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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.

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 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.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | July 03, 2021

Travel Is Coming Back. Will the Workers Be There Too?

In the post-pandemic era, leisure travel has taken off like a skyrocket. As the July 4 weekend approached this week, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), reported screening 2.15 million airline passengers on July 1, up 3% from the same day in the pre-pandemic summer of 2019. Hotels are on the comeback too. Occupancy in late June reached the highest level since October 2019. The surge is likely to continue. In a survey, 60% of Americans said they plan to travel more this year than they did in 2019. This is great news for the travel and hospitality industries, but now they face a new challenge: After drastically cutting employees during the pandemic, can they bring back their workforces swiftly and smoothly enough to meet demand? The airline industry, for its part, is going full throttle. Delta Air Lines has announced plans to hire and train 1,000 new pilots by next summer and 1,300 reservations agents by fall. For hotels, however, the recovery is a more gradual and complicated one, in part because the lucrative business-travel market is proving slower to recover than leisure travel. At the same time, some workers have been reluctant to return to the workforce. Luke Marble, who leads compensation and benefits for InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the organization behind such brands as Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn, spoke with me about the journey of bringing staff up to full strength at From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” What incentives will bring employees back–and attract new ones? Marble said his HR philosophy is based in compassion, and he hasn’t forgotten who he’s there to support. “I think it's about culture. IHG puts hospitality above everything else, and we hopefully treat our employees like guests,” he said. Speaking about the hospitality workforce: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, left, and Luke Marble of InterContinental Hotels Group (Image by From Day One) That philosophy came into play in the early days of the pandemic, when hotel revenues plummeted and IHG had to make difficult decisions about the 400,000 people it employs in 6,000 hotels in more than 100 countries. “That was such a tough thing to determine how to do in the last year,” Marble said. “Do you furlough? Do you terminate? What's the right thing to do just to support another human being to the best of your ability?” While many companies in the hospitality industry laid off large swaths of their labor forces, Marble said IHG chose to furlough workers instead. “We said ‘You're on furlough,’ and we made a conscious effort to ensure that whatever subsidy we could provide as a company would not violate the benefits they receive from federal and state programs. And I believe we've treated our employees to the best extent humanly possible.” The choice to furlough rather than terminate may make it easier for IHG, compared to competitors, to bring back workers. But Marble said it’s still a challenge. Millions of employees remain out of the workplace as a result of lingering health concerns, lack of child care, and evolving worker preferences about what kind of work they want to do. By and large during the pandemic, Marble said IHG was able to keep many workers on full-time at 30 or more hours per week, plus benefits, despite sluggish bookings, but the company has struggled to keep hours consistent for many hotel employees. “Without the revenue coming in, it's difficult for us to guarantee the hours that people need both for benefits and for compensation,” he said. “But on top of that, we have the programs that are available within states and different geographic regions that may not make it attractive to come back unless you can guarantee that, and we're working primarily with that in specific locations.” More than three million women have left the workforce in the U.S. as a result of the pandemic, and IHG is making specific changes to encourage their return to work. “We definitely recognize the stress that the current environment has placed on working mothers and potential mothers and families in general, and we're doing the best we can to address those concerns. And for the most part, I think our strategy has been successful.” The InterContinental Hotel in Cannes, France (Photo by Missalgong/iStock by Getty Images) The strategy includes discounts and subsidies for child care, expanded paid parental leave (now a minimum of eight weeks at 100% pay) and expanded short-term disability to birth mothers (now a minimum of 14 weeks at 100% pay). IHG is doing its best to accommodate new preferences for working arrangements as well, Marble said. The company been able to give corporate employees flexible schedules, but IHG is still figuring out remote work arrangements for those who want to move to a state outside their office location. “I do recognize that some companies have come out and said you can work anywhere. But I don't know how they do that. Some of those companies have much larger bank accounts that allow them to do things quicker. For us, we're gonna have to be a little bit reticent to allow that much opening.” Workers have said they want new and expanded health benefits as well. Marble acknowledged the importance of those needs, but was frank about the tension between the usefulness of those incentives and their cost. The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates that employer health-plan costs could rise as much as 5.3% in 2021. For a company the size of IHG, that cost is significant. “IHG runs a $100 million health care budget. So a 5.3% increase is five million bucks,” said Marble. “And while the company picks up 70% of that cost, that's $3.5 million in cost against the P&L, and the employees have to pick up another $1.5 million. Our job is to provide benefits as stable and as good as we can without disruption to them, and that's a responsibility I take very personally.” The stubbornly slow return of business travel is another variable in the industry’s planning. Business travelers normally help fill IHG hotels Monday through Thursday–leisure travelers tend to dominate the weekends–and Marble supposes it could take more than a year for business to return to recover its normal rhythm. This creates staff scheduling problems. “How do you staff a hotel for two or three days of work versus shifts of work that used to have to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week?” he said. “Even though there were different types of travel, the hotels work consistently at a certain level of occupancy, and we're going to struggle with that.” This means that drawing employees back to work will have to be a steady process, with no sudden moves, Marble said. “Our revenue is a little bit volatile right now. We have to recognize that, and we can't be reactive,” he said. “We have to be calm and contemplative about how we address this. I probably will for quite some time.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Angelica Frey | June 30, 2021

Workers Want Better Benefits. What Can Employers Deliver?

“If people are stressed on the job, they're unproductive and distracted,” said Lori Lucas succinctly. That cause and effect seem to be very much in play in the Summer of 2021 as workers emerge from the pandemic and venture into a new world of hybrid work. Lucas is the president and CEO of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, which seeks to provide data-driven insight into retirement, health care, and benefits tied to financial security. She continued: “So employers are offering benefit programs because they have bottom-line connotations. The point of view is not just altruistic.” Indeed, employers seem to be shifting toward more generous policies, especially in the realm of family-friendly benefits. Between 2018 and 2021, Lucas observed, companies offering paid maternity and paternity leave increased from 68% of employers to 73%. Paid leave for elder care rose from 38% of employers to 42%, she said, speaking on the evolving benefits picture as part of From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” In post-Covid times, benefits have become one of the biggest recruiting and retention challenges. Traditional benefits as we know them, such as two to three weeks of paid vacation and standard health insurance, do not cover the impact Covid had on the American workforce. But change is afoot across the board. “Workers have been remote for 15 months, and now they're navigating how to get back into a regular workforce situation, and that is clearly a moving target," said Lucas. In her institute’s annual workplace wellness survey, the focus among corporate employees has been on work-life boundaries and mental health. Many feel that their employers are not communicating clearly about the benefits in these areas. The situation is quite different, however, for furloughed employees, who are more interested in emergency funds and savings. “Just how do I make ends meet?” they’re asking themselves, Lucas said. And while student-loan repayment programs have factored prominently in EBRI's reports in recent years, in the latest survey the focus was strongly oriented toward emergency funds, debt-management services, and other ways for employers to help workers manage their financial situations. A conversation on benefits with, from left, moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company and Loris Lucas of the Employee Benefit Research Institute (Image by From Day One) Despite the increased attention from employers, especially in the realm of financial wellness, there has been a disconnect between what the employers think they’re offering and how employees feel about that on the receiving end. “Interestingly, maybe even more alarming from an employer perspective,” Lucas said, “is the fact that while employers report that they see increases in engagement with the financial-wellness initiatives, according to the survey, only three of 10 employees feel that their employer’s efforts to help them manage their overall well-being since Covid-19 has increased,” she said. “So they're not seeing it, even though employers are saying they're doing it.” Lucas believes that holistic programs are key for effectiveness, along with back-and-forth communication about what’s effective and what workers want. Companies should be “encouraging champions within the organization to help the word out,” followed by “strategies to measure the suggestions in order to calibrate the program according to what's working and what's not working,” Lucas said. Most employers want their benefits to change employee behavior in ways that helps workers help themselves over the long term. “Especially with financial wellness solutions that they're offering, they want people to do better in their financial lives, they want them to do better with their retirement savings,” Lucas said. “It could be they want to see reduced absenteeism, because of less stress. They want to see reduced turnover,” she said. “So that really speaks to the need for an empirical analysis: What do I see in the data? Am I seeing changes? Am I seeing people contribute more to their 401(k) plan, take fewer loans and withdrawals?” That kind of assessment calls for more than employee surveys. It means “identifying the metrics where you want to see changes, and then measuring them,” Lucas said. “But still, the norm tends to be surveys, because it is challenging to do that kind of detailed analysis.” Of course, there's a cost to improving benefits. “When we talk to employers, they're realistic about the fact that they have to justify the cost of these programs. The pie is only so big for compensation and benefits,” said Lucas. “They want to help employees from an altruistic sense, but there are also goals they want to see in terms of employee productivity, absenteeism reduction. Some have gone so far as to create an ROI metric.” Lucas cites the example of a call center affiliated with an organization she was working with, where workers were leaving because they were getting a few extra dollars per hour somewhere else. The company’s response was to implement a student-loan repayment program. “They actually reduced turnover by a measurable number, directly linked to bottom-line costs in recruiting people,” says Lucas. “I think to the extent employers can do more of that, figuring out what the return on investment is that they want, and then being able to measure it, this can help to justify the cost and keep these programs going strong.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | June 26, 2021

