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The Future of Work, 2021: What We've Learned

In 2020, in every conversation I had about the impact the pandemic would have on work, I heard a version of this statement: “COVID-19 is going to accelerate the future of work.” But with the year ending—and the pandemic still sadly out of control—here’s what we still don’t know: Exactly what will that future be? What is clear is that work–or at least what we used to think of as office-based, white-collar work–underwent an astounding and sudden transformation as the first shelter-in-place orders came down in mid-March. Before the pandemic, perhaps 5% of American workers could be classified as remote. By May, according to the Economist, that figure had risen to 62%, and even as late as October, nearly half of American workers were still putting in their hours in spare bedrooms and on kitchen tables, connecting with their colleagues through the digital lifelines of Slack and Zoom. What did we learn? That the sudden absence of the workplace did not mean the absence of work being done. One survey from the employee-visibility software company Prodoscore found that productivity between May and August of 2020 was actually 5% higher than the same period in 2019. Orders were fulfilled, timesheets were filled, emails were sent—more emails, almost certainly, according to research that found that the average workday grew by nearly an hour during the pandemic. Because those of us who used to work in offices lived through the transition, adjusting to the realities on the fly (often painfully), it can be difficult to comprehend just how radical this forced experiment and its conclusions have been. There are a lot of reasons why, until a 200-nanometer virus from China showed up, that white-collar workers gathered in offices each day. Among them: the sunk costs of real estate, a sense that innovation and creativity required physical proximity, and the ingrained belief that this was simply how things were supposed to be done. But the unstated assumption that work simply wouldn’t be done as much (or as productively) at home—and away from the eyes of managers—was probably the biggest reason why offices remained sacrosanct workspaces. We now know that this isn’t true, and likely hasn’t been true for some time, thanks to applications that can make work and collaboration doable at home. A recent study by two researchers at Harvard of call-center workers between January 2018 and August 2020 found that while remote workers were less productive initially than those in offices, by the end of the study—when nearly every worker being surveyed had been forced home by the pandemic—those who switched to working from home became more productive than they had been in the workplace. The takeaway here is that while workers are individuals with different productivity levels, where the work takes place isn’t the deciding factor, and indeed good workers may become even better when they’re allowed to work from home. Bryan Walsh of Axios (photo courtesy of the author) And many of them have made it clear they want to keep doing so, even when vaccines finally take COVID-19 off the table. A recent report from Glassdoor found that 26% of workers surveyed wanted to continue working at home, 70% favored a hybrid combination of office and remote work, and just 4%–yes, 4%!–desired a full-time return to the office. Workers are also voting with their feet. A survey by Upwork from October found that as many as 23 million Americans, or more than 10% of the adult population, are planning to pack up and move thanks in part to the freedoms of remote work. They’re migrating mostly from dense, costly cities to cheaper places that might be far from the office. Another report from Upwork found that those working from home because of COVID-19 were saving an average of nearly 50 minutes a day that they used to spend commuting to work. That matters, given that a number of studies have confirmed what most people know from grueling experience–that commuting is among the least enjoyable activities people regularly do. Give workers the option of not sitting in traffic or a crowded train every workday, and being able to move to a place where they can get more house for the same amount of money–which in turn makes remote work easier, since satisfaction with working from home is linked to having a dedicated home office–they will take companies up on it. Firms that can get over the need to have eyes on their employees will benefit from a much broader shift to remote work as well. One study found that companies can save as much as $10,000 per employee annually in real estate costs by switching to full-time remote work. Many top tech companies, including some that until recently were touting the creativity-enhancing benefits of their sumptuous Silicon Valley campuses, have announced their openness to much wider remote work. And companies that embrace remote work may be able to get away with paying employees less if they move to cheaper cities, which many workers are willing to do, even as they’re able to expand their hiring pool to the entire world. So what will the future of work look like, once it’s no longer being dictated by a new virus or old assumptions? Pay attention to that 70% of workers in the Glassdoor survey who say they’d prefer a hybrid future: freedom to work at home sometimes and in an office-like environment at other times. Some kinds of collaboration really do require workers being eyeball to eyeball, and sometimes you just need to get out of the house. It doesn’t make financial sense for companies to maintain large corporate offices in expensive downtowns if they’re rarely more than half full, which they won’t be, especially if workers have fled to cheaper cities hours away. But working outside of the home doesn’t have to mean working in a central office. Satellite offices, co-working spaces, even cafes–all of them will be a better and more efficient option for when collaborative work is needed. The bigger challenge may be for managers. As McKinsey & Company managing partner Kausik Rajgopal told me in August in a From Day One webinar, there’s a risk that a company’s culture could splinter if one group of workers remains in the office while another works from home. That’s why it’s important for a manager “to be thoughtful and think about each member of the team as an individual, and figure out what may be most helpful that they stay motivated and operate in a sustainable way.” That includes figuring out effective and fair ways to evaluate employees who work remotely and onboard workers who might never see the inside of an office. No one would want to re-experience 2020, but if we’re fortunate, it could help give birth to a white-collar working world that is more humane to employees and more productive for employers. Provided, of course, we’re all willing to shell out for a decent chair. Bryan Walsh is the Future Correspondent for Axios, covering emerging tech and future trends, as well as the author of End Times, a 2019 book about existential risk (including pandemics). He previously worked as a foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor for TIME for more than 15 years. You can read his new piece for Axios about the coming tech-driven productivity leap here.

