leaders to make sure they avoid unconscious bias and ensure that all of their teams or accomplishments are reviewed on the same playing field.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight, Blueboard. Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the Sunday Independent, and the Irish Daily Mail. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Emily Nonko | August 11, 2021

How Leaders Can Excel by Promoting 'Followership'

In business, massive scale can bring its own weaknesses. Case in point: a few years ago the Nestlé corporation, the world's largest food-and-beverage company, decided that in spite of its dominance, it needed to change. A focus on cost-cutting had discouraged its employees from taking ambitious risks. One of the results was slower growth. And so in the summer of 2018 the company embarked on a strategic plan designed to transform company culture. “It was a pretty big mindset shift to embrace failing fast, risk-taking, and a decide-and-go mentality,” said David Tredo, VP of human resources, operations, and transformation at the company. “It was taking an organization that had been conditioned to operate in a certain way, in a different landscape with okay results, to something in which [company leaders] use the analogy of building a dynasty.” But to build a dynasty, the company’s executives realized, they had to shift the mindset of the entire workforce, not just top leadership. To do so they embraced the concept of “followership,” which says that followers play important individual, relational, and collective roles in organizational failures and successes. “In the followership dynamic, when we encourage employees to challenge, seek clarity, and have self-advocacy for what they need and where they are, that comes with an accompanying sense of mutual responsibility and accountability,” explained Shaun Dyke, the managing partner at SSCA, an executive-leadership consulting firm, who guided Nestlé on its cultural shift. Shaun Dyke, the managing partner at SSCA (Photo courtesy of SSCA) The concept of emboldening followers has a rich history, Dyke pointed out. “Some of the most prominent research on it came from Mary Parker Follett. This was late 1800s, early 1900s,” he said. Parker Follett wrote The Essentials of Leadership and stressed that leaders must be able to see the desires of the group, organize them, and unite them under a common purpose. She depicts followers as crucial allies in that goal. Dyke, who has a long professional history in leadership development, came to the concept after confronting challenges of companywide culture shifts. “I really started to dig into this understanding of when good people know that something could be done better, why don’t they do it?” he asked. He studied the psychological concept known as the “diffusion of responsibility,” meaning “when a person is among other people, they are less likely to take action because they assume somebody has already taken action.” Dyke then explored the dynamic between leadership and followership. Effective leadership is amplified by effective followership, meaning that leaders are tuned in with their team and provide clear expectations, while team members feel comfortable making suggestions, enacting change and taking responsibility for their work. “People have to be willing to take personal ownership across the board,” Dyke said. “We live in a world where it can sometimes be easier to blame or shift responsibility than to take responsibility.” While the concept empowers so-called followers, it requires a leadership shift as well. “It takes a healthy ego of the leader,” Dyke explained. “He or she has to be willing to, at times, acquiesce to the thinking, experience, and collective thinking that a followership population may bring to them.” When the relationship aligns under the concept, he added, “everybody wins.” The term “followership” was initially met with apprehension at Nestlé, which is based in Switzerland and operates around the world. “We really had to define and unpack what followership is,” said Tredo. Dyke knows it can be a tough shift in a culture that often focuses on leaders and celebrates leadership qualities. But as he noted, “the masses of an organization’s population are people not in formal leadership roles.” The Nestlé USA headquarters building in Arlington, Va. (Photo by Tim Brown/iStock by Getty Images) Nestlé decided to move forward, knowing its culture shift would be company-wide. “We had a strategy from the very beginning to win the hearts and minds of everyone and start with leaders to really hit the right tone,” recalled Tredo. “We started with strategic leaders, moved to our people leaders, and then embraced this among the many and pulled it through to individual contributors.” That meant company-wide conversations, workshops and programs covering topics like creating conditions for team achievement, understanding key motive drivers, deep trust-building and accountability, alongside skill-building, facilitated by Dyke and his team. “We had over 100 daylong sessions during Covid with individual contributors helping embed these concepts and ideas,” he said. For Tredo, it was asking employees to figure out “how do you actively engage in this cultural journey that we’re on?” Leaning into the cultural journey during the pandemic paid off. Tredo pointed out that 2020 was the best year in company history, with online sales accounting for more than 40% of the company's growth in the U.S. The company’s new values made sense during a time of tremendous change because “people thought it was the right trajectory and could see their role in it,” he added. Dyke believes that leadership and followership are key to healthy companies and their ability to navigate the unexpected. And as companies like Nestlé embrace the concept, he is confident it will take on renewed value in the workplace. “We want people to wear the ‘followership’ title as a badge of honor,” he said. “There’s an incredible complement and power in effectively supporting and following something.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story, SSCA. You can read more about the firm's thinking on corporate culture here. Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | August 04, 2021

A Sense of Belonging: How to Make It Sustainable

There’s a message posted in the meeting room of Dr. Lauren Wadsworth, a clinical psychologist and senior instructor in psychiatry. It reads: “Feedback is a gift.” The posting includes a step-by-step process to accept feedback openly and without defensiveness. These are a few of the key tools needed, Wadsworth believes, to create a culture of belonging inside the workplace. Wadsworth and Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker, a clinical psychologist and Harvard Medical School professor, co-wrote the new book Did That Just Happen?! Beyond “Diversity”–Creating Sustainable and Inclusive Organizations. A key word in the title is “sustainable.” At From Day One’s July virtual conference, “Diversity’s Many Roles: How Mentors, Sponsors and Allies Each Play a Part in Inclusion,” they spoke with Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman about how organizations can go beyond one-off diversity training and other just-fix-it approaches to build a longer-term foundation. Both Wadsworth and Pinder-Amaker emphasized a few things from the start: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace is everyone’s responsibility as well as a lifelong journey that can’t be boiled down into check-the-box compliance trainings. “Box-checking training is a common mistake,” Wadsworth noted. “When we work with organizations, we view it more as a relationship.” And instead of companies focusing their efforts on finding the “right” training program in the marketplace, they should start by gathering internal data about what employees want and need. “You have to do some sort of needs assessment,” Pinder-Amaker said. “You have to understand your training toward what end, asking what do we really need, before going out and bringing in the training.” Speaking on a new guidebook for inclusion, clockwise from upper left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company and co-authors Dr. Lauren Wadsworth and Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker (Image by From Day One) In the midst of training, Wadsworth and Pinder-Amaker said, it’s important for the participants to practice self-compassion. “We were all raised in this society, all trained to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic,” Wadsworth said. “We expect you to come in with these biases. As we’re doing this work, we expect you to mess up, and when you do, we hope you can name and acknowledge it.” Pinder-Amaker talked about the concept of physiological safety, or the sense that you can speak your mind or stick your neck out without being punished for it. An organization has created that climate if “the person with the least amount of privilege and power in your organization still feels valued, seen, heard, and a sense that they belong.” She stressed that “it’s an all-or-nothing proposition,” in the sense that everyone in the organization has to feel that safety, or no one really does. The co-authors offered up communication tools necessary for having the hard conversations that might test that sense of safety. “Calling in” instead of “calling out” is a more effective way to navigate hard conversations, as well as accepting feedback gracefully. “You can reframe feedback not as punishing, but as a gift–you say that person trusted us enough to share that extremely vulnerable thing,” said Wadsworth. As part of their work on the new book, Pinder-Amaker and Wadsworth have been rethinking the language used in talking about DEI. Some of the identifying terms in common use are overly “deficit-based,” the authors said. For example, instead of using terms like “marginalized communities” or “minorities,” the pair prefers “rising identity” and “rising population.” As Pinder-Amaker put it, “We think it’s just really beautiful and empowering.” They also advocate replacing the term “micro” in the popular term “microaggressions.” Explained Wadsworth: “The idea is that they’re little and subtle and we don’t see them, but I think that prioritizes the privileged person in calling it micro, and not the person who was hurt,” Wadsworth said. Nor does it do justice to the accumulated weight of these aggressions. The pair instead uses the term “identity-related aggressions.” For people with enough empathy to know when they’ve made a mistake, Pinder-Amaker emphasized the importance of “the empowering apology.” It’s an acknowledgment of harm, putting focus on the person who has been injured, and an openness to how that person needs to process your apology. “Learning how to own your behavior sounds like such a basic recommendation,” she said. “But we are really bad at apologizing, just taking responsibility, and saying ‘I really screwed that up.’” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | August 03, 2021