Employee Well-being: What We Learned in the Pandemic

Dr. Hemalee Patel, an internal-medicine physician at One Medical, has noticed that some people take issue with the phrase “holistic approach to health,” dismissing it as slightly woo-woo. “When people hear holistic, they make light of it, but regarding holistic lifestyle practices, you can't address one without the other," Patel said. Taking the word holistic seriously, she continued, "[is] an opportunity for people to become a little bit in tune with the fact that there's a ripple effect in everything that you do. If you're feeling mental fatigue and stress, at some point that can lead to a cardiac condition–and might also stem into diabetes." Patel spoke in a panel discussion exploring the concept of a new definition for employee well-being, part of From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” Patel’s words rang especially true now that employers find themselves reassessing their benefits packages and their underlying company culture in the wake of the pandemic’s unprecedented disruption of work life. It's an area with a lot of opportunity for growth, since only 21% of organizations reported in a Deloitte survey that their well-being strategy is “both comprehensive and integrated into the way that they design work and develop workforce experience.” By definition, a holistic philosophy about employee well-being calls for a multi-pronged approach. More insights from the panel: Burnout Is the Basso Continuo of Post-Covid Workplace Culture While productivity increased during Covid-19, especially among knowledge workers doing their jobs from home, the resulting lack of work-life boundaries has been blamed for another kind of epidemic: burnout. Essential workers, meanwhile, suffered their own kind of exhaustion. Jim McMurtray, director of the Shared Services Contact Center at Piedmont Healthcare, said that the company had a notable number of employee departures in the past month. “When there was talk of another surge, that was the tipping point for a lot of people,” he said. Jeanne Walsh, manager of global benefits at Boston Scientific, said that within the company’s HR team, there is a separate focus that exclusively deals with the burnout of HR employees, who handled furloughs, shutdowns, and other crises. “We had different parts of our workforce impacted with different challenges, but all of it in an incredibly dynamic and stressful environment,” Walsh said. “We're not back to normal, but now it's like trying to get ready to jump back into what the new normal looks like.” Exploring new approaches to employee well-being, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Jeanne Walsh of Boston Scientific, and Dr. Hemalee Patel of One Medical. Bottom row, from left: Jim McMurtray of Piedmont Healthcare and Davida Rivens of E4E Relief (Image by From Day One) The matter is dicier than it might sound. Alongside burnout, people have now settled into a precise set of habits. “Transition back is a primary worry,” said Davida Rivens, VP of product management and sales at E4E Relief, which administers employee financial-relief funds. Workers are saying, “I've gotten used to this, don't force me back if I don't have to,” she said, advising: “Allow them to find the time to find the child care to make sure that life works.” Well-being Is Not Just Physical or Mental. It’s Also About Finances When corporate HR leaders hear more about employee financial relief, “they run in droves to try to set it up,” said Rivens. “Interestingly, relief programs have not been seen as a traditional benefit program in the past,” she said. “Over the years we've seen that change.” The purpose of such programs is to provide cash grants to workers facing a financial emergency, but E4E Relief tries to bring a holistic approach to financial well-being too. “We know that with relief, $500 dollars in emergency relief, most people don't have that in their savings,” Rivens continued. “So when we give these grants out, are we preventing other negative things from happening? We want to bridge the gap, but is there something else that could have been preventable?” Student-loan debt is another threat to well-being. Piedmont Healthcare’s McMurtray said the company’s student-loan repayment program is a more effective tool than, say, sign-up bonuses, because helping with the burden of student-loan debt affects employee retention more directly. “What we hear about how it affects turnover is unbelievable,” he said. “If people can take advantage, they will stay. I hear from many sources that student-loan forgiveness results in a 25% reduction [in turnover]," he said. “Fidelity has a really nice platform, with monthly reminders [showing] the trajectory for the loan. It’s a very visible tool that's also quite easy to set up. The ROI will pay for itself.” Smart Platforms Can Boost Engagement There's often a disconnect between the health benefits that employers feel they're providing and what employees feel they're getting, since it can be challenging for workers to wade through a whole list of benefits. A benefit hub with a well-oiled algorithm can make the daunting benefit-navigation process less frustrating. “The biggest game changer for us has been Castlight. It's a hub for all benefits,” said McMurtray, adding that the platform also allows workers to log in across different services without having to remember every single password they’ve set up. “The biggest thing it's done is for the health-plan navigation.” Similarly, Boston Scientific’s Walsh praises Quantum Health for “being the conduit of what we know as a really complex health care system and really taking on the back-and-forth between providers and insurance companies. We've gotten tremendously positive feedback,” she said. Help Employees Set Boundaries, Especially in Remote Work “I teach our sleep classes at One Medical as well. And I've never seen a more well-attended group class,” said Patel, the physician. “I am very aware of how much our personal and professional lives bleed in. And it was the case pre-pandemic, but definitely during the pandemic–and that really affected people's quality of sleep, their ability to turn off. And it was fun for me and really satisfying as a provider to start to have my patients create boundaries around what is personal, what is professional, and start to bring more awareness to the fact that they are at home. The effects from a health standpoint have been very impressive.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 24, 2021

For Workers Baffled by Benefits, an App Brings It All Together

Even before the pandemic, Valmont, a company that makes infrastructure products–think irrigation equipment, steel utility poles, and windmill support structures–was looking for a better way to communicate benefits to its global workforce of more than 10,000. As health plans and retirement plans changed, Valmont’s employee-benefits team, led by Jennifer Paisley, found employees were getting lost trying to find what they needed. I spoke with Paisley, Valmont’s VP of total rewards and HR operations, about how her team is using a mobile app in tandem with print mailers and brochures to increase employee awareness and use of benefits. Our one-on-one conversation was part of From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” Paisley’s team first identified the problem in 2019. “We knew that our employees just couldn't remember, ‘Who’s my medical carrier? Who’s my dental carrier? Oh, you added managing student debt–what was their name again?’ We knew employees were struggling because they can’t navigate, they don’t know where to go, they don’t know who the carrier is, and frankly, all the benefits [they have],” she said. When employees can’t remember carriers, when they don’t know what’s being offered, they’re not going to take advantage of what’s available. So the HR team started talking to employees to encourage them to use their benefits programs. But what they kept hearing was, “I’m not the decision maker. You’re going to have to talk to my wife” or “That’s my significant other,” Paisley said. (Valmont’s workforce is 83% male.) Speaking on benefits, from left: moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza and Jennifer Paisley of Valmont Industries (Image by From Day One) That year, the Valmont started working on a way to consolidate benefits into a single source and designing a plan to communicate what’s available. Valmont partnered with Green Circle Life, an HR software-as-a-service platform, to build Valmont on the Go, a web app that consolidates all employee benefits in a single digital location. They rolled it out to their U.S. employees at the end of 2020 and plan to expand it to other countries in late 2021 or early 2022. Valmont on the Go has two main sections. One is a benefits dashboard, which includes medical and dental plans and eligibility information. The other includes optional tools and programs like disability insurance, tobacco-cessation programs, and access to paystubs. The app is also how employees and their families can access free coaching for stress reduction, nutrition, and other health programs. “We tried to do a one-stop-shop approach,” Paisley said. The mobile app has been used to initiate communication with employees via text and push notifications, but not everything is digital, Paisley noted. Her team is also using take-home brochures and mailers to reach the decision-makers in the home, and it will likely remain a part of their communications plan. “We’re definitely taking a multi-channel approach. We know that it gets the family members more involved,” she said. To stretch their communications budget, Paisley’s team worked with Valmont's medical vendor United Healthcare to take advantage of a communication-services credit that’s built into their contract. Likewise, they asked their dental vendor MetLife to send out postcards advertising enrollment periods, which were co-branded with Valmont to remind workers of the connection to their employer. Valmont on the Go will also help the HR team refine and develop more benefits offerings. Last year, responding to the pandemic, the company rolled out a subsidy for backup child, elder and pet care. Despite promoting the program to employees and offering it for a year, no one used the subsidy, which Paisley attributes to employees relying instead on extended family for those roles. Valmont eventually retired the benefits and reallocated the resources to other programs. The mobile app will make it easier to test new benefits like this and decide whether employees value them–or not. Paisley sees the long-term potential of the app as an additional communications channel as adoption grows–about 1,000 employees use the app currently–using it to notify employees of plant closures during natural disasters, for example. “I mean, we have scratched the surface.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Emily Nonko | June 23, 2021