Bryan Walsh | January 05, 2021
Employee Experience: How Tech Is Changing Work and Life

Juggling home-schooling with back-to-back Zoom calls. Combating video fatigue while missing face-to-face contact with coworkers. Struggling to keep up with the demands of real-time communication. Aargh! The pandemic has pushed the workforce onto a steep learning curve since the beginning–and technology has been at the center of everything. How has it changed employee experience? While progress and adjustments have been made, how could it be further improved? That was the topic at the heart of a From Day One webinar in December moderated by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman. Some of the panelists spoke from years of experience working remotely, while others hailed from more traditional industries like construction and hardware. But all agreed that the swift and seismic shift in working conditions pointed out the need for immediate adaptations across the board, with technology proving at times to be both a help and a hindrance, prompting a search for balance that continues to be negotiated. Dishman, at the beginning of the webinar, highlighted Salesforce research showing that employees working from home as a result of the pandemic had only a 1% reduction in productivity, while Microsoft research found that people were working more in the evenings and on weekends. In light of these adjustments, the webinar speakers stressed that they’re highly conscious of avoiding employee burnout, maintaining a strong corporate culture, and helping their workforce adapt to new conditions and best practices–without further disrupting their personal lives. Jamie Hillegass, director of talent, development and learning at the construction-supply company White Cap, described the particular challenges faced by her “very traditional industry” with many locations across the U.S. This included reinventing meetings for which people would fly into headquarters from all over the country to discuss important topics like succession planning. “These are things that we traditionally felt like you had to be in person to see each other,” Hillegass said. The transition to digital meetings involved “teaching the organization and the leaders who are becoming more familiar with Zoom and some other technologies how to do it,” she said. “To that point, in a three-hour session, how do you keep it motivating, and people engaged, without getting distracted or going off camera? Setting some of those rules and expectations for being on camera was a new thing for our organization.” Our speakers, top row from left: Micha Mros of HUB International and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. Middle row: Christine Doucet of Ace Hardware, Jamie Hillegass of White Cap, and Joey Levi of LumApps. Bottow row: Laura Sewell of Avanade (Image by From Day One) Familiarizing executives from the top down with new technology has been uncharted territory for many organizations, participants agreed, noting that the comfort level with different digital tools varied among generations. Christine Doucet, Ace Hardware’s director of employee engagement and head of the company’s charitable foundation, said: “We do a lot of communication with our store owners, and they’re not used to this technology. Not every audience is sitting in front of a computer all day.” Doucet said she started preparing them ahead of time, for example asking everyone to be on video. “I learned pretty quickly that with some audiences, like our hardware-store owners, many of which are baby boomers, I needed to spell it out, like, ‘This is the expectation, if you can. This is how it’s going to work.’” Over-reliance on video calls, however, has been an equal challenge. Joey Levi, director of pre-sales for North America at LumApps, an employee communication and collaboration platform, has been working remotely for more than 20 years, but saw things change when more colleagues connected virtually in 2020. “I did a lot of personal Zoom meetings early on,” he said. “And then they all stopped because everyone got really exhausted by them.” He later added: “On the sales side, it’s very difficult for both the prospects and customers and for salespeople, because you’re shifting into a new paradigm of trying to engage somebody. But you’re  now boxed into a meeting in a video. You can’t go to dinner, you can’t do the normal things you would do, and it does definitely bring a challenge.” One of them is a lack of feedback. “When you’re dealing with people in sales, a lot of times they will go off camera,” at which point “you have no idea–are they paying attention to what you’re talking about? Do they get it?” One solution he suggested: “Getting people to start to be more conversational in their approach to presentation.” Micha Mros, HR technology leader at insurance brokerage HUB International, echoed his sentiments. Like Levi, she and her team had historically worked together remotely, but “prior to COVID, we were on site with our clients,” she said. “So we got to meet them, see them, create that bond with them. And although we did use–and still do use–a variety of different software to communicate, we never really pushed people to turn their cameras on, you know, to engage in this way. And now we ask all