Hello, Meet Your Mentor: One Company's Inclusive Approach

When you get hired at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, you don’t have to wait around to find a mentor by chance. Even if you’re not entering for a leadership position, “a mentor is assigned as a part of the onboarding process. You don’t move through that process without a mentor being assigned,” said Michael Lopez, the chief diversity officer at HPE. That first step for an HPE employee is part of the evolving culture of career development at the company, which dovetails with its efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). “I've never seen so much buy-in, I've never seen so much engagement around the topic, a willingness to have the discussion,” Lopez said. “Now, whether that willingness results in action remains to be seen. It has almost become cliché, but whether this is a movement or a moment really is about what happens next,” Lopez told Fortune senior editor Ellen McGirt in a one-on-one conversation at From Day One’s July virtual conference, “Diversity’s Many Roles: How Mentors, Sponsors and Allies Each Play a Part in Inclusion.” Events of the last 18 months have highlighted the need for acts of mentorship, sponsorship and allyship in the workplace, practices that have the power to improve morale, reduce attrition, increase representation of marginalized groups in leadership roles, support inclusion, foster psychological safety, and increase productivity. Given all those manifest benefits, Corporate America is giving this kind of structured guidance more attention. But with the new emphasis comes the need for managers and employees to understand the distinctions between mentorship, sponsorship, and allyship. For his part, Lopez said he doesn’t draw rigid lines around the three, preferring to think of it as a spectrum instead. “It’s much more nuanced than that,” he said. He put it this way: There are mentors who provide support and encouragement, connectors and opportunity givers who might offer a colleague an “insider track,” and advocates who go to bat for someone both publicly and privately. However, he said, one individual can’t be expected to fill all of those roles. “Many times it's a web of relationships that we have across the mentorship-and-sponsorship spectrum that enable our success.” Lopez’s experience with mentorship began years ago with his friendship with a former colleague. “That friendship opened up doors, he opened up his network, and we really charted a path together around the passion that I had for diversity and inclusion.” Speaking on mentorship, sponsorship, and allyship: Ellen McGirt of Fortune, left, and Michael Lopez of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Image by From Day One) His encounter with allyship came later and further changed the course of his career. “Allyship has been immensely important to me as a gay, Hispanic male in the workplace. My first corporate experience at Goldman Sachs was with someone tapping my shoulder and asking me to be part of the Pride Network. That's why I do this work in many ways. It's the reason why I pursued education in organizational behavior, because you know what? Organizations have the power to be good, and organizations have the power to unlock individuals' ability to be their authentic selves.” McGirt pointed out that there’s no need for a formal program for people to act as a mentor, sponsor or ally–individuals who see the opportunity should act. Even so, Lopez said this kind of behavior must be “structurally enabled” to ensure that it will happen in an organization. Managers and leaders need to be given the trust and freedom to work out these behaviors, speak up on behalf of others, and elevate colleagues. Lopez’s approach to fostering these roles at HPE is to embed inclusion in the corporate culture. “Unconditional inclusion is one of the key behaviors,” he said. “It’s a core behavior for our culture. It's embedded in how we define leadership from a competency perspective. So as we take managers through leadership training, we're unpacking the elements. We're talking about emotional intelligence, we're talking about courageous conversations, conflict management, managing across differences. All of those are elements of how we define leadership. So as we develop our mid-level managers as leaders, it's embedded in what they're thinking.” Last year the company instituted listening sessions to support and respond to the needs of marginalized communities. The response was strong and encouraging, Lopez said, and HPE is now expanding these sessions across its global workforce. Application is key, of course, so these sessions are followed by action. “We are transparently posting the actions that come out of that, tracking the actions that executives have agreed to,” Lopez said. “That's a new internal level of transparency that I haven't seen. And we're using transparency as a motivator to keep us accountable toward action. So that's why I'm proud. It's not just listening, it's listening with works.” Those works, Lopez said, should also be forward-looking. “When we're thinking about successors for leadership, we're also thinking, who are the diverse successors? And we're aligning to the development plans that need to be met in order to enable them to take those roles because, as you know, organizations are dynamic.” Succession planning is especially important amidst the Great Resignation. “As people come out of the pandemic, there's more talent movement, and inevitably you need to be ready to fill those positions. That requires advance planning,” Lopez said. Thinking of those who may refrain from courageous acts of inclusion at the risk of making a misstep, McGirt asked, “How do you build a culture that is resilient and offers grace to people who might make a mistake?” “Listen before you ask,” said Lopez. “And it’s hard. I mean, the notion of listening to individuals’ perspective and experience around this is powerful, but it's fundamental.” Powerful acts of mentorship, sponsorship, and allyship can also be small ones. “There is no small act that isn't transformative. If the gentleman that had tapped me on the shoulder at Goldman Sachs, way, way, way long ago, the one who asked me to join the [pride] group, knew the impact that they had, I think it would be amazing. Those small acts really have meaningful ripple effects. So no matter where you're at in your journey, look for those. And please don't be scared to make mistakes. You know, failure is a blessing. I don't think anyone's going to blame anyone. If you say, ‘Hey, I'm trying to work on inclusion,’ and if you make a mistake, so be it. There is power in that. And so step into that power.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Sheila Flynn | August 01, 2021

How Employee Coaching Is Boosting Inclusion

Growing up as the child of immigrants and a person of color, Neela Pal always felt there was “a strong pull towards integration/assimilation”–a pull that carried forward as she entered the workforce and began her career. Once she had the opportunity to work with a professional coach, however, she began to think differently, she said during a panel discussion on coaching and inclusion, part of From Day One’s July virtual conference, “Diversity’s Many Roles: How Mentors, Sponsors and Allies Each Play a Part in Inclusion.” “The part with coaching that was actually very transformative for me was to actually think of the difference as a differentiator,” she said, viewing her upbringing and culture as “a competitive advantage rather than something I needed to hide or step back from.” Now the head of external engagement strategy for diversity and inclusion at Goldman Sachs, Pal said she wants to see coaching affect others the same way–growing and diversifying “at the intersection of coaching and DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging).” The democratization of coaching was the major focus of the panel, which looked at how the tool for managers and employees is becoming more broadly available, more sought-after, and embraced by employers as a means to more diversity and belonging in their work forces. Pal was not the only panelist who’d seen the benefits of coaching in their own career. “Coaching personally changed my life,” said Dion Bullock, the strategy lead for DEIB at Bravely, a coaching platform. “Being able to work with a coach helped me to challenge some of the stories I had about work and success and what it meant to be a black professional. And from that experience, I wanted to be able to share that with the world and be able to support others to understand what their needs are and really have that sense of reflection about what their work experience is like.” Speaking on coaching and inclusion, top row from left: moderator Emily Nordquist of Loyola University Chicago, Curtis Brooks of DXC Technology, and Dion Bullock of Bravely. Bottow row, from left, Neela Pal of Goldman Sachs and Nichelle Grant of Siemens (Image by From Day One) Key to achieving those goals, panelists agreed, is to increase awareness about what coaching actually entails and how it can benefit everyone. The concept and practices have changed significantly in the past 10 to 15 years. Whereas coaching used to be viewed as something tailored for high-level executives, particularly those who had made missteps or needed significant help, it’s now becoming more and more proactive and applicable to workers at all levels. “Coaching is unique compared to those other aspects of sponsoring, mentorship and allyship, because typically it’s focused on a goal or an issue or a project and you’re working through something,” said Nichelle Grant, head of DEI for Siemens in the U.S. “You’re making some decisions, you’re getting guidance, while the others are really more long-term goals, long-term plans. Coaching is more immediate–you know, ‘I have something I want to talk about; walk me through this.’ Maybe it’s a one-time thing, maybe it’s recurring. And so, while the others are ongoing and more frequent, I think we’ve seen [coaching] manifest itself at the individual level.” Curtis Brooks, who is responsible for talent, employee experience and culture at DXC Technology, explained that “coaching is different than being a mentor, being a teacher, or being a therapist–and it doesn’t mean that we don’t do some of those things in coaching where it makes sense and when it’s appropriate, but it’s definitely distinct,” Brooks said. “I usually tell my clients that, from a coaching standpoint, I will assume that you’re coming to our relationship as a whole person, and you have the answers that you need. And my role is to walk with you, not in front of you, not behind you, but side-by-side with you to shine a light, if you will, on your path–to help you find those answers that you already have in yourself.” Building a System To do that through coaching, the speakers said, employees at all levels must not only be convinced of the benefits of coaching but also be given opportunities to take advantage of it. Coaching offers a unique avenue aside from “other modalities of support, where there may be a hierarchical relationship or a power differential,” Pal said. Coaching needs to be confidential as well, with employees of all grades having confidence that a coach will offer personal guidance and not report back to managers or HR, Bullock pointed out. Employers should assess the structural obstacles that might get in the way of providing coaching to all communities within an organization–and then find ways to remove those barriers, for example by offering coaching in different languages or ensuring time-zone flexibility, Bullock said. Siemens, for example, has created a program “which has 100-plus certified coaches across the globe–and we have a tool where, if you want coaching, you put your name in and they pair you up with a coach,” Grant said. Who Does the Coaching? Employers need to have a combination of external coaches, internal coaches, and peer-to-peer coaching to ensure success and accessibility, Brooks said. “If I put that into a framework, what that will look like is probably the top 2% to 3% of the house, if you will, we would technically be working with an external coach,” he said, continuing: “Then you will look probably at your next 30% to 40%, so your mid-level leaders within the organization, either we’re using internal coaches that are ICF (International Coaching Federation) certified or working toward their ICF certification.” For the bottom tier in the hierarchy, Brooks said, “your entry-level employee, maybe your first-time supervisor, we’re probably looking at more peer-to-peer or managers–a coaching program where we’re teaching our managers how to coach their employees, whether it’s coaching on a career issue or in an area of career, or whether it’s around business, some type of business problem, or a business initiative.” Removing Self-limiting Obstacles Coaching can play an integral role in inclusion by simply working as a catalyst for people to think differently about their strengths and find answers within themselves. At Siemens, Grant said, the company has fostered the creation of “a coaching network for the racial-justice conversation we’ve been having–and so coaching shows up in multiple parts of the organization.” Panel moderator Emily Nordquist, senior program manager for the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility at Loyola University Chicago, pointed out, “Something that’s really effective in helping leaders of color get into management positions and rise is actually coaching and mentorship–and so, if we only focus on providing coaching to those who are at the top of an organization, who have those kinds of levers that they can pull, we are really missing an opportunity to create a pipeline for more leaders of color to be in management.” While coaching has come on by leaps and bounds, Pal said, its evolution has not ended by any means. “There’s some reframing work for us to do [to help] destigmatize coaching,” she said. “It’s not just a luxury good–like, ‘I deserve it, too.’” Nor should coaching be considered a consequence of performance issues. The message should be, “You’re doing great, and we want you to do even better–and so it’s really building on your capabilities,” Pal said. “And so there’s some work that we have ahead of us to really universalize coaching.” Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the Sunday Independent, and the Irish Daily Mail. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Angelica Frey | July 30, 2021