Inside the Transformation of Health and Wellness Benefits

This spring, Ovia Health released a study analyzing stress levels of parents, comparing how they felt pre- and post-pandemic. The findings: Lack of child care, financial stress, remote work and schooling, and domestic violence were taking a major toll. The most significant increases in anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation were among women age 35-39, those within the BIPOC community (especially Black mothers), and first-time mothers. Such findings should not go unacknowledged by employers, says Amy Page, a regional sales director with Ovia Health, a family-health benefits platform. “Working parents need support now more than ever,” she said, “and they’re really looking to their employers to meet them where they are.” Page joined four other speakers for a conversation on the transformation of health-and-wellness benefits driven by Covid-19, moderated by Insider Careers Editor Caroline Hroncich as part of From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.” The time is ripe, panelists agreed, to increase focus on issues like maternal and family health, mental health, and a holistic integration of work and well-being. They also offered solutions and best practices to do so. Ovia Health’s engagement with its members offers insight on what matters most to working parents: “Human understanding with a healthy dose of support, empathy and flexibility,” Page said. That translates into employee needs like flexible work hours, mental-health support, and backup child-care services. Hannah Wilkowski, senior manager of global benefits at BuzzFeed, said the company has relied on its employee-resource groups, especially its parents group, to inform benefits changes. The company offered virtual resources for mental health, parenting, and pediatrics. It also instated backup child care for a certain amount of days per year. An expert conversation on health and wellness, top row from left: moderator Caroline Hroncich of Insider, Kimberly Young of PAE, and Amy Page of Ovia Health. Bottom row from left: Hannah Wilkowski of BuzzFeed, David Kristoff of NetApp, and Alyson Watson of Modern Health (Image by From Day One) BuzzFeed’s most popular innovation, however, has been offering one “self-care day” to every employee each month. “Everyone takes it,” Wilkowski said, partly because the days don’t roll over and can’t be cashed in. “One of the concerns we had before we implemented it was how it would affect productivity,” she said. “As it turns out, it didn’t impact productivity at all. I’d say it improved it.” The offering will be continued post-pandemic, she added. Kimberly Young, VP of global benefits for PAE, an architecture-and-engineering firm, said that offering flexible scheduling has resonated with employees. “We realized the traditional work schedule wasn’t going to fit our employees in this new circumstance,” she said. Flexibility was offered “to meet deadlines in your own time.” Because employees weren’t traveling and taking as much paid time off (PTO), the company implemented “PTO flex,” in which employees buy, sell, or trade their PTO for other benefits, like contributions to their 401(k), paying off student loans, or cashing it out. Mental Health on a Par With Physical Health Alyson Watson, co-founder and CEO of Modern Health, a mental-health-care platform, offered suggestions on how employers could improve benefits in that area. Corporate leaders should acknowledge the difficulties in maintaining work-life harmony in the age of 24/7 communications, remote work, and global workforces. “This whole notion of balance is hard to achieve,” she said. “So how can we create work-life integration in which we support people while they are at work, and whatever it is they’re going through?” By thinking of workers as individuals, companies can start strategizing on different mental-health offerings for different needs. “There’s no one-size-fits-all,” Watson said, affirming the current trend toward more personalized benefits. She suggested that companies think of mental-health needs as similar to our physical-health needs. “How can we get everyone to prioritize their mental health?” she posed. “It’s about offering something that covers that full spectrum and different modalities of care so everyone can engage.” One example offered by Modern Health is Circles, a community-based care offering that provides mental-health support via virtual, provider-led group sessions. Initially created as a resource to extend support and relief at scale at the beginning of Covid–and recognized by Fast Company in its 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards–the resource has evolved into a core offering, supporting people of different backgrounds and life circumstances. Balancing Costs With Comprehensive Support Yet, in the face of ever-rising health-care costs, how can company leaders devise health-benefits plans that are both cost-effective and supportive? David Kristoff, VP of total rewards and HR services for the data-management company NetApp, called this “the eternal question.” With work so fundamentally changing, he believes it’s an opportunity for companies to step back and re-evaluate their programs. At NetApp, “we’re figuring out what is our working model going forward, and how that’s different from what employees are provided today,” he said. “If that means we have to reallocate resources, stop doing some things, or invest in others, that’s what we’re going to do.” Companies can utilize engagement surveys or conduct a needs analysis to see how benefits are performing with their employees, he said. From there, companies should analyze the range of financial forecasts associated with new benefits. “From that, you’re able to build in whatever support mechanisms you might need, whether that’s a change in how medical or health care is set up, or it’s looking at different options for stop-loss or things of that nature,” Kristoff said. Ovia Health’s Page also offered suggestions on how to measure return on investment (ROI). “Thinking about finding solutions that really drive results is a big part of what we do,” she said. “It’s grounded in clinical research and evidence-based curriculum.” Evidence-driven work must be coupled with engagement to make sure employees are aware of the benefits available to them and whether they positively affect them. Using Tech to Boost Access Page also suggested easily-accessible, digital solutions in which companies can measure engagement and impact according to metrics. “We saw, across our member data, that digital coaching and mental-health questions had a 200% increase year over year,” she noted. “We’re able to pass that information to our [corporate] clients and they’re able to think about where else they need to pivot.” Technology tools can also help minimize confusion about benefits packages and engage employees with their options. NetApp, for example, uses a tool for employees to compare health-care options side by side. “It’s a smart investment with the ROI as it gets employees more engaged and gets them to think through the consumer-driven aspects of health care,” Kristoff said. At the close of the discussion, panelists spoke about the importance of flexible benefits that are proactive, as opposed to reactive, and designed to meet employee needs. “Employees are going to remember how companies have treated them during the really hard times that lots of people have had this past year,” Watson said. “It’s really important to consider what your benefits program is communicating about your organization’s values.” 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.

Opinion

How Juneteenth Finally Became a National Holiday

When President Biden signed legislation this week making Juneteenth a national holiday, it marked the swift rise in recognition of the day commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. After decades of delay, the movement gained momentum last summer during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, when U.S. corporations began honoring the day as part of their commitments on behalf of racial justice. Why should it matter for all Americans? “African Americans should not have to bear the burden of this history alone. Nor should Black achievement be something that only African Americans celebrate,” wrote Kevin Young, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A year ago, From Day One published this story on Juneteenth's history and meaning: Spring 2020 will be remembered in corporate circles as a whirlwind of change, with exhausting and exciting pivots by big business. Difficult conversations connected to brand identity and race were being held in the boardrooms of many corporations as weeks of Black Lives Matter protests unfolded. One of the most intriguing outcomes from those conversations is the embracing of Juneteenth, which commemorates a unique moment in American history that many citizens may not have heard about before. Many people are familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln decreed that enslaved persons would now be free. Juneteenth specifically commemorates a day two and a half years later, June 19, 1865, when Gordon Granger, a U.S. Army general, relayed the emancipation orders in Texas, the last state where slaves were liberated. Landing by ship in the city of Galveston, Granger read the order: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.” The order, which affected the lives of about 250,000 people, is based on a document that was re-discovered just this week, according to the Washington Post. The National Archives on Thursday located what appears to be the original “Juneteenth” military order, written “in the ornate handwriting of a general’s aide,” the Post reported. Given current interest in the subject, the Archives staff went looking for the original order, which had not previously surfaced, and found it. David Ferriero, head of the Archives, said of the find: “I think it’s terrific. I think the timing is just amazing.” Over the years, emancipation day has been celebrated across the U.S., initially according to the date each state was liberated, but many historians track the modern, national version to a celebration at the conclusion of the Poor People’s Campaign, held in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Since then, recognition has steadily grown, with Texas in 1980 becoming the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday. Since then, 45 other states and the District of Columbia have officially recognized the day. With that in mind, it’s fascinating to observe how a small but growing number of corporations have responded by adding Juneteenth to the list of holidays and cultural observations that their organizations will observe. The timing of the uprising in favor of racial justice was fortuitous in presenting companies with an opportunity to give employees something symbolic yet tangible: a paid day off. Among the organizations who’ve said “yes” to observing Juneteenth: the National Football League, Nike, Lyft, Target, Twitter and Square. There are a number of reasons why companies have decided to embrace Juneteenth: Companies do not want to be perceived as tone deaf during tumultuous times. It’s highly likely that these organizations already had employees focused on facilitating diversity and inclusion initiatives within the company and that Juneteenth was already a part of the conversation. Staff members may have discussed ways to show Black Americans and other employees of color that the company is interested in learning more about their cultures. Corporate commemorations of Juneteenth may be a part of rebranding culturally insensitive language, visuals, or charactersassociated with the products that the company sells. The corporate response to Black Lives Matter is probably influenced by the lessons learned only a few weeks earlier during the onset of the pandemic, when companies were challenged in their responses to put people first. When asked about how companies would be affected if they failed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis in an empathetic way, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, made the following observation: “Their brand is going to get destroyed. I mean, how you treat your employees today will have more impact on your brand in future years than any amount of advertising, any amount of anything you literally could do. Because, again, we're all suffering from this. Every single person is looking to see how their company is treating them, how their employers are treating family members and friends.” One could make the same argument that companies will be forever branded by how they did (or did not) respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, brands are already dealing with swift positive and negative reactions related to the stance that they take specific to the Black Lives Matter movement and any ancillary conversations associated with the movement. Those conversations need to go beyond the recognition of one day to encompass the daily lives of Black Americans on the other 364. Statistically, blacks earn significantly less than other cohorts. After organizations recognize Juneteenth, will that spur further dialog connected to employee well-being? While Juneteenth is important, ultimately many organizations may find that most employees care just as much about the following issues: Earning more and wage transparency. Employee mobility within the organization. Being treated in a respectful manner at work. Microaggressions and how they affect employee morale. Creating safe spaces to work in and having the ability to speak up without fear of retaliation. In hastily rolling out Juneteenth holidays, corporations may be unintentionally making the mistake of focusing on creating a cultural fix within the company that might not be needed or wanted. As the flurry of companies observing Juneteenth continues, one is left to wonder who was in the room when making the decision to include Juneteenth in the company’s corporate culture. Regardless of the intention, companies need to find ways to facilitate difficult conversations related to race and their corporate culture. Many organizations may find themselves ill-equipped to handle revelations they weren’t expecting related to how their employees experience their workplaces. Ultimately by making Juneteenth a holiday, companies must also embrace the responsibility and reality that their employees will expect more from them and will want the organization to do better moving forward. While it’s wonderful watching people discover what Juneteenth is, the reality of Juneteenth is that it’s a bittersweet moment to commemorate. Don’t forget that for an additional two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Texas remained enslaved. That’s something to consider when you’re thinking about having your company observe Juneteenth. There’s a bigger conversation that has to be had about race and equality in the workplace. Will you be willing to have it? Finally, there is this point to consider. In a note to colleagues, a senior global payroll manager of color had this to say about her company rolling out a Juneteenth observation: "This is an incredibly generous display of thoughtful leadership. I know that as a start-up there is an immense cost associated with this and I am keenly aware that we are in a cost-saving environment. It is also incredibly difficult to navigate the environment in which we now find ourselves. I just wanted to lend my voice to say that with or without observing this particular day, this company has been incredibly gracious and effective in its acknowledgement of the struggles and issues that employees of color may be facing. I have had many discussions with my peers and what things boil down to for many of us is how history will record and remember our actions. Even more, how will we remember our actions when our grandchildren ask us about it. I know that you will be able to look back at your leadership in a positive light.” Your employees are watching and paying attention to the actions that you take. What will you decide to do? Michelle Jackson is mission-driven to help her readers and listeners empower themselves financially, whether it’s by improving their personal finances or learning how to sell what they already know. Michelle runs the website and podcast Michelle Is Money Hungry and is the founder of the Money on the Mountain retreat focused on empowering financially single women, one conversation at a time. When she's not geeking out about personal finance, you can find her hiking in the mountains of Colorado.