of our consultants to make sure that their cameras are on.” Technology has not yet provided a substitute for deeper, in-person discussions, Mros said. “We do things like discovery sessions with our clients, which typically would be on site for three or four days,” she said. “We found that it has been a difficult transition to get people to stay focused for four days on camera. So there have been some struggles.” Fostering engagement with in-house employees has also emerged as a priority too, participants said. That means getting feedback from workers about their well-being, adjustments they’re making, and what works (and what doesn’t) in the new remote, more tech-heavy environment. Laura Sewell, EVP of human resources in North America for Avanade, a digital-transformation consultancy formed by Microsoft and Accenture, said she’d seen more “reliance on video and recorded-video messages to really build that connection” because workers are seeking those ties in the absence of being together in person. “And I think the other shift that I have seen is leveraging technology to conduct what I call pulse checks with our employees in real time,” she said. “We’re aggregating results to HR quickly, enabling us to respond and adapt in real time to employee sentiment. That wasn’t something we were quite leveraging as much prior to the pandemic that we’re now doing weekly.” Listening to employees and adapting accordingly has brought a decrease in formality and previously rigid schedules and structures. “We have introduced and launched what we call alternative ways of working, which enable people to work four 10-hour days [and] have a day off or afternoon,” said Sewell, the goal being to “create these flexible working schedules with some parameters around them.” Participating employees have agreed to anonymous surveys to gauge productivity, “so that we can get a better sense of whether this is working­–or creating added pressures in your life, where you find that you’re working five 10-hour days instead of having that extra day off.” The speakers agreed that the new reliance on technology and flexible working conditions are here to stay. “We have all learned that we can work remotely–that we can still engage with folks without being in the same room with them,” Mros said. “Personally, I’ve learned that maybe I don’t have to travel as much to visit with clients to get my work done, which would save them money and make me more productive. And I think that the way that we do business, because of this, will be forever changed,” she said. “I wonder how many of my clients will never return to brick and mortar. How many folks will end up being permanently remote? And from talking to my clients, a lot of them with offices in large metropolitan areas really don’t have any plans on going back,” Mros said. “If this had happened ten years ago,” added Levi, “this would be really difficult to work from home, because we wouldn’t have the ability to do this video stuff, et cetera. I also think that the trend for a lot of people before Covid was already that technology was driving them to work longer hours because it’s immediate. It’s in your phone. It’s in your hand. It’s constantly there. And so I think the benefit of knowing how that affects everybody in the organization means that the things we talked about are more about your life-work balance and making sure you understand if your employees are actually well and mentally well.” He added: “People were getting used to working on the weekends and working at night and working in the morning and working during lunch. So I think the benefit for the employee is going to be more sensitivity.” Sheila Flynn is a Chicago-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 | January 03, 2021
Performance Management With Empathy in Mind

Among the many tough questions companies had to tackle during the multiple crises of the past year, one of the most important has been whether to continue with employee performance reviews. Some companies scrapped parts of their performance-management systems, like mid-year reviews and numeric ratings. Others lowered sales quotas or urged bosses to avoid labels like “does not meet expectations.” For many employers, it was a chance to make over the traditional performance-management process. At the cloud-computing company Nutanix, for example, the decision to continue with reviews presented an opportunity to open a conversation with employees about why and how that decision was made. The company’s leaders then simplified the review process and made 360-degree feedback optional. New questions were brought into the process with a focus on empathy. “We re-purposed the purpose of the conversation itself, from performance-oriented to more alignment-oriented, to more support-oriented, to being an exchange between the manager and their teams on what support is needed and any new goals that needed to be articulated,” said Deep Mahajan, Nutanix’s senior director and head of people development and culture. Mahajan was a speaker in a From Day One webinar in December focusing on “Performance Management With Empathy in Mind,” moderated by Myla Skinner, chief of staff of OneGoal, a college-access organization. The panelists stressed that empathy and compassion, in fact, are key ingredients