Mentors and Sponsors: Why Each Has a Role to Play

“One good thing about the pandemic is our ability to identify skill sets in folks that we didn't know they had, we truly didn't know they existed,” said Sandra Borders, chief diversity officer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Before Covid forced most office workers to transition to remote work, these employees might sit at their desk day after day, doing what they needed to do. “But during the pandemic,” Borders observed, “they were able to really shine, such as in, ‘Not only can I push this paper, but hey, I have these technology skills, these graphic design skills, and this network!” Borders’ observation epitomized the spirit of the conversation she had with four other speakers as part From Day One’s July virtual conference, “Diversity’s Many Roles: How Mentors, Sponsors and Allies Each Play a Part in Inclusion.” The speakers explored the value of mentorship and sponsorship in helping colleagues develop new skills, as well as the benefits for employers in boosting retention by giving people a sense of belonging–a key asset in employer branding. They focused as well on the key differences between mentorship, which traditionally is an advisory role, and sponsorship, which involves a leader investing their social capital to boost their protégé’s standing in the organization. Among their insights: Portrait of a Mentee, and a Mentor One of the first steps in creating these relationships is pairing suitable partners. Organizations now have something similar to a matchmaking process: worksheets through which mentors and mentees can be matched following a series of criteria, including mutual interests, cultural backgrounds, and line of work. On top of that, individual disposition should be taken into account. “I think it's important that there is a good mixture between high-potential employees and high performers: anybody could be it at some point in time,” said Jeffery Walker, SVP and chief administrative and diversity officer at SoCalGas. “And maybe the mentoring opportunity is just the opportunity that they need to make that transition and help them to step up into a higher-performing role.” A panel on mentors and sponsors, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Sandra Borders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Jeffery Walker of SoCalGas. Bottom row from left: Vincent Guglielmetti of Intel, Karen Rodriguez La Paz of Purple Innovation, and Tonya Hempstead of American Express Global Business Travel (Image by From Day One) Borders echoed Walker’s sentiment about the need to nudge people who might have a lot of potential, but who are less prone to raising their hands. “One of my visions, and something that we started to do, is to formalize the mentoring process more with a focus on getting more managers mentoring lower-level managers, if you will, in order to help build their skills and to help them in their developmental processes,” she said. Karen Rodriguez La Paz, the global head of diversity and inclusion at Purple Innovation, which makes mattresses and other furnishings, said her company broadens the concept of mentorship by allowing mentees to get mentorship across departments, including manufacturing, retail operations, customer care, and administration. “So you are able to try out your skills on a particular project and see if you can develop them further within the organization,” she said, “and help utilize that to be able to transition from one side of the organization to the other." Formalizing the Process vs. Overstepping In an ideal mentorship program, there is a fine balance between formal and informal modes of operation. Mentors are not in a managing role, so they need to set boundaries about how directly and forcefully they steer their mentees. “Guard rails are important,” said Tonya Hempstead, VP of diversity, equity and inclusion at American Express Global Business Travel. “Some leaders are great at their jobs and have great intentions, but good intentions can have bad outcomes.” The burden of striking that balance falls on the mentor, said Vincent Guglielmetti, a VP and operations general manager at Intel. “The mentor needs just as much help in figuring out how you approach these discussions,” he said, stressing the importance of mentors understanding the dynamics before they start offering guidance. “We actually set it up to say that it isn't your job to go tell these people, ‘This is what you need to do; this is how you're going to grow; this is what's going to happen,’” he continued. A mentor, rather, has to spend time asking questions, because sometimes the mentee isn't sure what they want. And a mentor, ideally, also wants to make sure their mentee is motivated about where they're going. A mentor might think that their protégé would be great at something, but the mentee may simply lack interest in it. “They might say, ‘That's not really what I want to do.’ We've judged them before we even got started in the conversation,” Guglielmetti said. Providing context and perspective is another role of the mentor. “Sometimes the mentee does not know what they need to know,” said Walker, who typically devotes 3/4 of his mentoring time to career-focused issues and the remaining time addressing more personal components. “It's the entire person that you need to care about here. In most cases it’s going to be more focused on the career path, but there are a lot of ancillary components that contribute to their performance that you can help them with in the course of that relationship that you have with them.” The Image of Success At Intel, a successful mentoring relationship means, at minimum, not seeing people fall out of the company. “That's a very low bar,” acknowledged Guglielmetti. “You know, looking at the metrics: How are people moving in the organization? Are we seeing lower attrition rates? Have we been able to build, within those leaders, some of the skills that they said were lacking?” We know that people can be incredibly diverse in their skill sets, and often they haven't been offered the opportunity to showcase some of those skills. “You know, we've had some folks who are graphic designers, and happen to be really phenomenal influencers. We had no idea!,” said Purple Innovation’s Rodriguez La Paz. “And we thought, ‘Well, wow, you started over in the production side of the organization, but it would be great to align your skill sets with marketing.’ So this is where the desire and the need to address that really spurred from. We're starting to see some of those transitions. And that is integral for us, because we want them to not just have an opportunity to show their talents internally, but also out in the communities where we reside.” Mentorship vs. Sponsorship Until management experts started defining these roles more precisely, they tended to blur together. “Sponsorship is one of those relationships that just occur,” said Hempstead. “I had various leaders that invested in me. It did happen naturally.” At Purple Innovation, said Rodriguez La Paz, “We define sponsorship very similarly: help folks grow. A sponsor connects individuals to leaders, opportunities, and networks for them to be elevated. My ability to grow has come from leaders who had a desire to see me grow. They saw my potential and where I could go. My leaders have come from tech, supply and diversity.” Ultimately, though, sponsorship and mentorship are invariably tied together. “It may not be the mentor who will be the sponsor, but someone the mentor knows,” said Borders. Continuity is one of the most important determinants of success, she said. “A relationship can start promising, but at some point you can find a disconnect.” The way to avoid that, she said: “Check ins!” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Emily Nonko | July 28, 2021