Michelle Jackson | June 18, 2021

Angelica Frey | June 17, 2021

Breaking Down Barriers to Build a More Diverse Tech Workforce

When working as a teacher in Pennsylvania, Maasha Kah realized that systemically, the American education system is geared towards helping people prepare to work–in factories. “We have very rote memorization systems, we ask students to sit up straight, put on a uniform, and fall in line. But we know in the tech industry and in Corporate America in general, innovation is the next wave. We have to be creative,” she said this month at a From Day One webinar, “Breaking Down Barriers to Build a More Diverse Tech Workforce.” Kah is now the head of talent outreach at DocuSign, the electronic-signature company. In her role there, an integral part of her focus on creativity and innovation is, in her words, how to make diversity real. “I've spent a lot of time dissecting the HR facets of diversity and inclusion,” she said during the panel conversation, moderated by journalist Lydia Dishman. “So I think a lot about how diversity and inclusion are embedded in our HR practices, even when we don't mention them. So there are the verbal things and the processes that we all agree upon–and there are those unwritten, agreed-upon things that just kind of happen. And I find that in those cracks lies inequity.” In the panel conversation, Kah and three other experts weighed in on the topic of hiring for diversity. Their observations: It's Too Easy to Blame the Pipeline In recent years, tech companies lacking diversity in their workforces have tended to blame a lack of qualified candidates in the talent pipeline from schools to business. Jeffrey Spector, the co-founder of Karat, a company that conducts technical interviews for companies recruiting software engineers, sees blaming the pipeline as a deflection. “It's an excuse that certain companies make because they haven't hit diversity-hiring goals,” he said. “It affords them the opportunity to not look inward, to figure out like, hey, do we have systemic issues going on? Is there sexism or racism in our processes?” “I don't think there is truly a pipeline problem,” said Ivori Johnson, senior manager of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) recruiting at Better.com, a digital home-loan corporation. Johnson sees other factors in play. “When we think about the pipeline, we focus on finding the talent and just ensuring that we have more representation at the top of the funnel,” she said. “The problem that exists is if the process itself is inequitable, if our interviews are already screening out people of color, women, or people with disabilities and other communities. Then the problem is within the process,” she continued. “If we are able to fix the process, and we're able to influence hiring managers to get on board, and also train our recruiters to be able to go out and find the talent–and where they can find it–then we will be more successful.” Speaking on diversity in tech, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company and Jeffrey Spector of Karat. Bottom row, from left: Maasha Kah of DocuSign, Rita Giacalone of Autodesk, and Ivori Johnson of Better.com (Image by From Day One) Rita Giacalone, VP and global head of culture, diversity & belonging at Autodesk, which makes software for 3D design and engineering, offered a broad demographic assessment of the pipeline debate. “Let's take, say, the Black demographic or the Latinx demographic, with the Black demographic being 13% of the U.S. population, Latinx being 18% of the U.S. population, and then let's look at the professional population within these demographic groups,” she said, noting that it's 9% for the Black population and 11% for the Latinx population. “The pipeline problem lies in that delta, and that's systemic in nature. It's in education, it's in access. It's systemic inequity. So the pipeline problem is there.” Remote Work Widens the Talent Pool, But … Giacalone enthusiastically reported that her company was recently able to add to its workforce diversity by hiring a candidate to work on a full-time remote basis, which might not have been possible before the pandemic loosened policies about where workers are located. “You're casting a wider net, you're tapping into talent pools that potentially–out of a choice or out of necessity–can't live in very expensive cities,” she said. Yet the expansion of remote work brings some inequities too, said Kah. “I think the challenge that I would caution–if I could get a bullhorn and just let everybody know, from the mountaintops–is that we have to be thinking about this in terms of being remote-first, versus remote-friendly,” Kah said. She asserted that remote-friendly workplaces have the tendency to create second-class citizens of remote workers by promoting and cultivating the retention of people who are nearest and dearest to the physical office space. “We isolate the office-based leadership.” In contrast, she said, a remote-first policy comes with an inclusive strategy. Inequities in the Interviewing Process Can Be Remedied An issue in the technical interviewing process, Spector believes, is lack of professionalism. People conducting the interviews typically are the employees who have the most time to do so, rather than those who are good at it. Another issue lies with access to information on the part of the job candidate. “Everybody should know exactly what the interviewing process is, what competencies you're assessing for,” Spector said. To level the playing field, Karat offers candidates one redo opportunity. “We'll interview again with a different interviewer or a different question,” he said. “And that has huge impacts on underrepresented talent. We see them do much better in the second interview than the first interview, because now they're like, Oh, now I know what the situation is like.” Similarly, DocuSign gives candidates three different technical questions to answer, each with a different interviewer. “And it's not just based on whether or not you check the box and got it right,” said Kah, “but also your thought process, how you went through the problem, how you were able to explain it, and the way in which you communicated any difficulties and questions that you were able to think through and ask.” This structure helps avoid “a kind of tiebreaker moment,” she said, “where it's like one interviewer says, ‘Yes, this is exactly right. They pass this with flying colors,’ and the other one's like, ‘No, absolutely not, they couldn't figure it out.’” Confirmation Bias Dies Hard More inclusivity comes with challenging the traditionally held notion of what “good” looks like. In the recruiting and hiring process, for example, Spector observed a huge bias against active candidates, meaning those who actively searched for the position rather than being referred by someone the company already knows. “Most of the companies we work for, when we start working with them, interview only about 10% of the people who apply actively, and yet those people do just as well on the interviews as the people that they've sourced,” he said. “So we're kind of constantly pushing them” to be more inclusive, he said. “You should go to 20% or 30%, or a bigger percentage of our population who's not in your network.” A way to get rid of this biased mindset? Johnson suggests starting internally. “If we focus on just trying to recruit as many people from underestimated communities as possible, and we haven't done the work internally, we're just gonna lose them quicker than we hire them,” she said. "So we're starting with educating our employees on: What does diversity mean? What is actually happening in these communities? How can we address our biases and understand what our biases are?” Johnson said. “We're also working with our hiring managers, sharing with them data around where employees are, and what our employee makeup looks like, addressing gaps when it comes to racial and gender diversity, also looking at intersectionality as well, to ensure that our hiring managers are very well-informed, and also our leaders.” It's also advisable to have a paper trail. "Write everything down!” said Kah. “In DEI, and HR in general, we have this tendency to think of it as fluffy science that's nebulous. We need hard facts, data, and to be able to measure success based on where we come from. We talk about embedding DEI everywhere, but don't know the nuts and bolts. It takes intentional seeds to build the trees that we want." Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Feature