for managing performance in an inclusive way. While the global pandemic and remote work have turned many businesses upside down, the speakers suggested that the crisis has prompted innovative thinking about how to establish more productive conversations around feedback and how to maintain connections with what employees are thinking and feeling. The speakers on performance management, top row from left: moderator Myla Skinner of OneGoal and Sarah Sheehan of Bravely. Center row, from left: Jaison Williams of Fitbit, Robin Malmanger of Genpact, and Cynthia Brown of NetApp. Bottom row: Deep Mahajan of Nutanix (Image by From Day One) Jaison Williams, VP of global talent management and inclusion for Fitbit, shared his company’s own adaptations. “Instead of a typical mid-year review, we just said every employee needs to have a one-on-one with their manager in which they get feedback.” Fitbit sent out a simple one-question survey to confirm the conversation happened. At year end, Fitbit planned to ask employees to share their own thoughts on performance and challenges they encountered. Secondly, the company will rely on manager feedback and insight as opposed to 360-degree feedback or talent calibrations. Cynthia Brown, a senior HR director for the data-services company NetApp, echoed the importance of managerial attention. “It forced our managers to think about what it is that you have to do,” she said of the pandemic. “What are the roles and responsibilities for this individual? And to be very clear about the expectations can help to manage that. It can be anything, from why they can or can’t do something–and when they can do it.” It’s also important to understand the reasons for underperformance by an employee, noted Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of the employee-coaching firm Bravely. Sheehan was candid about her own struggles running a company while caring for her baby at the same time: “My stress levels were through the roof in a way I’ve never experienced.” Sheehan said leadership should make an effort to understand personal experiences of employees before bearing down on performance. By example, Sheehan demonstrated that leadership should also be frank about their own struggles, especially at times when a lot of pressure is being placed on managers. “Our guidance is always that managers have to give themselves permission to be vulnerable and share their own personal circumstances, so their teams are able to come and do the same with them,” Sheehan said. “Our belief at Bravely is that if you’re not able to have the open dialogue, and ask people to come forward and share what’s really going on, you won’t be able to solve the performance issues.” One big challenge, panelists acknowledged, is how to distribute tasks based on employee availability and their roles in the company. If an employee without children is consistently taking on additional tasks, for example, how can a company be sure they don’t burn out or become resentful? Mahajan, of Nutanix, spoke on the concept of “community performance,” in which individuals are responsible for certain deliverables, but the larger team is held accountable for its goals. “In a phase where some of us are busy taking care of our families, and others are more available … you can take our boundaries of performance from the individual and shift it to the team and community level,” she said. At FitBit, the company uses one-hour “monthly manager forums” to provide space for their concerns and identify specific stressors among employees. “We’re slicing and dicing our engagement data, so we can bring in management and share groups where we are seeing high levels of stress and issues impacting well-being,” said Williams. “We can also use that to tailor our sessions–we did one last month on going through the change curve, for you as a manager.” Companies also shifted policies and culture to address what’s going on. Robin Malmanger, a global HR leader for Genpact, a professional-services firm focused on digital transformation, said the company has expanded its definition of what qualities are recognized, beyond just rewarding top business performers. “We still do that, but we’ve made space to reward people demonstrating good work-life balance,” she said, “those people who can put up the boundaries and say they’ve gotta shut it down right now.” NetApp started “Pandemic Prevention Days,” essentially treated as sick days, but not deducted as such, for employees who need to take a day off for situations related to the pandemic. “Anything from taking care of someone for the day, getting tested, or whatever you feel you need to do,” Brown said. The webinar’s speakers shared a variety of company decisions, like allowing employees to turn off their computer video while teleconferencing or designating no-meeting days. Genpact established a “Work From Home Pledge” that includes promises not to make judgements about worker’s homes, or about family activity in the background, and to show respect for other employees' time. “It gives employees a freedom to open themselves up and be aware we are coming into each other’s homes,” said Malmanger. Throughout the discussion, common themes like honesty, open communication, flexibility and empathy all came up as qualities needed to change performance reviews for times like these. “Empathy is not separate from driving performance–it’s an integral part of the process,” as Sheehan put it. “Any great leader that I’ve worked for has been empathetic.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | January 01, 2021