The Power of Allyship: a Master Teacher on Getting It Right

Willie Jackson was one of three contractors at ReadySet, a consulting firm specializing in making more human-centric, inclusive work environments, when it was founded in 2015. At the start of Covid-19, there were eight employees. Following the historic year of a pandemic and social-justice movement, which prompted Corporate America to make new commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the staff is now at 35 and growing. “Nothing has been the same” since the death of George Floyd, according to Jackson. “I have never seen this kind of response to a social movement and a lot of this interest is really continuing.” Jackson joined Elizabeth Stock, executive director of Portland Women in Tech (PDXWIT), for a conversation at From Day One’s July virtual conference, “Diversity’s Many Roles: How Mentors, Sponsors and Allies Each Play a Part in Inclusion.” They talked about Jackson’s experience over the past 16 months as ReadySet’s head of learning and development, as well as insights for how companies can get allyship right. Off the bat, Jackson broke down how DEI work is both “interpersonal and structural”–the personal experiences of marginalization and racism alongside the structures that uphold racist systems. “Our analysis of bias is that it exists interpersonally and also structurally,” he said. “We forget that we’re not talking about people from hundreds of years ago, we’re talking about people like my grandmother, who was born in 1932, or my grandparents, who were sharecroppers in the rural South.” Organizations have to be open to exploring the ways that both interpersonal and structural biases are upheld. Jackson still sees a place for “performative” allyship, a kind of earnest but bland activism that’s been called out recently. “A lot of people discount it out of hand for the purpose of being seen on the right side of history–is that so bad all the time? I don’t think so.” He believes it is important for people to speak out and signal to others where they stand. But he also encourages people to analyze if they’re expecting credit or a pat on the back. “Would you still do it and would it be worth it? It calls into question your why.” Speaking on allyship: Willie Jackson of ReadySet, left, and interviewer Elizabeth Stock of Portland Women in Tech (Image by From Day One) Jackson cited a study carried out by Stephanie Lampkin, chief executive of Blendoor, a diversity analytics company, that found that tech companies making statements of Black Lives Matter solidarity had 20% fewer Black employees on average than those that did not. “There’s a bit of a paradox,” he said. “What the data tells us is that the folks who have the furthest to go are often the loudest and most visible voices in this conversation.” For companies that do want to make a real investment in DEI work, Jackson advises against the “companies trying, behind the scenes, to get it right and get it perfect, without taking folks along for the ride.” DEI work should be inclusive and communicative at every step. Most importantly, he added, “Senior leaders should own the progress for this. This work needs to be resourced, there needs to be a strategy.” To that end, Jackson pointed to companies that are tying executive compensation and bonuses to DEI targets. And for those companies that are well-resourced and well-financed, he had a simple piece of advice: “Write a check,” he said. “People and communities and nonprofits and historically underfunded organizations doing important work–build their support into your revenue models.” He continued, “Some of the companies I’m most inspired by are writing very large checks to very important institutions and not telling anyone a word about it.” Jackson also spoke to how inclusive values can tie into the return to workplaces in the post-pandemic era. “My concerns are around how many companies are not tracking who they’ve lost, from a demographic perspective, from the predictable Covid turnover.” He suggested that companies pilot return-to-work policies that track employee wellness using a quantitative and qualitative approach. Companies should be flexible and be open to how remote work has “leveled the playing field,” Jackson said. “It’s an opportunity to do things differently.” Jackson wrapped the conversation with a video of basketball player Paige Bueckers’ acceptance of the 2021 ESPY Award for Best Female College Athlete, a speech in which she expressed solidarity with Black women. “This is obviously practiced, she named names, she said what she had to say, she was strategic and data-informed, she mentioned people living and not living, she also named her social identity,” Jackson noted. (Bueckers is white.) A speech like this, Jackson believes, demonstrates a powerful example of allyship. “Is it performative? Completely,” he said. “Is it appropriately performative? I think so. I think the lesson we can draw is that when we have the spotlight or a platform–how will we use that moment?” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Sheila Flynn | July 21, 2021

Helping Military Veterans Make the Leap to Civilian Careers

Employers across the U.S. have made tremendous strides in recent years when it comes to launching programs to attract veterans. They’re casting a wider net and honing their hiring and training practices. But the transition from military life to the civilian workforce often remains difficult. Much of the challenge of easing that process lies with recruiters and HR managers, who need to be educated about the skills and life experience of transitioning veterans, said participants in From Day One’s recent webinar, “Matching Military Veterans With Your Need For Skilled Talent.” “There’s a big difference between military-friendly and military-ready,” said Dave Harrison, executive director of national apprenticeships for Fastport, a software-development company that builds products to help military-community members find meaningful employment. Harrison himself is an Army veteran who served with the 82ndAirborne. One of the biggest issues for military veterans transitioning to a business environment is adapting to a completely new organizational culture. “The danger point for everyone, and I can’t stress this enough, [is] in transitions, in the first six months,” said Harrison. “The higher-ranking they are, the more danger that is, because the more disenfranchised they’re going to be in that first transition. They’re used to being able to manage things at a whim; that they will not be able to do. So you need to create a culture that helps them assimilate to your culture.” “Once they understand the landscape,” he continued, “you will be amazed at what those folks will do for you and how they will create a culture of problem-solving that you may not have had in certain areas–and how other people will follow them to you if you give them that kind of platform.” Getting Managers up to Speed That’s where training for hiring managers comes in, said Jacqueline Jarl, also a veteran and a military recruiting program manager at Stryker, a medical-technologies corporation. “In 2019, we decided that it was necessary for us to build what we call a military-talent familiarization curriculum” for recruiters, she said. “Given my Army background, I started building what we call Military 101,” which she describes as a “foundational” course for “somebody who has never really heard of anything in the military other than what they see on TV and movies.” “It’s just the basics, the rank structure, the different services, the different components, what’s the difference between active and reserve and guard. So we started building these curriculums that are housed in our online-learning management system, so anybody has access to them.” That includes “your recruiters, your HR, business partners, your hiring managers, anybody who sits in an interview.” She added: “Every single new recruiter that comes into Stryker, it’s mandatory for them to go through that training.” Employers must also come to understand the time frame associated with military transition, participants said, reaching out and keeping contact with candidates long before they leave the service. “Folks are going to start looking as many as 24 months in advance of their transition date,” said Greg Rivera, the military recruiting lead at Booz Allen Hamilton, the management consulting firm. “And they’re going to be doing various different things, whether they’re upskilling, getting a resume together, fine-tuning their interviewing skills, learning about business and how they can fit in and where they can fit in.” “As we are engaging with those individuals,” Rivera said, “we’re making sure that we’re keeping them fully engaged on what’s going on within the firm, giving them that pulse check.” Speaking on hiring military veterans, top row from left: Jacqueline Jarl of Stryker and Chris Cortez of Microsoft. Middle row: Dave Harrison of Fastport, moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, and Chuck Kluball of The Home Depot. Bottom: Greg Rivera of Booz Allen Hamilton (Image by From Day One) The Need for a Sustained Focus Harrison agreed with the need for prospective employers to take a long-term approach. “Anyone in the business of hiring, or trying to sell a military-ready program, you have to get the hierarchy to understand that this is not [the case that] the fish are going to jump in the boat in the next 10 minutes. You’re not going to get 7,000 hires tomorrow, especially developing a program. If you are talking to people who are 20, up to 24 months out from the transition, this is a long play,” he said. Training and timeframe education for HR managers must also reinforce the fact that the military transition is far different from regular job switches, said Chuck Kluball, senior manager of military relations at The Home Depot. “It is a strong culture shock,” said Kluball, also a veteran. “For many of the veterans getting out, this would be the first time they do job interviews. It would be the first time they will write a resume. It’ll be the first time they sit through an actual onboarding with a company where they don’t show up and have their entire day or their entire onboarding process planned out for them.” “This will be the first time that they have to deal with different type of work environments,” Kluball said. “It’s a lot–and it’s also one of the only times in your life where you’ll go through a job change, potentially a relocation, health care change, education changes, potentially your family’s getting uprooted. It’s an entire life change versus just a job change. So companies that are prepared to provide support for that life-changing event, not just a job-changing event, we’re going to see higher retention. And then, because of the high retention, they’re going to see higher performance out of the veterans they are bringing in.” Practical Approaches to the Transition To capitalize on the potential of veterans, companies such as Microsoft have been particularly proactive. In 2013, the software giant began the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA). “Think of it as a 17-week technology boot camp, where you come either through a transition, or you come through our program while you’re participating in the SkillBridge program, which allows you to go through these kinds of programs when you’re within the last six months of your service,” said Chris Cortez, Microsoft’s vice president of military affairs and a retired Marine Corps major general. He added that “it doesn’t matter what your military specialty was, you could be a truck driver, you could be a cook, a medic–we take them all. And at the end of this 17 weeks, you have the blocking and tackling that it takes to go to work–no kidding–in a technology company. As a matter of fact, we have over 750 companies that have hired from this program.” The importance of networking and word of mouth cannot be overestimated when it comes to awareness about such veteran programs, participants said. “People that go through the program have friends,” Cortez said of MSSA. “So we get a lot of interest through referrals. The graduates from the program have their own social network, and they also talk about the program. And like all the companies here, we work with Hiring Our Heroes, the service academies, career conferences and others that reach out and touch our military–and we all talk about our programs.” Opportunities for Military Families The impact of such outreach and networking extends to military spouses and veterans’ families as well, an effort that has actually been aided by the increase in remote working during the pandemic. “There’s an amazing opportunity that’s come out of the Covid transition and remote-working scenarios,” Harrison said. “There are a few companies that, very early on, figured out that there’s a whole population of talent out there that was untapped: active-duty military spouses. If you can find a way to have them work remotely, you will have a dedicated workforce that will stay with you for the long term. And there are companies that are now engaging military spouses stationed in Germany and Italy and Okinawa, etcetera.” Other companies such as Home Depot work diligently to relocate military spouse employees to accommodate deployments and base transfers, said Kluball. But while many organizations have made great strides in attracting, training, and easing veterans’ transitions, work still needs to be done and more overarching outreach must be offered to the individuals who served the country. “I believe we’re going to do better, because we’ve made some really radical changes,” said Cortez. “Our goal, always from the very beginning, was to get 100% [of trainees hired]. We’re not quite there. We’re at about 98%. But we want 100% of those that go to this program, to get them employed, get them a good job, get them a career in the technology industry.” Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based freelance journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Daily Mail, and Irish Times. She is the daughter of Vietnam veteran and Bronze Star recipient John Flynn, who served with the 101st Airborne Division. Upon his return to the U.S., he spent decades installing phone systems for AT&T and Lucent in New York City before starting his own telecom business.