How Coaching Got to Be Such a Positive Thing

Years ago, the hiring of a “coach” in a workplace evoked certain sentiments–and few of them were good. Coaches were typically reserved for high-level executives and managers, not regular employees. On top of that, they were often brought in because of a problem with a manager who needed behavioral instruction and correction. Fast-forward to 2021, and the tables have turned dramatically. Coaching has acquired a far more positive reputation–and in practice typically means something almost entirely different. Ambitious employees are clamoring to be coached. Companies are adopting the practice at record rates. Coaching’s goals, availability, and even fundamental perception across the workforce have undergone a revolution. It’s now seen as a highly desirable benefit to career growth. This was happening even before the Covid pandemic, but the shift to remote work has accelerated the process, highlighting the impact of technological advances in delivering the service. At the same time, experts across the field say they’ve noticed other distinct trends, including a move toward democratization, a broader array of topic areas, and a proliferation of new vendors. All told, coaching has grown as a profession, with increasing numbers of certified coaches and courses to train them. From Day One talked with HR executives and coaches to see how the field has evolved–and how it’s influencing workplace culture. What Is Coaching Now? The rise of coaching is part of a greater emphasis in Corporate America on continuous learning, which has myriad benefits, including the development of future leaders, the teaching of new skills, and greater diversity and inclusion. Yet the diversification of coaching has created blurred lines, changing buzzwords, and debate about precise definitions. Coaching, mentoring, training, and consulting are all separate practices, but they can also be combined to some extent. The traditional definition of coaching, said Alec Levenson, a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, had a “very specific connotation” and almost always meant “executive coaching, the idea being that, by the time somebody gets to be in an executive role, a managerial role, they’re two or three rungs up the hierarchy.” Coaching was sometimes done by other high-level executives who could empathize with a leader’s situation and advise them on corporate decisions and very specific situations. Coaching now, however, tends to involve targeted, one-to-one conversations that are goal-oriented and designed to help participants follow their own paths and come to their own conclusions. The scope of topics is more holistic than in the past, including coping mechanisms, goal determination, and a plethora of other subjects that can be applied not only to an employee’s current position but further career development. According to Bravely, a coaching platform, the topics most often discussed by the firm’s users break down along these lines: performance and role (25%), general stress (21%), manager conflict (17%), promotion guidance (15%), and company culture and environment (10%). In a corporate setting, coaching is almost always done by professional, accredited coaches, HR leaders said. “I think when you talk about certified coaches, [organizations like the] International Coaching Federation (ICF), they’re pretty much aligned in what coaching is,” said Jackie Bassett, director of people strategy at University of Chicago Medicine. However, she added, “When you talk with leaders throughout organizations, you get definitions that are all over the map.” In practicing their craft, coaching professionals typically take “a developmental approach, based on asking versus telling,” observed Bassett, adding that such coaches do not focus on “telling them what to do, not even giving advice, but really asking the right questions to help them come up with the answers themselves. The coach doesn’t have to be a subject-matter expert; in fact, it’s often harder if they are.” The process, she added, “enables self-discovery [that] can be applied to any future situation. I passionately believe that it can be the most powerful and most under-utilized tool there is.” Coaching is quite different from traditional management-training sessions, observed Fidelma Butler, VP of talent and organization development at ZenDesk, which makes customer-service software. “A generic training course, where people all gather from different experiences and different backgrounds to study a particular topic for a couple of days, or even to view an online course together, that’s standard content,” Butler said. “That’s the same, no matter who the individual is to do the training, whereas coaching is hyper-personalized. It’s much more about meeting the people where they are at a certain point in time. It’s much more customizable. The individual gets to drive the agenda of their development and coaching, rather than the organization or the person who developed the course content.” Democratization: Coaching Becomes More Accessible Realizing just how beneficial it can be, employers have embraced coaching for a wider range of employees who show potential, not just for the elite or those who fall short of expectations. “Coaching used to be done only for people who were in trouble and was done for remedial reasons,” said Jeanne Schad, global talent solutions and strategy practice leader at Randstad RiseSmart, a talent-mobility consultancy. No longer. “It’s an interesting thing that rarely happens in business–that the same word has grown to have the opposite meaning,” said Schad, who is also the founder of a professional-coaching network. Now, “you get coaching and it’s a reward. More and more people are seeing the benefit of having a sounding board to access outside of themselves and outside of their traditional management structure,” she said. As a result, “many organizations are united around the idea that they want to democratize coaching, they want to make it available to everybody.” Besides the practical impact of enhancing employee skills, the broader application of coaching sends a message inside and outside a company that it’s a good place to work because it cares about the growth of its employees, said Stefanie K. Johnson, associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business and author of Inclusify: the Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams. Companies are saying, “We see you as being a high-potential employee; there’s obviously a strength we want you to invest in,” Johnson said. “I feel like people are stoked about it.” Younger Workers Welcome the Advice While older workers may still see coaching’s negative connotations–Did I do something wrong?–younger workers in particular take a pro-active approach to it. “People want coaching,” Johnson said. “It’s seen as an opportunity to improve skills, especially among millennials, who are very focused on getting better, improving.” Bassett agreed, connecting the trend to generational culture. “A lot of the younger generation are more used to these ongoing, real-time feedback conversations.” The individual and institutional results, seen firsthand with more and more regularity, just drives the popularity of coaching, experts said. “When you experience it, it’s hard to describe with any other word than transformational,” said Schad. “It can really make a difference in how you see your situation when it is reflected by somebody on the outside, and that is unique to coaching.” Coaching as a Blossoming Career As coaching has grown in popularity, so has the population of coaches themselves, a phenomenon which brings with it both pros and cons, according to insiders. “During the last recession, the number of coaching training schools jumped dramatically. When I did training in 2005-06, I think there were 40-something ICF-certified programs I could do,” Schad said. “By 2010 or 2011, there were over 2,000. The industry of coach training sprang out of nowhere. I think it was indicative of the attraction and appeal as a career option,” particularly for experienced people who may embrace the profession as a “third career or early retirement,” she said. Not all of those individuals should necessarily be coaching, though, according to some experts, who complain about a too-broad definition of coaching and a lack of oversight when it comes to credentials. “I actually think that there might be too many coaching-accreditation bodies,” ZenDesk’s Butler said. “If you’re an individual looking for a coach, it’s very hard to start at a blank page and look for that. There are very low barriers to entry for people who want to become coaches and the quality of coaching can vary massively.” That said, however, the proliferation of coaching choices can mean that “there is a coach out there for everyone,” Butler said. Technology Brings Access–and Affordability As the availability of coaches increases, so does the price range, while apps and other innovations have made it easier for employers to find good coaching fits and also provid access to them. In pre-pandemic times, there were “a lot of coaches flying around the country to meet with these folks,” Johnson observed. Since then, “coaches are doing more virtual meetings. It’s just a smaller footprint and cost,” she said. Thanks to new coaching platforms, “You’ve got coaching now that can be done on demand,” said Schad. “You’ve got coaching that can be done in the moment; you’ve got coaching that can be done through text messaging rather than live.” Organizations are particularly keen when it comes to harnessing technology for “coaching at scale,” said ZenDesk’s Butler. “How do you, as an organization, provide coaching at scale when it is [usually] for one person, at one moment in time, over five or six sessions? How do you, at scale, provide a solution for people? I think that can be really challenging.” Butler continued: “The tech platforms are how we scale. That’s the important piece. We really need the tech platforms, because for a company of our size–more than 4,000 employees–we can’t provide coaching without a solid tech platform behind it.” Bassett, of UChicago Medicine, said that technology was undeniably “helping in a lot of ways. I don’t see any downsides versus being in a room,” she said. “I think you can still get that engagement connection. There are plenty of upsides, because it’s much more accessible.” And competition brewing within the coaching-startup world, she said, is helping to make the practice available and attractive at a “broader scale and price.” Coaching as a Boost to Diversity and Inclusion While coaching is defined as a category separate from training, consultation and mentoring, those practices can still be combined to more comprehensively address personal and corporate issues, said Sharon Hart, an executive coach at the firm Talking Talent, who has more than a decade of experience as a certified coach. Reflecting the widespread expectations for Corporate America to improve its record on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Hart’s firm has seen an increase in demand for comprehensive programs to address company culture and DEI. Talking Talent has responded by offering a combination of webinars, group discussions, and one-on-one coaching. It’s all focused on client-driven conversations leading to reflection and self-realization, she said. “We’re helping to break down the barriers and helping to get people to feel safe to share,” said Hart, adding that, among her clients, many were “afraid to talk about” diversity and equality. “There’s a stigma about, ‘I’m afraid I might say the wrong thing,’” she said. “When we approach it with our coaching hats on, we’re offering more of an invitation to reflect, now that the defenses are down, and we can say, ‘We give you permission to have the experiences you have had. What do you want to do with that?’” Coaching Diversifies Even Further Just as Talking Talent offers a range of services from group coaching to one-on-one sessions, the coaching world in general has seen an uptick in variations of how the practice is delivered. One trend gathering steam is peer-to-peer coaching. “The key definition of peer coaching is that it’s about two individuals within the company. They reflect on current practices, what’s happening, and what the challenges are,” said Madhukar Govindaraju, founder and CEO of the coaching platform Numly. “They refine and share ideas. And eventually they’re solving problems. You develop a trusted connection between the two. That’s the first step. And it’s a private conversation.” That safe space can potentially improve the performance of employees and the wider organization, further broadening the conversation about diversity and democratization. “Right now, companies are pivoting from the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion, to one of inclusion and belonging,” Govindaraju said. “You need to create a sense of belonging in the employee experience. And we’re not just connecting them, we’re helping them with developing the skills they need. We empower employees to help each other.” Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, the Sunday Independent, the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Sheila Flynn | June 10, 2021

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 09, 2021

The Employee Skills Gap: How You Can Identify It–and Close It

The skills gap is the difference between the skills your workforce has and the skills they need to do their jobs well now and in the future. It’s a risk for any employer. Unless that gap is closed, the business is likely to struggle to compete and grow. As an employer, you have two ways to close the gap: Hire new employees who have the skills you need or develop those skills in your current employees, a practice called reskilling or upskilling. Upskilling refers to training an employee on new skills that are useful in their current role (or future roles in the same area), while reskilling refers to training someone on new skills so they can do an entirely different job. To explore ways that employers can identify their skills gaps and efficiently close them, From Day One hosted a webinar, “Mind the Gap: Understanding and Closing the Future Skills Gap to Build the Workforce of the Future,” which featured three experts from the Human Capital Solutions practice at Aon, the professional-services firm. According to Marinus van Driel, an Aon Associate Partner, 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025, but only 28% of companies are planning new initiatives to identify future skills gaps. Aon's Marinus van Driel (Executive photos courtesy of Aon) Before you start to sweat the impact of training on your P&L, consider this: Upskilling and even reskilling makes good financial sense, according to the Aon speakers. “The biggest risk area is not taking action,” van Driel said. According to a report by the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group, it would cost about $25,000 to reskill a single worker to a new role. The same report includes a cost-benefit analysis that asserts the private sector could reskill some 25% of its workers for less than it would cost to hire new, already skilled employees to take their places. Another study claims it could cost six times as much to go looking for talent outside your doors. How can employers best approach this process? “Whatever the critical skills are for your organization, take the time to identify them, measure them, and develop them,” said Kathy MacKay, an Aon Associate Partner. “People can do some really amazing things if given the tools and training and opportunity.” To identify the skills that are critical in your organization, Aon Partner Stefan Gaertner recommended this: “Go through your business forecast, go through your business plan, engage with your business leaders, and they can tell you where the business is going. You can then translate these goals into skills that you need to cultivate,” said Gaertner, the firm’s global lead of people analytics. Van Driel also recommended employers look at labor-market data for their industry to get a sense of skill trends and what the competition is doing. To measure and evaluate current skills, MacKay said she works with clients to implement assessments that “target specific skills and competencies and to look for fit and potential and ROI.” These assessments help leadership to choose the high-potential employees or teams for skill development and to design job descriptions built on core competencies. After employees go through the reskilling process, managers should make ongoing assessments to track their progress and identify further areas for development–as well as have a consistent flow of data. Aon's Kathy MacKay When it comes to making the investment and developing those skills in employees, employers should consider the work environment and employee motivation, MacKay said. “Individuals who are motivated can go down that path of reskilling much faster and much easier.” The panel shared examples of how Aon has helped clients facilitate, incentivize, and even gamify the process of upskilling and reskilling. Aon worked with telecom company Vodafone to develop a free app that operates like a kind of skills marketplace. Young workers take an assessment to learn about the skills they have, they can explore the kinds of jobs where they could apply those skills, and they can get access to online learning to develop the skills they need. MacKay cited an innovative example at another company, which made skills development into a competition. The company currently has “ten teams across four or five different countries competing for $1.5 million or so in order to generate the best and most effective design and demonstration of a rapid training and reskilling solution for those individuals who are most vulnerable to employment loss in the U.S.,” MacKay said. Aon's Stefan Gaertner The upskilling and reskilling of the world’s workforce is an evolutionary process bigger than any one company’s efforts, the speakers observed. The future will bring new strategies and tools that connect the dots between people, skills, and business interests. “Once you develop tools that connect people with jobs, people with skills, and skills with jobs, you give people a good reason to use these tools,” Gaertner said. “You can then also collect the data for planning purposes, so you can shift from a very transactional place to a strategic place. You have the data for something broader, to develop workforce strategies.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Aon. You can watch a video of the conversation here and view the slide presentation as well as Aon's guidebook, “Closing the Future Skills Gap to Drive Business Success,” by going to this page. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Sheila Flynn | June 08, 2021