How to Encourage a Diverse Culture of Imperfect Allies

How do we define allyship, a concept that sounds straightforward in the abstract, but murkier in its practical application in the workplace? Marisa Grimes, the director of inclusion and diversity at Mastercard, was inspired by the words of Barbara Whye, the new VP of inclusion and diversity at Apple. “You can't self-proclaim it,” Grimes said, speaking in a panel discussion titled “How to Encourage a Culture of Imperfect Allies,” which took place this month during From Day One’s virtual conference on inclusive leadership. “You have to be deemed an ally by other people by words and actions,” said Grimes. “I do think a lot of people think of themselves as allies when actually you know their words and actions don't match.” To Julie Yoon, a consultant at the leadership development firm DDI, allyship is defined to a large extent by the way others consider you to be. “And I think part of that is, you know, recognizing the privileges that you do have,” she said, “and actively learning, practicing inclusivity and standing up for the needs of others, specifically people who don't have the privileges that you have.” Is it something that can be learned? Yes, but it takes commitment. “The concept of allyship is not a noun, it’s not static, it’s not accidental, it’s something that we intentionally choose,” said Teresa Hopke, CEO of Talking Talent, an inclusion-oriented coaching firm. Just remember, it’s OK to make mistakes, the panelists told moderator Lydia Dishman, a contributing editor for Fast Company. Among their key points: Create a Safe Space to Prepare: Safe space is not just a catchphrase conservatives use to make fun of the sheltered places in academia. In an era when racial inequality and social justice are easy to endorse but also tempting to avoid in corporate conversations, Neela Pal, the head of strategy and management for the office of corporate engagement at Goldman Sachs, extols the virtues of a self-contained space to get ready for being an ally in real situations. When Pal was pursuing an MBA at Yale, she became a facilitator in a course on interpersonal dynamics, she recalled. In a sandbox-like context, groups of people guided by facilitators would express assumptions and perceptions, and the peers and facilitator would “de-risk high-risk situations,” Pal said. “I keep coming back to it. It’s not tied to my performance in a functionary way,” she explained. “There is a space where you can show up this way to practice, and then take what you learn to a higher-stakes environment.” The speakers on allyship: top row from left, Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Jennifer Abbondanza of NBCUniversal, and Teresa Hopke of Talking Talent. Bottom row, from left: Neela Pal of Goldman Sachs, Marisa Grimes of Mastercard, and Julie Yoon of DDI (Image by From Day One) Practice Empathy (Emphasis on Practice): “This year has been really focused on helping leaders become more empathetic and supportive, compassionate, curious, and creating cultures where people can bring their full selves to work,” said Hopke. “It's really been about raising the leadership competency within an organization to help create those safe spaces where people can show up this year with all of their baggage, with all of their exhaustion, and really figure out how they can thrive within that environment,” she said This was critical as the racial-justice movement of the summer unfolded, revealing a need to create an anti-racist environment where people can have difficult conversations and learn how to support one another. “You have to have empathy for what it feels like to be excluded, not only what it looks like, [but also] what it feels like, and you have to practice,” said Yoon. “Practice that behavior of having the courage to speak up on behalf of someone or even on behalf of yourself. It's very, very difficult to do, especially in a workplace where, for many people, it could feel like the stakes are higher.” Imperfection needs to be tolerated, or people will be afraid to take unfamiliar risks. “Especially in organizations where this is not commonplace yet, we know that people are going to make mistakes, we know that people are going to do and say things that aren’t perfect,” Yoon said. Let Data Help You: In an approach to allyship that’s heavy on soft skills, one of the things that people tend to overlook is the data from workforce analytics. If used correctly, they can help avoid the dreaded one-size-fits-all approach. There is power in the data: Seeing raw numbers increases awareness about where diversity and equity are lacking–and awareness can bring about change. At NBCUniversal, said Jennifer Abbondanza, the company’s VP of diversity, equity & inclusion (DE&I), data has always had a seat at the table. “[On my] team the focus is to dig into the nuances of our data, and make sure that we understand what it's telling us,” she said. “So we bring that information to our executives, to our business leaders. We