Angelica Frey | July 14, 2021

Beyond Pride Month: Toward Greater LGBTQ Inclusion in Corporate America

In declaring her preferred gender pronouns at the beginning of a recent From Day One panel discussion, Toni D’orsay, PhD, dispensed with the usual earnest format. She said her pronouns are Empress, Your Majesty, and Thank you, May I have Another?, “but I do settle for ‘she’ and ‘her’ for your comfort,” said D'orsay, the director of transgender services for Borrego Health, a health care network based in Southern California. Aside from being an ice-breaker, D’orsay’s approach emphasized that pronouns are not only a personal statement of identity, but a respectful gesture. “It's the simplest thing you can do to make everybody else understand who you are instead of making them decide who you are,” said D'orsay. D’orsay made her comments in a recent From Day One webinar titled, “Toward a More Inclusive LGBTQ Outlook in Corporate America,” which looked at how the visibility of LGBTQ employees in the workplace rises during Pride Month in June, yet these workers are still often marginalized when it comes to advancement and career development. It’s a pattern than echoes Women’s History Month and Black History Month. “Everyone has a month in their honor. What you're doing in that month might be your focus. But you should ask yourself, what are you doing the [other] 11 months of the year?” said Yvette Miley, SVP of the NBCUniversal News Group. “What are you doing to make members of that community feel included, heard and seen not just with the parade, or just with cupcakes in the conference room?” Inclusion runs on parallel tracks–individual, organizational, and societal–and manifests itself at the intersection of symptoms and systems. “We're good at addressing the symptoms; we do that every symbolic month. We're moving from performative into systemic efforts,” said Chad Nico Hiu, SVP for strategy, innovation and impact at the YMCA of San Francisco. Perhaps we should not be overly cynical about the one-month efforts–and ask what comes next. “Sometimes, maybe over-optimistically, we think about some of these performative declarations or statements–or changing your logo for the month of June–as a starting point, the baseline,” said Toby Hervey, CEO and co-founder of Bravely, an employee-coaching platform. “Maybe there are just a lot of organizations that are still in that Phase One.” How to make progress from there? Focus on Behavior “If we're honest, the progress of one month can be outweighed by the stall of 11 months,” said Natalie Edwards, chief diversity officer of the energy company National Grid, who adds that people have mostly come around to understanding why diversity matters, but inclusion is one step forward. “Inclusion is a behavior. There's a behavior change that still needs to occur. The system runs based on people's behavior.” Speaking on LGBTQ inclusion, top row from left: Dr. Toni D'orsay of Borrego Health and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. Middle row, from left, Yvette Miley of NBCUniversal News Group, Natalie Edwards of National Grid, and Toby Hervey of Bravely. Bottom: Chad Nico Hiu of the YMCA of San Francisco (Image by From Day One) A solution, in her view, is more workshop-based learning, as opposed to the standard lecture system. “We train to change behavior, but the organization has to hold itself accountable,” said Hiu. “What gets measured matters. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training will illuminate what is the thing that we need to address. There are behaviors rooted in beliefs that are acceptable and others that are rooted in beliefs that are not.” “In order to change those [behaviors], then you have to identify them,” said D'orsay, who singled out four As to be mindful of: Animus, Anxiety, Aversion, and Apathy. “When you combine them with power imbalances, in any kind of relationship, you automatically now begin to understand how you end up with situations such as trans people being murdered, such as the kind of violence that's being engaged against Asian and Black Americans, and the erasure of Indigenous populations,” D'orsay continued. “We're gonna have our little flag, but that's just pink-washing unless we can follow it up with some actual action, as far as I'm concerned.” DEI training, by itself, often feels perfunctory. “People come from different levels of awareness,” said Bravely’s Hervey. “There's the reality of the forgetting curve. Without the repetitive touch and reinforcement, that touch gets lost.” At Bravely, educational opportunities start with a more traditional training session, which then moves to a group environment where colleagues can process what they’ve learned, and then progresses to more targeted sessions for people to individualize that experience, Hervey said. Be Mindful of Intersectionality Edwards singled out an industry-wide issue she described as the “oppression Olympics,” which she described as a kind of competition among marginalized groups. “There's a lot of still sentiment about, What about us? What about me? Why are they getting all the focus right now?” she said. “We have to be honest about how everyone fits into more than one category.” In this regard, D'orsay brought up the concept of the axis of privilege and oppression. “When you have an axis, you have to have a point on each end. A lot of people don't understand that the two points on each end are stigma and privilege. You cannot talk about one without having to talk about the other,” she said, acknowledging that “when we talk about intersectionality, we tend to confuse them when we're doing the training.” Especially given that individuals can have many layers of identity. The overlapping categories can create a daunting complexity, especially in moving from concept to action. “I don't know how to fix it. I can't tell you right now,” said Edwards. “But I'm excited for us all to figure that out together as large organizations and even community organizations. How do we make sure that our causes for quality are not in competition with one another, because at the end of the day, you know, divided we fall,” said Edwards. Be More Accepting of Discomfort “Comfort is the norm, the standard, the baseline. If you want to be comfortable, it means you want things to not change,” said D'orsay. “I don't feel comfortable anywhere, I don' t trust cisgender people. I don't trust you. If you want to make me feel more comfortable, start feeling uncomfortable. Meet me where I am.” On that note, it needs to be emphasized that disagreement does not mean disrespect. “We tend to conflate those two things. Discomfort is equated with anger, disrespect. I am uncomfortable on a rollercoaster, but it did not cause me harm,” said Edwards. “Comfort and growth do not coexist. If you go to a training where you are not getting challenged, it means you are not learning anything.” Be Honest About the Ideal of “Bring Your Whole Self to Work” At the start of Yvette Miley's career, the concept of showing your full self at work was not a thing. “When you get in, fit in,” was the creed. “Entering the room, I was always trying to calibrate because I was always trying to make sure I didn't offend anyone, that I didn't come across as being the loud Black female, or the angry Black female,” said Miley. “I am from the South. There were no gay people in the South, so I could not be gay. I could not be gay, nor Black. I tried to be a professional, and at some point I thought I am never going to enter a room and not be Black/a woman/and gay. That comes with me. Wherever I go, those layers come with me.” So she came out at work before coming out at home. “I found people at work who didn't judge me, that allowed me to be my full authentic self.” Yet this awareness has to come with honesty about what's possible. “Unfortunately, the aspirational goal sometimes doesn't work,” said Hiu. “There's nothing wrong in saying we hope to get there, but we're not there yet. I can come to work as a gay man, but there are layers of me I am not comfortable sharing.” Edwards echoed Hiu's sentiment. “One of my professors said data can tell the truth but not be honest,” she said. “We have to be very honest that the reality is not that you can bring your whole self. You can work towards it, but we like to look forward with rose-colored glasses. We have to keep it real for everyone. Do HR leaders know why LGBTQ people leave the company?" Look Up Along the Hierarchy In terms of setting goals, people with authority need to be held accountable. “If you have a diversity officer, in whatever title, the reason you hire them is to have that,” said D'orsay. “If you don't give them power, authority, and data, you hire them and ... why?” “What are the CEO and business-unit leaders doing? Start with the top. People look up to replicate behavior,” Edwards said. “Then, once it's done, keep moving down. No matter how junior you are, you have to have a DEI performance goal. Culture is not what you say or write, it's what you reward. Look at who gets promoted and how they behave–positively or negatively.” Miley echoed this sentiment: “If you're training everyone, yet the person being phobic is getting the promotion, it's not as much as what you say, but what you do. That says more about your system.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | July 14, 2021