Speaking Their Language: How to Talk About Employee Engagement With the C-Suite

It’s a dilemma that’s been faced by HR professionals since the evolution of their role: As literal conduits and arbiters between the C-suite and employees, how do they get both levels to consider the advice of HR itself–and actually act upon it? Tools and tips for how to navigate this tricky balancing act were offered during a From Day One webinar, “Speaking Their Language: How to Talk Employee Engagement and Belonging With the C-Suite,” featuring Natalie Baumgartner, PhD, chief workforce scientist at Achievers, the employee recognition and engagement platform, and Lidia Zekorn, director of talent and culture at FCT, the leading Canadian service provider in real-estate technology and title insurance. The two experts asserted that HR leaders often try to be proactive and identify problems, only to be ignored, and then are suddenly thrust into the spotlight when things go wrong. “Senior leaders are unexpectedly or understandably busy with competing priorities,” Zekorn said. “So when there’s a negative outcome, whether it be attrition in a certain department or in a certain area of the organization–or even if a high performer unexpectedly leaves the company–that’s when the questions start to come. So you can be proactive all you want, but it’s when that happens, when [C-Suite] see some sort of outcome, that’s when the questions happen.” Key to avoiding this situation, Baumgartner and Zekorn said, is gathering up-to-date, specific data to present to C-level executives, going in armed with targeted issues and solutions supported by facts that prove how those actions will help not only company culture but also its financial and productivity goals. Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist at Achievers (Photo courtesy of Achievers) “There are a lot of HR metrics out there that demonstrate how different initiatives can impact the bottom line, all the way from attrition to productivity,” Zekorn said. “You want to rely on this research to be your proof of concept so you can get the buy-in from the C-suite with what you need. And by buy-in, what I mean is you want the commitment. You want the understanding, the support and the engagement at the C-suite level. HR initiatives about employees–whether it’s about attrition, productivity or engagement–should not solely rest on HR shoulders. These are corporate initiatives.” When You Have Their Attention… Once senior executives realize a strategy, a policy, or even a tool can be good for the company, it’s much easier for widespread implementation. And following the initial buy-in, HR must carefully monitor and showcase the concrete outcomes. “That internal data, the results that you were able to drive, is important to maintain support and built your credibility with the C-suite,” Zekorn said. “The story doesn’t end with your business case. You will continue to measure after the initiative is launched. For example, when you’re looking at measuring those turnover rates, you want to measure before and after whatever initiative you put in place. You can keep an eye on online reviews and track changing ratings, and hopefully they’ve become positive. And you can utilize surveys and feedback tools to see where employee sentiment has changed.” The Importance of Employee Sentiment Similar strategies should also be implemented to get C-suite interested in employee sentiment in the first place, the experts said. HR leaders need to persuade C-level executives to embrace the concepts of “belonging” and “engagement”–and to appreciate why they genuinely matter for success. “Why even measure? What is the business case for understanding and managing engagement?,” Baumgartner asked. “Well, over the past couple of decades, the research [has shown] numerous data points indicating the high degree of correlation between engagement and just about every positive business outcome. “First of all, highly engaged employees are significantly less likely to leave an organization. Companies with engaged employees boast higher levels of employee commitment, and so they experienced lower attrition and greater retention,” Baumgartner said. “Research also shows that engaged employees are more productive. So by increasing engagement inside your organization, you’re also actually enhancing business results. Engaged employees are more likely to stay focused and to put in discretionary effort. They go above and beyond to achieve goals, which means that your company is more likely to be successful. “And finally, engaged employees have higher job satisfaction,” she said. “You can be confident that a more engaged population will drive better reviews on sites like Glassdoor, with more employees feeling satisfied and therefore willing to share their sentiments online.” Once those realities have been impressed upon senior executives, more concerted efforts can be made to gauge and bolster employee engagement. A Boost for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging At FCT, Zekorn said, “when we were presenting our business case for diversity, inclusion, and belonging strategy, it was very important for us to present it as a business imperative and illustrate how it aligns with our corporate priorities. We have heard that it is the right thing to do for employees, which I absolutely 100% agree. However, what cannot be lost is how it is the right thing to do for the organization as well.” Lidia Zekorn, director of talent and culture at FCT (Photo courtesy of FCT) In pursuing FCT’s inclusion strategy, “we held our own community circles, which are sessions that provide employees a safe space to share personal stories and to put a human face to the very real experiences that affect them inside and outside of the workplace,” Zekorn said. “It also provides direct feedback to our C-suite about how FCT can continue to drive an inclusive organization where employees feel that they belong and then finally illustrating why all of it matters: the return on investment, which is reducing turnover, improving employee satisfaction and well-being, and increasing productivity. When you have this, everyone succeeds, from the employees to the organization as a whole.” Central to employee engagement and belonging is for leaders to listen and offer opportunities for feedback, whether it be the aforementioned “circles,” or tools such as surveys, or even just coffee chats. Employees must feel they’re properly heard and see subsequent actions demonstrating that their concerns and ideas are indeed being implemented, the experts said. Be Careful Not to Overreach A major pitfall, though, can be attempts to execute too many actions, they said. Instead, they advise making micro improvements with visible results. “Trying to do too much at once is a setup for failure in the world of engagement,” Baumgartner said. “So be sure to focus on just one or two areas for improvement per quarter. I know it can be overwhelming for leaders and HR professionals to look at all the feedback and the desired action from one’s organization or one’s direct team. But when you narrow down your focus to identify the single metric that you want to impact and select just one or two micro actions that will move that metric over the next couple of months, the process is simplified and you’ll be better able to prioritize actions to solve problems.” While a sharp focus gets results, it’s important to keep an eye on the big picture too. All members of the organization, from the top down, should be provided with communication channels, values-based recognition, and a deep understanding of corporate vision and priorities. “We recommend having four to six core values that you then align everything in your culture around so that they become part of how you and your employees live and breathe at work,” Baumgartner said. “It’s simple, but it’s elegant.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Achievers. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Sheila Flynn is a Denver-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, the Sunday Independent, the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 08, 2021

The New Hybrid Back-to-Work Era: a Sneak Preview

Workers are reluctant to go back. At least, as the pandemic recedes, office workers don’t want to go back to the way it was. In a recent survey by Accenture of more than 9,000 workers in 11 countries, 83% of the respondents said that a hybrid work model is optimal, defined as the ability to work remotely between 25% and 75% of the time. A survey for Prudential found similar results, including 42% of current remote workers who said that if their employer doesn’t continue to offer remote-work options, they’ll look for a job at a company that does, CNBC reported. Knowing these sentiments, employers are scrambling to implement hybrid work structures, but there is still a great deal to figure out. Among the issues: how to apply policies consistently and fairly, how to maintain long-term collaboration and productivity, and just how hybrid an organization can and should be. This was the topic of discussion in a recent From Day One Webinar, “The New Hybrid Back-to-work Style: What's Optimal–and What's Fair?” Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman moderated the discussion among six leaders in employee experience and management about the future of the hybrid workplace. Abhishek Budhraja, the senior HR business partner for global engineering at Uber, said that he has become a student of the topic, since “this is the No. 1 topic of discussion in every HR meeting in every HR conference that you go to.” Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of the professional coaching platform Bravely, anticipates this year will be more challenging than the last when it comes to designing and managing a work environment that satisfies restrictions and preferences. There may be fewer health and safety restrictions than during the height of the pandemic, but employee preferences have changed, she said. Namita Seth, who leads talent management at the global IT firm Wipro, noted that the size of the problem and the list of decisions to be made can be overwhelming. She recommended employers take it one step at a time. “There’s so many things to solve for,” she said. “If we try to solve for everything, we’re sure to get it wrong. But if we stay focused on what’s most important, it’s probably easier to get more steps done right.” Getting Started With Building the New Workplace Where to focus first? Grace Kong, chief people officer for Cox Automotive Canada, said her focus has been on designing work arrangements with employees’ needs in mind. She has been circulating an assessment of those needs, the results of which will help the company redesign their workspace not only for cost efficiencies but also for what’s best for team members. Exploring the hybrid workplace, top row from left: PC Christopher of GardaWorld and Susan McGoff-Miller of Evonik. Middle row, from left, moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Grace Kong of Cox Automotive, and Abhishek Budhraja of Uber. Bottom row, from left: Sarah Sheehan of Bravely and Namita Seth of Wipro (Image by From Day One) PC Christopher, regional director of HR at the security-services company GardaWorld, said he’s trying to solve for a balance between giving employees the ability to work from wherever they like and maintaining company culture. “How do we allow that flexibility, but also maintain the camaraderie and the teamwork that you get when you can just be around people in the workplace?” For Susan McGoff-Miller, head of future of work for the chemical manufacturer Evonik, hybrid work is about considering how to create a consistent experience company-wide. “What we’re trying to do as an organization is create some consistent approach toward institutionalizing virtual collaboration. We want to make sure there’s a consistent minimum level. We want to make sure it’s not left up to the managers individually to decide based on what they prefer,” she said. “So we’re trying to balance it both ways, where it’s not based on the whim of a manager whether or not you have access to [hybrid work].” Starting by tackling a single problem is good practice, panelists said, though Wipro’s Seth encouraged employers not to marry their first plan. “It’s like a transitionary process. You cannot have a guideline today and stick to it forever,” she said. “You’ll have to wait and watch, see how the market is evolving, see how your clients are evolving, see what your workforce wants, and then keep evolving your guidelines according to that.” Preserving a Collaborative Culture As Seth implied, complications will come up as employers build hybrid models. A common problem is how to preserve the kind of culture that employers know can be facilitated in-person. Sheehan said that to preserve inclusion, she created a rule that says no in-person meeting of a team can occur without a member working outside the office in attendance. The hope is that office-based workers will be compelled to always consider those who aren’t. In the same spirit, managers need to make sure that an employee in the office doesn’t hold greater sway than one working remotely, especially in those small conversations that take place after a meeting or in the hallway. “If I’m in a room with you and everyone else is on Zoom,” she said, “I’m going to have the opportunity to influence you in a way that no one else had.” Preserving and promoting collaboration and productivity in a new format is something else panelists are figuring out. Budhraja said the most collaborative work he’s ever done took place during the pandemic, but whether that will last remains to be seen. “There’s a little bit of time that needs to pass before we really say whether collaboration has gone down or not, at least from a company standpoint.” Both he and Christopher talked about the digital tools they’re using to facilitate collaborative work and keep projects moving forward, some as simple as chat programs and features, others as rich as training employees to recognize non-verbal cues on a video call. Keeping Workers Healthy and Productive Long-term productivity of hybrid workforces is also on the table. Christopher said the challenge he’s having is caring adequately for employees’ mental health, especially those who are working remotely. “One thing in this virtual environment that I haven’t figured out is how to tell when someone is struggling, when someone is struggling personally because they’re burnt out. You get on the Zoom calls, you participate, you put your best foot forward, but then you’re not around the rest of the day where I can see, OK, you’re struggling, something is wrong,” he said. “I don’t assume they’re OK just because they’re chipper on the Zoom call.” Evonik’s McGoff-Miller said she has been inviting employees to talk about whether they’re struggling. “Usually people don’t want to hide all of it. They just need the space to share. We have to make that space differently than we used to. We used to do it at the coffee corner. Now we have to virtually make the time for it.” One of Kong’s imperatives is to keep employees’ energy up. Among her approaches to this, she has created wellness sessions on such topics as balancing work and life and how to cultivate empathy. She has support from the top: Cox Automotive’s CEO has banned meetings during lunch hours and Friday afternoons so employees can catch up on work or simply take a break. How Do You Measure Success? Panelists agreed the most difficult part will be measuring the effects of hybrid work. McGoff-Miller said her philosophy goes back to Evonik’s company values. “We see that institutionalizing collaboration does provide us benefits. We found that this framework for working from home and more virtual collaboration really had our values of trust and openness as a foundation. We find that virtual collaboration is actually a catalyst for performance and speed. We have to measure performance differently. We can’t just value presence as we had in the past, right?” The productivity that matters “is self-reported productivity,” Uber’s Budhraja said. “And that’s essentially saying, how do you create the right ecosystem for an individual to work there and give their best self to the work and not engineer the last decimal on a productivity metric?” Kong has a similar approach. She asserted that when life is easier for employees, productivity is simply higher, and it shows. “It actually makes a difference to the KPIs that we’re trying to achieve our goals, but it’s in a way where we’re supporting our team members and putting them at the forefront of what we do.” Give Them Good Reasons to Return If you’re still dead-set on bringing all your employees back to the office, consider why. Christopher encouraged employers to identify the business necessity, to “question the dogma” that you need to be in the office. “If you can find a win-win in this labor environment where a good employee that has figured it out can work remotely, great. Why not accommodate that? At the same time, there are some folks that are just dying to come back into the office.” If you do want to draw workers back to a physical work environment, Christopher said you should give them reasons to be excited about returning. “There’s got to be something that draws them in,” he said. “There’s got to be times where you get everyone together so that somebody isn’t left out and you can have that fellowship and have that enjoyment of each other’s time.” McGoff-Miller’s team is planning for this right now, studying reasons why someone would want to return to work, with the goal of creating an environment employees are eager to be part of. The stakes are high, Sheehan warned: Employers who are inflexible about hybrid work or who refuse to adapt to employee expectations risk major turnover. “Employees are going to be dictating what happens post-Covid. Prior to Covid, it was all about, ‘This is what we’re offering to you,’ and now, I’m hearing more and more that companies are losing people, that there’s a lot of turnover happening. And if you’re not able to meet the needs of employees, then they’re just going to leave you and go somewhere else.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Angelica Frey | June 02, 2021

The Wayfair Way: On a Path to Becoming a Real Meritocracy

For the decades since work on diversity and inclusion has been happening, many people have talked about it as a nice-to-have feature of the workplace. As in, “Can we get this into training?” Or, “Can we get our managers to consider this?” Those are some of the mild requests that KeyAnna Schmiedl, global head of culture and inclusion at Wayfair, had been hearing before she joined the fast-growing furniture retailer in July 2019. Then, in the past year, spurred by the marches for racial justice, things started to pick up more momentum. “Really, what the shift has been most recently is, unless it is part of the fabric of how we do business and interact with each other, people will question everything,” she told journalist Lydia Dishman in a one-on-one conversation at From Day One’s recent virtual conference, “Diversity: How Employers Can Match Words With Deeds.” At Wayfair, making this part of the workplace cultural fabric, though, required substantial foundational work, which included frank conversations, a greater reliance on objective data, and a reassessment of what it means to be a real meritocracy in Corporate America, Schmiedl said. Among her insights: Start With a Dashboard Last year, Wayfair launched a dashboard to monitor its efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), measured according to metrics. The dashboard follows all the steps in the employment trajectory, starting with recruiting and hiring. “We have metrics on overall performance ratings, attrition rates, and all of that can be broken down to dimensions of intersectionality and diversity that we have self-reported data for,” Schmiedl said. This meant that information was at the fingertips of virtually everyone. “We need to talk about transparency, and the rule that we wanted to push is that everybody sees something, and some people see everything,” she said. At Wayfair, anyone who is an associate director and above sees everything. “This makes a huge difference. If I am now given access to data, there's an onus on you to look at it and do something about it. You're now my accountability buddy.” The data proved to be a catalyst for honest conversation. “People can no longer ‘ostrich’ their head in the sand,” says Schmiedl, especially when everybody sees the same data. “Data neutralizes so much. Data is both quantitative and qualitative, and certain pieces are irrefutable,” she said. At Wayfair, this led to more candid discussion about what's happening with promotion and engagement, how to understand better what's going on within a specific population, and how to bring those groups to the fore to tell leaders what's going on–and what they'd like to see changed. Deal With Internal Issues First Having a dashboard fostered collaboration and changed internal culture. Dealing with DEI challenges internally before performing outreach is one of the main tenets of Schmiedl's modus operandi. “If your culture can't sustain that type of diversity they're trying to bring in externally, then you're just going to be in the same place for longer,” she said. A conversation on real inclusion: KeyAnna Schmiedl of Wayfair and Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (Image by From Day One) On that note, when companies went all out in making DEI pledges and promises in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Wayfair emphasized the internal conversation. “We decided to show our people you’re who we care about,” Schmiedl said. So company leaders set up a series of panel discussions, which included members of employee resource groups (ERGs), and gave employees the opportunity to share their stories unquestioned, and to talk to their leaders about how to ensure that bad experiences are not replicated. Employees also asked how they could use their employee matching grants to support disadvantaged communities and donate to racial-justice organizations, to which Wayfair responded with a double-match program. “By the end of that campaign, in the month of June 2020, we raised over $900,000 to be donated to those organizations,” said Schmiedl. “And so that's really powerful that our folks own that success, and that our organization can see that this is what our folks care about.” Educating Others Is OK, But Consider the Emotional Toll Schmiedl said she is always nervous about asking a group that is “other” to share their stories so that folks can learn. So when leaders set up the aforementioned discussions, they were very clear in the beginning about what these conversations would and would not be. In the first place, it was explicitly stated that that was not a forced thing. “I also said the employee-story share format is not going have Q&A. I don't believe that people's experiences should be questioned in this context,” she said. Then they dug into topics that in the past they did not always have the right talking points for. In this context, ERGs have been instrumental. Wayfair mandates they have an executive sponsor, a person who will advocate on their behalf. “The executive sponsor should not represent the dimension of diversity of the group that they're representing,” said Schmiedl, “because that is an opportunity for them to learn to be active allies, to people that maybe they have not spent a lot of time with or really understood what their challenges are. The sponsors become the biggest advocates in the company and an unexpected voice of support.” Reassess the Concept of “Meritocracy.” Yes, Through Data Too Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah, who is the son of immigrants from India, would frequently say “we're a meritocracy,” said Schmiedl, who observes that, besides being an old-school Protestant value associated with white males, the word meritocracy holds a strong grip on people of immigrant backgrounds. “So the first question I pitched him when we first had our conversations around change was: Given the stories that you just heard from employees, their experiences outside of work at other workplaces, etcetera, do you still feel like Wayfair is a meritocracy?” Four thousand people who were tuned in heard the CEO’s response: “You know, Wayfair isn't a meritocracy, but I want it to be.” Yet in understanding the kind of data will move the company in that direction, there are theoretical and practical challenges, said Schmiedl. “I don't always know exactly how to formulate the question in a way that clearly translates to our analysts where they can easily say, “here is how we solve that,” she said. Data, with the aid of artificial intelligence, can start illuminating patterns. For example, thanks to a DEI analytics team, Wayfair has been able to build a tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand what's going on in performance reviews. First, they had analysts build scripts for “what are words that show up for folks with different genders in performance review as opportunity areas?” For women, hardly to anyone's surprise, the word was “confidence,” which, upon further investigation, was being used in a biased way, so the word “confidence” was built into the calibration facilitator, which prompts participants to ask for more objective information upon the mention of the word. Wayfair’s team translated this script into a model that fits race and ethnicity as well; contentious words are flagged and further resources are given. Said Schmiedl: “This is a different way for us to use the data and to then move the needle.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | June 02, 2021