Designing the Care Benefits That Employees Need Now

The pandemic exposed a critical gap in Corporate America’s support for its employees: the lack of care benefits to help workers meet the needs of their children, their elders, and other family members. Many companies rushed to respond by adding new benefits, greater job flexibility, and other support measures. Now employers they face a new concern. In what’s being called “the great resignation,” millions of workers are leaving companies, and even careers, for new arrangements that support the lifestyles they want. In this environment, employers facing a competitive labor market are continuing to re-evaluate benefits, especially those related to health and family. According to a recently published Future of Benefits report from Care.com, an online marketplace for caregivers, 63% of employers plan to expand child care benefits, and 41% plan to expand elder care benefits. I talked with Natalie Mayslich, Care.com’s general manager of consumer and enterprise, about this changing dynamic, in which employers are recognizing a larger interest in the care needs of their workers. Excerpts: What are the most important changes you’ve seen in health and family benefits in the last year? It's never been more clear than during the pandemic how important and foundational care is in our ability to work. So during the pandemic, I think one of the most interesting things that has happened, and one of the most important, is the rise of the caring enterprise. Because employers have had a firsthand view into the homes, the lives, and the families of their employees, we're now seeing them recognize employees as people, and these people have loved ones and they have responsibilities beyond work. We saw that sentiment reflected in our research. We’ve also seen that echoed in the exponential growth of our enterprise business. When I think about the good that has come out of the past year, what we've learned is really this: The caring enterprise exists, the need for care benefits is now recognized and continuing to grow and accelerate. Why should we be talking about senior-care benefits right along with child care? Why do you think senior care is a neglected area for employers? It is unfortunate that senior care is sometimes a backseat or secondary priority. I think the reality is the pandemic highlighted not just our child care crisis, but also the need for more elder care support. Particularly what we saw happen in nursing homes and adult living homes: The family caregiver who has parents or loved ones in those homes was turning to us to help get them out, to look for alternative options, or to get more information. Natalie Mayslich, Care.com's general manager of consumer and enterprise (Photo courtesy of Care.com) There's a growing population of adult children who are being crippled by the needs of their aging loved ones while they're continuing to work. Senior care should 100% be top of mind, and we believe, equivalent to child care benefits–particularly when you think about the growing aging population and the underlying demographic shift that's happening in the U.S. There needs to be more of a commitment to senior care, otherwise companies won't be able to retain their more seasoned employees, and even some of their younger employees who are already in the role of family caregiver. Many employers instituted “emergency” provisions in the last year. For example, they expanded elder care leave, remote or hybrid work arrangements, and flexible working hours. Do you think these will become permanent? Should they? Working families had care challenges well before the pandemic and will continue to have care challenges well after the pandemic. That's not changing. What's changed is employer awareness of the care challenges and what they're willing to do about it. I'm optimistic as we think about coming out of the pandemic and all of the benefits that a caring enterprise has delivered to their employees. The ROI they have reaped will be the permanent rule and not the exception. And fundamentally, because care is so core to what we do, I would expect that the employees are raising their hands and asking for more from their employers in order to continue to be productive as they go to work. Mental health is getting more attention these days. What is your take on the way employers are responding? Where are they getting it right and where is the room for improvement? The pandemic has shone a light on many things, including the need for mental health and wellness, and the pandemic itself has had a pretty significant impact on employees’ mental health and wellness. We're thrilled to see employers playing a role in supporting the mental health of their workers, and our report showed that we positively impacted the outcome of mental health by providing care support. So I think there's two parts: There's addressing mental health and wellness head-on, and we've partnered with a third party in order to be able to provide that benefit to our enterprises because they've been asking for it. We recognize it as a key core need. Then there's the other care benefits, or adjacent ones, that are actually impacting and causing the stress that is requiring a third-party mental health and wellness service. We need to reduce the stressors. Three million women have left the workforce in the last year. We don’t have enough time in the day to talk about all the things that should be done about that, but could you talk about a few that you see? We’ve undone 50 years of progress. In the past nine months, millions of women have had this choice between care for their children or collecting their paycheck, and that is absolutely insane. And when we talk to our employers and we talk to our HR partners, 95% of them say that a big contributing factor to female attrition are care concerns for their children, for their parents. As we think about bringing women back and trying to undo the tremendous attrition that we've seen in the workforce, I don't know how we can have that happen or how we can make meaningful progress there without proper child care benefits in place. What are programs employers can use to draw women back to work? Proper child care, 100%. Return-to-work programs are another one we've taken to market to our employers and we will continue to champion. And [there must be] an overall recognition from both sides of the market that it's not just a female problem. Maintaining women in the workforce, and continuing to invest in diversity, equity and inclusion is enterprise-wide and is a problem for all genders and all classes of folks. I'm hoping to see a lot come out of [President] Biden and our investment in our care infrastructure from a political standpoint. I also am hoping that there's a continued investment in care infrastructure by employers who are looking to continue to grow women's participation in the workforce. To what degree should a company’s workforce demographics influence how they build care support into their benefits and policies? What are mistakes to be avoided here? Here's the challenge. Care isn't limited to just new parents, and so it's hard to talk about demographics and the care benefits that are necessary. There's a sandwich generation that's caring for both kids and their aging loved ones, so if you think about limiting care benefits to just new parents, it will be a good start, but will not address the entirety of the workforce. Ultimately, as we think about care benefits, I'm not sure that the employer should be the one gauging what care benefits are necessary for their employees based on their pure demographics so much as on principle. And based on macro data, you know that your employees will be parents, will have aging loved ones, will have mental health and wellness concerns, will have these care concerns that span beyond just ensuring their child is well cared for. So as we think about our services, we keep saying: Flexibility of care is key. Flexibility in terms of who you're caring for, the type of care they receive, and also the care questions that you may be asking. I think the mistake would be to be too prescriptive of the type of care [based on] the population you're serving. Instead, offer more flexible options so that your employees can leverage the care they need, when they need it, without having to sort of raise their hand and say “you forgot about me.” According to Care.com’s Future of Benefits report, 61% of employers are deprioritizing on-site child care in favor of more flexible care benefits. Do you think this shift is simply a result of an increasingly remote or hybrid workforce, or is there a bigger change happening? I think there are two things going on here. Hybrid work and remote work, which we expect to continue, necessitates something more than just on-site child care. And I think there's a bigger trend here, which is control and flexibility for employees. On-site child care is prescriptive, whereas an option to choose on-site child care, choose an in-home caregiver, or choose something else—the provisioning of care and how, where, and why you receive it–should be in the hands of the employees and not the decision of the employer. What’s at risk for employers who don’t reconsider their health and family benefits even after the effects of the pandemic wind down? I think the reality—and we've already seen it start—is that employees will leave jobs that are not supporting them with the care that they need, and perhaps they will leave the workforce altogether. Then we have this perpetual cycle of workforce attrition, struggling to recruit from a smaller labor pool–and the cycle continues. The risks are really high, and employers are starting to realize that. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story, Care.com. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Sheila Flynn | July 14, 2021

Emotional Well-being for Workers: Why We Need New Approaches

During the pandemic, the stressors in life haven’t come one at a time–they’ve piled on. Employees and managers have struggled with burnout. They’ve juggled working from home and child care. They’ve felt a sense of anxiety and fear across the social landscape. And now America’s workforce is faced with a lessening of restrictions and an equally stressful return to some semblance of normal life. The result is a lot of psychological wear and tear. “There is a mental health crisis in this country,” said Karsten Vagner, senior VP of people for Maven, a virtual care platform for women’s and family health. Vagner cited data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that “half of employees today say they experienced high to extreme stress over the past year.” The scope of the crisis, as well as new approaches for employee emotional well-being, were the focus of a conversation between Vagner and Cassidy Stevens, a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) at Massachusetts General Hospital, who also provides care through Maven’s platform. Speaking at From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today,” Vagner and Stevens discussed historic shifts in the workforce and ways to increase support for worker health and wellness–particularly among underserved populations. Maven partnered with Great Place to Work to conduct the largest-ever survey of working parents in the U.S. “We wanted to dig a little bit deeper–and here’s some of the insights that we found: 2.65 million women have left the workforce since February of 2020. We know that working mothers are experiencing burnout more than they ever have,” said Vagner. “Black mothers, in particular, are experiencing burnout. We know that 40% of parents are changing their job situation to balance work and child care. We haven’t been juggling one crisis this year, we’ve been juggling several crises all at once.” Karsten Vagner, Maven's SVP of people (Photo courtesy of Maven) "Eighty percent of employees say they would consider quitting their current position for a job that focused more on employee mental health,” said Vagner, adding: “The irony is that we all have these people, especially from diverse groups, leaving their jobs at a time when more companies than ever before are looking to hire and retain diverse employees–and more job candidates are scrutinizing companies’ diversity strategies, too.” As a mental health care provider, Stevens has seen firsthand the impact of burnout and other pandemic-related stressors. “Our systems are just overloaded right now,” she said, continuing: “With the medical complexity of the pandemic also came an increase in psychosocial complexity–so that includes mental health concerns, family dynamics, substance use concerns.” “The patterns that I’m hearing are actually quite similar to what we see in the hospital environment,” she said. “Any underlying stressors that someone might have been experiencing before the pandemic, or before a hospitalization, they tend to be exacerbated and all bubble up to the surface when they come to the hospital. So the pandemic has actually been quite similar. Anything underlying, such as workplace burnout, mental health concerns–all of that bubbled up to the surface and actually worsened in the setting of the pandemic.” Studies since the onset of the shift to work-from-home have repeatedly shown that productivity on the whole has increased, but that comes with an emotional cost. Stevens cited “the sense of pressure that you might have felt to demonstrate your performance accurately from home and especially in an environment where work layoffs were happening. That led to many employees developing unsustainable work habits, which is what I work with patients on, and then, especially, that unclear boundary between work and life.” According to Stevens, establishing routine and structure is key to addressing these pressures and blurred lines.. “Most of the recommendations I provide are related to, one, creating structure, and two, setting boundaries. Distinguishing clear boundaries in the workplace can help optimize mental well-being and also, [from an] HR perspective, increased motivation from home. So that can include having a designated space to work that’s obviously not in your living, sleeping spaces. Or doing anything you can to maintain that routine and sense of normalcy, like mimicking a morning commute, doing anything that creates that sense of structure,” Stevens said. “From a mental health side, lack of structure, routine and social connectedness really creates an environment that is opportune for depressive symptoms.” Cassidy Stevens, a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) at Massachusetts General Hospital On top of adjusting to remote work itself, many parents are attempting to demonstrate remarkable productivity to their managers while simultaneously taking on new roles as teachers to young children. A large percentage of them “felt like they were failing at both of their jobs,” Stevens said. The experience is often worse for underserved groups, including many Black mothers. “Just the chronic safety concerns and distress that Black mothers face on a daily basis have a significant impact on health,” Stevens said. “Stress hormones in the body like cortisol increase the number of health risks and hormonal dysregulation. Secondly, the person feeling persistently anxious, unsafe, worried, the whole gamut–that’s a lot of stress for the body and mind and soul.” Employers need to be vigilant in recognizing such challenges, work on their cultural sensitivity, and, most importantly, implement meaningful support systems. “Rethinking work schedules, rethinking flexible, remote opportunities and benefit packages, really helps modify the environment to be more supportive for everyone,” Stevens said, adding that perhaps a silver lining of the pandemic will be the increased conversation about employee mental health and well-being. “What’s great to me is that there’s a whole conference right now talking about this–really talking about mental health at work and stating that mental health matters,” she said. “But what’s important is going beyond that and creating those systems and structures that can really demonstrate to employees that their mental health matters–and particularly for underrepresented populations who are at greater risk of facing distress.” Such longer-term, solid plans–fortified by increased employer awareness and openness–will be crucial in maintaining productivity and easing workplace transitions as post-pandemic life gradually evolves. But employers must be vigilant when it comes to mental health, Vagner said, and committed to implementing long-term support strategies. “We can’t be short-sighted,” he said. “When the pandemic is done (whenever that is) and we resume normal life (whenever that is), these issues aren’t going to just disappear.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight, Maven. Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the Sunday Independent, and the Irish Daily Mail. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | July 12, 2021

Deferred Health Care: Why Americans Are Due for a Checkup

It’s very likely that in the last year, you postponed a medical appointment. It’s also very likely that it had something to do with Covid-19. Putting off medical checkups is not a new phenomenon, of course, but the scale of deferred care doctors have seen in the last year is unique. The CDC estimates that as many as 41% of adults delayed or avoided medical care because of concerns related to Covid. The reasons were abundant: fears about visiting health care facilities and bringing home the virus, burnout from too much work, the struggle to balance work and childcare, or the loss of employer-based health insurance. With all of these factors stressing people out, it’s understandable that routine checkups got pushed back. Even some doctors deferred their own self-care. The result, however, can be bad for your health, as well as your finances. That’s why health care leaders are urging Americans to get back into the habit of regularly seeing their doctors. Leah Rothman, D.O., is a family physician and the Northern California regional medical director for One Medical, a national advanced primary care provider. From Day One spoke with her about the risks of deferred care and how we can all safely return to making timely visits to our clinicians. Excerpts: What is deferred care? Deferred care is a reaction to Covid. We know that a lot of people during sheltering-in-place orders deferred care for things that were active issues, new things that may have popped up, chronic issues, things that they had a diagnosis for–or even things that were preventative. Because the threat of Covid was looming so large, there was so much fear and anxiety and uncertainty as to whether or not the health-care setting was a safe place to interact with. Is this a phenomenon unique to Covid? I think Covid has really accentuated the concept of, “I have a health care question. Am I going to be motivated to act on that question by seeking the guidance of a clinician?” In the past, I'd say delaying care was intermittent, but not nearly as large. Deferred care in the past was predominantly influenced by access. So if you had a clinical question but the next available appointment wasn't until a month out, you'd say, “Ah, what's the point? It'll probably be better by then.” So barriers to access in primary care and medicine, I think, was previously the largest influencer of whether or not somebody would engage. Who has been deferring their health care and why? I would be hard pressed to come up with a group that hasn't been deferring care. Adolescents defer care because a lot of times adolescents are drawn in when they're required to see a doctor for sports physicals. I've seen young adults defer care because they're working from home and they want to stay safely in their bubble. I've seen parents defer care for those same reasons, with the addition of “How do I manage everything that's going on at home?” I've seen a lot of elders defer care because they feel like they are in the highest-risk group of contracting or having a very negative impact from Covid. I couldn't tell you that there's a single group that's reliably come in during the pandemic and said, “This is great, your waiting rooms are empty, and I'm happy to be here.” Leah Rothman, D.O., is a family physician with the primary care provider One Medical (Photo courtesy of One Medical) Have physicians, yourself included, deferred care? Yes. I will say that not sheepishly or apologetically. I think it's really important for us to acknowledge that amid the fears and uncertainty, the health-care team was not outside of that. We too had all of the same information the general public had, and there were big gaps of time where we didn't know what the risk of coming to work was, or what the risks that we ourselves might bring to others. For my own personal example, I forwent any dental-cleaning appointments in the year of 2020. It was related to that concern or the potential guilt that I would have if I exposed somebody, because here I am interacting with others with Covid testing or treating for Covid. What are the dangers of deferring even the most routine health-care appointments? There are a couple of things I think of as the downstream effects. The first one is that the intention of screening is to identify things early, before they get more difficult, before they get messy, before they get too big to recover from. You want to find something early so that you can make changes early and prevent it from being more costly. The other thing that can happen is just not diagnosing something. So something that may have been found and prevented from becoming a cancer is now a cancer. And just that diagnosis alone, even if it's treatable, is something that really looms large on people's psyche. What could be the long-term effects of delayed care for communities and populations? What plays out in the community is highlighted by deferred care for chronic conditions. Let's say an individual has elevated blood pressure and they're seeing that their blood pressure at home is not what their provider told them is the goal, but they're not inclined to go into the health care setting. This becomes a ticking time bomb. Rather than address it early on to bring an uncontrolled blood pressure under control, it might progress to the level of being an acute issue where this person has chest pain and needs ER care. The message we've been trying to get out throughout Covid is ensuring that people know the safety of the care that they can get in a primary care setting, so they're not postponing their own needs to the point that they have to go to the hospital, which we'd like to decongest so they can care for the most ill. But it’s also so they themselves don't have to go through the very high stakes and real risks. What’s the first appointment someone should schedule if they’ve been deferring care for the last year? There's no wrong visit. Even if you haven't been seen in a year, even if you think your health is optimal, there is a visit for you, and that is an annual wellness exam. It's a great way to just get a tune-up on knowledge and screening and then set you up for success for another year. An annual wellness exam is intended to allow a conversation between the clinician and the individual to take stock of their current lifestyle and habits that will inform their health today and in the future. What are the screening tests that you are eligible for? What are the vaccines that you might be due for? What are the over-the-counter medications you're taking? And is it safe with the frequency with which you're using them? The other thing that we've seen a lot of is deferred care around mental health, whether it was your concerns around Covid itself, the isolation that you may have felt and depression from a grief response–if you lost a loved one, a neighbor, a family member–or just the anxiety of saying, “Oh my gosh, I've lost any sense of organization to my time, I work at home, I live at home, I do child care at home, I'm a home teacher. I didn't sign up for any of this.” Pretty overwhelming. Primary care is a great place to go when you need to take stock of how those thoughts and emotions or feelings are influencing your health or influencing your relationships and maybe even your productivity or your sleep. The beauty of primary care is that there's always something to come in for. And it's always the right place for any clinical question. If you've thought, “I'm going to Google this,” then the primary care provider is the right place to go with that question. To what extent can virtual-care visits take the place of in-office visits? I am delighted to say almost seamlessly for a large number of conditions. It’s about having a dialogue and the clinician asking probing questions around it and then coming up with what the plan is. In a number of instances, the exam is not the highest-value item for that discussion. So for people who aren't able to come into the office, remote visits with One Medical are a really wonderful way to stay connected. Rather than be uncertain about which one to book, I welcome everybody to book for a remote visit and know that I as a clinician will guide you if an office visit is truly warranted. When is it safe for someone to resume their in-office health-care visits? Today! It has been safe for a very long time to come into a doctor's office. I know each office comes up with its own tools to de-risk the office. There is not a time where I could tell you that a health-care setting is a zero-risk experience, but all of the tools that we use significantly lower the risk. Offices are a very safe place to come, not only because of the tools that we have in place, but the knowledge that we have gained over a year’s worth of information about Covid. How will your relationship with patients and your relationship with your profession change post-Covid? While empathy, relationship building, and interest have always been important, the opportunity for us to invite the questions and really bring our own humility into the room as clinicians and say, “Yep, that happened to me too.” What else do you want people to know about resuming regular health checks? I really want to encourage people to know that our offices should always be a place where there's no judgment. We can offer validation and humility as clinicians that we ourselves have had the same struggles, that we are not above them. We can use that as a bonding moment to say, “Yep, we've been there.” The important thing is not to have a lot of self-judgment around it, but rather know that we can partner together to build a plan to get back to what your idea of optimal health is. I really want to encourage people to return to that clinical consultation, knowing that you have a champion who's looking out for your health. There really isn't any substitute for the primary care clinician who knows your health and who can make an informed recommendation. They know what's in the background and not just what's on the surface. Having a person in your corner, having a conductor of the orchestra, a coach in the room, is a great way to know that you're making really informed decisions that are based on the best evidence we have today. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story, One Medical. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Emily Nonko | July 07, 2021