Hiring a Diverse Team Is One Thing. Retaining It Is Another

To appreciate the strength of a company’s diversity initiatives, it helps to look at employee retention, which is often a reflection of culture. Many companies face the “leaky-bucket problem.” They can recruit and hire diverse talent, but their attrition rate betrays an internal culture that doesn’t entice employees to stay. In one door, out the other. So how do companies create “sticky” workplaces? How can structural bias and personal bias be mitigated to foster an inclusive space for all–one that makes talent not just want to stay, but able to thrive too? To explore answers to those questions, Emily Nordquist, senior program manager at the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise & Responsibility at Loyola University Chicago, moderated a conversation among experts in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at From Day One’s recent virtual conference, “Diversity: How Employers Can Match Words With Deeds.” Some companies, like Schneider Electric, a multinational with more than 135,000 employees, are years into thinking about inclusion and belonging at work. Sonali Satpathy, Schneider’s VP of DEI and well-being, said inclusion has long been a part of her company’s mission and internal work. The core, she said, is about asking, “How do we hardwire this? How do you hardwire processes, programs, systems for inclusion? And how do you build equity into the system?” Others, like the data-management company NetApp, founded in 1992, acknowledge being in the beginning stages of their DEI plans. “We’re early in our journey now,” said Gerri Mason Hall, a NetApp VP. “I’m leading diversity, inclusion, and belonging. We’re very intentional in this choice of title,” she said. “It’s a reflection of our strategy. We’re relatively new, so it’s a multi-year plan. My year-one plan is talent first, and it is absolutely doubling and tripling down on the increased representation of Black and Latinx [employees], especially because we are a cloud-led, data-centric software company and our strategy is informed by our data, and our data tells us what we have to do better.” Inclusion Should Be Consistent No matter the company size and history, the panelists agreed that inclusion practices must be applied consistently. Satpathy shared the example of establishing universal minimum standards. She noticed that among Schneider’s global workforce, parental-leave policy varied widely by country, compliant with local laws, “at best,” she said. “We wanted to go above and beyond that.” The company put in place a global family-leave policy, so caregivers of all kinds–not just parents–can take the time they need. “As a global company, we have to put in minimum standards. We say that if you work for Schneider Electric, no matter where in the world, you have access to X, Y, and Z.” The company is applying the same idea of global minimum standards to address the problem of pay equity, she said. Make It a Multi-level Mandate To make inclusion happen, there needs to be organizational-level work and individual-level work, panelists said. Both have to exist and the two must work together. Organizational-level work occurs when companies institute policies and programs to support and advance marginalized communities. Examples: pay-equity rules, clear criteria for promotions and advancement, and Schneider’s global-minimum family leave. Speaking on employee retention, top row from left: Sonali Satpathy of Schneider Electric, Emily Nordquist of the Loyola University Chicago, and Desiree Booker of ColorVizion Lab. Bottom row, from left: Jonathan Mayes of Albertsons Companies, Larry Baker of LCW, and Gerri Mason Hall of NetApp (Image by From Day One) Individual contributions, on the other hand, begin with the question, What can you contribute to inclusion? Jonathan Mayes, SVP and chief diversity officer at the food-and-drug retailer Albertsons Companies, said his team has developed content they call Leading with Inclusion. “It’s an opportunity for different voices not heard from enough in Corporate America to talk about a day in the life.” Having established awareness of their lived experience, they prompt action from individuals. “What are you going to do?” they ask. “How can you be an ally? For folks who have experienced discrimination time and time again, what are you doing to do about it?” Larry Baker, a consultant at LCW, a firm that offers training and expertise in cultural competence and organizational effectiveness, encourages individual managers to come up with accountability structures or “diversity action plans” to make this happen. This is how companies can influence individual work with organizational work. “What gets rewarded gets repeated,” he said. “So if there aren’t strategies in place that are rewarding these managers and leaders that are leading us to the new normal, if you will, they’re going to revert back to what got them the rewards prior to this initiative.” Adding EQ to the Equation Desiree Booker, founder and CEO of the diversity recruiting and coaching firm ColorVizion Lab, said emotional intelligence is a core competency that leaders must have in order for individual work to be effective. This is how individual contributions can influence organizational work. “I think having high emotional intelligence could really mitigate some of the pitfalls that we see happening when it comes to leadership,” she said, adding that EQ helps leaders “to leverage the strengths of different people on your teams.” Booker recalled missteps that could have been avoided with some emotional intelligence. For example, she was coaching an employee at a company where management asked him to serve on a panel to talk about his Black-at-work experience, Booker said. “But he’s very uncomfortable being thrust into the spotlight and saying, ‘Hey, I’m Black and this is what it feels like to work in Corporate America as a Black individual.’ And the way it was phrased to him was, ‘We would really love for you to do this. It would be great to have you participate in this.’ However, there just wasn’t the awareness there to give him the choice.” Bring on the Data Too Evaluating the effectiveness of inclusion work should be both quantitative and qualitative, the panelists asserted. “First and foremost,” NetApp’s Hall said, “we’re committed to being continuous learners. So we’ll try something, we’ll measure it and look at the data and what it tells us, and then we’ll tweak it if we need to.” She said employers should approach it like any other key performance indicator (KPI), “reviewing your data on a regular basis and changing course as needed.” “Make strategic organizational decisions based on data,” said Booker. “Use the data to develop a North Star and to track your progress. And then I would also say to get feedback continuously from your employees.” Quantitative measures might include change in employee attrition, change in promotion rates, or asking employees to rate their sense of belonging. But even with data to support your initiatives, inclusion work requires continuous tending to bring about those soft changes that are harder to quantify, changes that individual employees are experiencing, like whether they feel comfortable raising their hand for new opportunities, talking about their mental health, or reporting discrimination. Can managers be trained to be inclusive? To some degree, but it’s not a fix-it-and-forget-it solution. Instead, it requires a daily commitment to change, said Hall. “Training is important. You have new leaders coming in, they don’t know how to lead inclusively. Sometimes they’re early in career and they need to build that muscle,” she said. “That’s the continuing work, that’s the day-to-day, that’s the ongoing conversations and the interventions.” Nordquist, the moderator, observed that this work is nuanced and will naturally create tension. “When you have a diversity of perspective in that room, it’s naturally going to be more tense,” she said. “People are going to say, ‘Hey, Jonathan, you know I think you’re great, but I actually see it this way.’ Or ‘Sonali, I actually want to challenge you on that, given my lived experiences.’ There is this real need to be able to navigate that tension and lean into the fact that not everyone’s going to be on the same page with this work, and that’s OK, and to get comfortable with that feeling.” Satpathy concurred with that idea: “Progress over perfection,” she said. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Angelica Frey | May 31, 2021

Cultural Diversity: Encouraging It in the Workplace

Growing up in a Catholic household, Rocio Lopez was always told by her mom “when you leave the house, you're acting like a queen, and when you're at home, you can act crazy.” Now a tech-strategy leader at Accenture, Lopez believes that, sure, acting in a professional way still means retaining some of that regal behavior. However, “at the end of the day, to me it's about being human to others,” she told journalist Lydia Dishman in a conversation on cultural diversity in the workplace, part of From Day One’s recent virtual conference, “Diversity: How Employers Can Match Words With Deeds.” In Corporate America, the whole concept of professionalism has tended to uphold standards of appropriateness dating back to Puritan pilgrims who arrived from England. It took a global pandemic, when we peered into each other's homes during work hours, to give a more holistic definition of the “human” component behind the whole idea of “acting professional.” These extraordinary times, including a year focused on racial equity, challenged some of the stereotypes in the workplace around race, politics, mental health, and age. “When I started, ‘work self’ and ‘personal self’ are separated. Now they're blending. For the first time, it's OK to talk about politics, religion, and sexual orientation,” said La Toya Haynes, director of racial equity at Intuit. The speakers offered other observations about the ramifications of cultural diversity: “Appropriateness” Is Not Set in Stone Heather Tinsley-Fix, a senior advisor at AARP, noted that while a sense of appropriateness still remains a requirement, it is not fixed. “It's more about authenticity. Bringing your best self is a sign of respect for your colleagues," she said. “You have to be curious about that.” Dion Bullock, strategy lead for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the coaching firm Bravely, sees appropriateness as a layered situation. “It’s focused on agreed-upon principles where folks have what they need in the workplace,” he said. "Everyone has a different definition on what it means to act and perform respectfully. There are cultural differences around that.” One workplace, for instance, might say that having a beard is unprofessional, but other workplace cultures might welcome the hirsute look. “I would focus on continuously revisiting agreed-upon principles,” he continued, “so folks from different cultures can weigh in on what these principles are.” Conversations Need to Take Place Intuit’s Haynes recalls that she found it odd that an employee did not have any family pictures at their desk. Asked about this, the employee disclosed they did not want to put family pictures up because they did not have a “typical” family and wanted to avoid questions, looks, and potential discrimination. However, said Haynes, “when you don't share this, it limits an HR leader's ability to do their job. It takes some active listening, compassion, and empathy to understand the person's situation and then create the space to ask the question.” Speaking on cultural diversity, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Rocio Lopez of Accenture, and Dion Bullock of Bravely. Bottom row, from left: Heather Tinsley-Fix of AARP, Denise Reed Lamoreaux of Atos, and La Toya Haynes of Intuit (Image by From Day One) Starting these conversations calls for courage and vulnerability, as well as an assist from leaders leading by example. In the middle of the pandemic, Lopez decided to reveal the fact that she was working from the corner of her basement. “It was not until they saw me do it that they did it themselves,” she said. “When you're really demonstrating that you're a human being, that's when things start to change and people allow themselves to be who they really are. This is what generates all the goodness and creativity for people to really thrive.” One does not even have to be very aggressive about it. Denise Reed Lamoreaux, global chief diversity officer for the technology company Atos, suggests starting by putting pronouns in one's signature and linking to resources. “It's very soft,” she said. “People with a curiosity factor would click on those links.” What’s Beyond “Office Matters” It’s important to recognize what's going on outside the office too. “Acknowledge a moment in the world that's happening,” said Bullock. “We talk a lot about supporting employees in moments that matter. Think of the Jan. 6 insurrection, when a lot of people were just concerned and worried about what is happening within the state of the world, and being able to be empathetic and create that space. Recognize that, even though we may have a calendar full of meetings, we know that everyone's paying attention to the news. So what does it mean for managers and leaders to be able to create space and support as folks are going through these particular moments?” Such outside events can be personal, social–or even natural disasters. Bullock and his team assisted their employees and coaches who were in Texas during the deadly winter storm earlier this year. "Recognizing that there are things that impact them outside of the workplace is really important,” he said. Today’s Older Workforce Is Not the Stereotypical “Old” Workforce It's clichéd and inaccurate to think that young people are naturally more primed than their elders towards being more open and vulnerable, said AARP’s Tinsley-Fix. “To me, the most important thing is to adopt a growth mindset. And there's this myth that older people slow down. Actually, older brains are just as plastic, the plasticity is just somewhere else.” “People are working 10 to 15 years longer than ever before. And there is still a place and the right to continue to work,” said Lamoreaux. “And I know that being part of an affinity group that is dedicated to the different generations and so forth can make a big difference in people feeling comfortable speaking out. They kind of find their voice within that group of people.” No, the Pandemic Was Not the “Great Equalizer” During the Covid-19 lockdown, a great deal of attention was paid to the remote-work phenomenon, in part because it was revolutionary and created a sense of democratization among knowledge workers. However, that affect has been highly variable across industries, a kind of diversity that needs to be acknowledged. “It's not true that everybody was working from home,” Bullock emphasized. “A lot of communities, essential workers, were much more vulnerable. When you see the data, you see it across racial lines. Covid as an equalizer has not been the lived experience for a lot of communities.” Even the current return-to-work campaigns tend to fall short of reality, especially in contexts that employ both knowledge workers and in-person workers. The latter group has been in the workplace all along. Personal situations come into play too. “There's a huge amount of isolation that occurs amongst people, for varying reasons,” said Lamoreaux. “Some of it is socio-economic, some of it is just that they were more introverted to begin with. There's so many different facets that come into play. So it's important for leaders to understand what the different types of people represented within their teams are experiencing.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.