Social Impact: Finding the Right Partner to Make a Difference

When the arrival of Covid-19 pushed AT&T to rethink its social-impact work, it was a “back-to-basics moment,” according to Neil Giacobbi, who develops and leads philanthropic and communications initiatives for the company. Giacobbi began with questions around the social-impact work already aligned with the company’s products and how the company could invest in work that reflects its public perception. “For AT&T,” he said, “that’s connectivity.” “There’s a lot of people who don’t have access that’s affordable or accessible where they live,” he continued. With the county’s digital divide on stark display during the pandemic, AT&T focused on solutions, including partnerships with nonprofits like Connected Nation. “We’ve seen a honing of our company’s portfolio to reflect that.” Giacobbi joined four expert panelists for a From Day One webinar, “How Companies Can Find and Vet the Right Partner for Social Impact,” moderated by Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman. The group assessed how much Covid-19 and last year’s social-justice movement has affected corporate giving and, in moving forward, how to determine the best practices for companies to find partners to support meaningfully giving back. Brittany Hill, founder of Accelerist, a company designed to boost social-impact partnerships and strategies, kicked off the conversation with an analysis of brands and social impact in a post-pandemic world. Among the findings of a survey of U.S. consumers: 64% said they believe brands should take stands on social issues, 73% feel more positive about a brand that supports causes, and 62% consider a company’s commitment to causes when considering employment opportunities. The majority of those surveyed felt that companies should focus their support on five or fewer organizations in order to maximize impact. Asked to choose the best way for companies to support nonprofits, 33% chose monetary donations, while 31% wanted a more holistic approach that included elements like event sponsorships, engagement efforts, and social-media advocacy. “We are seeing partnerships being forged for the greater purpose of solving a societal challenge,” Hill said. “Oftentimes nonprofit organizations can serve as experts on a social issue that perhaps a company is interested in, or looking to make progress on.” She called these new partnerships “a huge shift that I think has been a long time coming and is here to stay.” Panelists agreed. Victoria Hay, director of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for AIG Life & Retirement, said the company examined how it partnered with nonprofits “to figure out how to take that from a transactional partnership to one that was transformational.” One key way, she added, was by implementing skills-based volunteer programs with nonprofit partners. Speaking on social impact, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company and Neil Giacobbi of AT&T. Middle row, from left: Brittany Hill of Accelerist, Shelley Silva of TD Bank, and Victoria Hay of AIG Life & Retirement. Bottow row: Kathleen Owsley of the Bosch Foundation (Image by From Day One) Companies differ on how they make decisions about social-impact work. Hay, for example, is a “one-woman team” who collaborates with employee resource groups (ERGs) for ideas to be spearheaded at the executive level. Shelley Sylva, SVP and head of U.S. social impact at TD Bank, oversees a 40-person team that’s organized regionally. She stressed the importance of recruiting experts. TD’s team includes an art curator, environmentalists, a health-equity expert, and a chief medical officer. “We do let our experts bring, and bubble up, new and inventive partnerships and then we talk about it as a leadership team,” she said. Hill shared Accelerist’s data on the types of causes people care about most. “We’ve obviously seen a shift in the past 15 months,” she said. Long-running causes like education, mental health and the environment have been joined more recently by social justice and health equity. “What’s really resonating [with stakeholders] are the more specific, the more tangible–what is that tangible impact that companies can make on these various issues?” Hill added that “360 engagement” around employee’s needs can be more powerful than simply giving back to causes they care about. She gave the example of employees who care specifically about mental health–and the company responding by creating programs around its philanthropy by working with nonprofit partners and offering virtual engagement opportunities. Panelists stressed the importance of building programs that reflect employee’s passions and interests. Hay spoke about the effectiveness of matching-grant programs; last year AIG Life & Retirement increased its match cap as well as paid volunteer days. Sylva’s team at TD Bank built a matching-grant program so that employees could help raise money for the cause of their choice. “That program, virtually, has been insane,” she noted. “My team’s job is figuring out how to get to ‘yes’ within the constructs of our program.” Kathleen Owsley, president of the Bosch Community Fund, the social-impact arm of the appliance and engineering company, noted the opportunity of connecting corporate giving to employee skill sets. During the pandemic some of the company’s engineers retrofitted a van for an animal shelter that had to limit its capacity. “I made a grant on behalf of those employees doing that on behalf of their own passions to do so,” she said. Owsley said about 70% to 75% of her foundation’s giving is focused on local communities, steered through community advisory committees. Giacobbi added that AT&T’s workforce is getting younger, and “the expectations aren’t that volunteering and philanthropy will satisfy their desire for social impact, they want to see the company’s business practice and products deliver that social impact to the consumer.” The company, for example, made a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2035 and is also supporting companies on its network “to use our engineering expertise to achieve renewable and less carbon emission from their energy consumption within their company.” The panel’s conversation progressed to the issue of measuring the impact of their effects. “I’d say that it’s this mix of qualitative versus quantitative data,” Hay said. For a financial-literacy course that AIG Life & Retirement underwrites, the company looks at the scores of the students who take the course as well as feedback from participants. “I think you build the evaluation process into your agreement, so there’s no surprises,” Sylva added. “We don’t just write a check anymore.” Agreements can include impact reports throughout the partnership. “I think the key is open and honest communications with these partners,” she said. Impact measurement should be paired with public awareness of the work, according to Giacobbi. That could be through measuring social media, research, and polling. “If we have a partner who has a social-media following, how does this particular subject rank on social media?” he posed. “For your shareholders and your employees, you need to demonstrate that there’s some impact above and beyond the social impact, and that it drives the company’s brand.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Accelerist. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.