have open and honest conversations, and we use them to help us derive the great strategy.” With 14 different business units in her company, Abbondanza noted, DE&I initiatives need to be custom-built. “If we want to be effective, and we do, we really have to tailor it for the different units.” Maximize Learning Opportunities: When DE&I training initiatives are put forth, they are sometimes met with resistance. “Sometimes that resistance comes from a lack of confidence and getting it right,” said Hopke. “I do think that it's beneficial to provide people with opportunities to be educated to raise their level of awareness, but also to teach them the practical how-tos. Because a lot of people–a lot of leaders in particular that I talked to–say that they don't do anything because they're afraid of doing the wrong thing. And so how can we instill the confidence in people? That can be through training, through coaching, through bringing people together in dialogue.” Make It an Abiding Pursuit: Leaders should instill the idea of allyship as a lifelong commitment, not just attendance at a workshop or two. “For us, it’s more about continuous learning. We don't like to necessarily call it training, we like to call it more ‘building inclusive leaders’ and learning,” said Grimes. “We definitely rely on our business resource groups to provide that additional support and guidance. I think for us, it's always been about making sure that [leaders] don't just sit within their silos within their particular communities, that they look to engage employees across the company, regardless of what group they may identify with. So we encourage them to collaborate. It’s important for our colleagues to attend events for groups that they don't necessarily identify with, because that's how you learn and that's how you become an ally.” In sum, it’s a journey. “Stay the course,” urged Pal. “We're very execution oriented. We want to get things done, but some of these things are big. They take a lifetime. So stay the course and see where that journey will take you because I think it's always surprising.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | December 29, 2020
Being an Inclusive Leader Is 'an Active Role to Play'

This year the McCann Worldgroup launched its second-ever global activation for employees, which the company calls A Day for Meaning. The event was the result of the company’s investment in a change-management solution driven by local markets, rather than micro-managed by top leadership. “The model we created really allowed local markets in all our regions to craft their own DE&I, or what I call ‘conscious-inclusion action plans’ based on their own experiences,” said Singleton Beato, chief diversity and engagement officer for the company. “The local offices needed to have the tools and resources to discover what diversity meant to them.” McCann Worldgroup is a marketing company with an integrated network of advertising agencies in over 120 countries and a global workforce of more than 20,000. During From Day One’s conference this month on inclusive leadership, Beato was in conversation with Sharon Epperson, senior personal finance correspondent for CNBC, about the strategic thinking needed behind initiatives to promote employee belonging, connection and shared purpose. The conversation kicked off with Beato sharing her own personal journey that led to her career path, growing up in different places with her mom, including where she was one of a few Black kids at majority-white schools. “I began to learn about the complexity of ethnicity, race and identity,” she said. Singleton Beato of McCann Worldgroup, at left, interviewed by Sharon Epperson of CNBC (Image by From Day One) Employees bringing different life experiences to the table is crucial in DE&I work, Beato stressed. “Exposure is everything,” she said. At McCann, she has worked directly with leaders to understand personal accountability and “how they can approach some of these conversations with authenticity.” Being an inclusive leader, she noted, is “an active role to play … you have to be involved, connected to, and regularly interacting with people who are different than you in a way that is open.” A Day for Meaning, McCann's global employee event, empowered local offices to craft their own diversity and inclusion plans with the goal of creating opportunity for deeper conversation. Remote conversation was an unexpected benefit, added Beato. “The connections were a little bit deeper this year than the in-person sessions we had last year.” Remote work has also prompted the company to update its mentorship program. “We have done a lot more work to re-think community and mentoring,” Beato said. “Some mentoring relationships we might not have thought about fostering, we can do now. One of my employees in New York can have a mentoring conversation with an employee in California.” There are smaller behavioral changes that help promote inclusive community inside a large company, Beato said. Instituting a “raise your hand” policy during virtual meetings can create more space for quieter employees to share their thoughts. In the same spirit, speaking up for someone in your team who’s being marginalized is a productive act of allyship. Teams can also think outside their base to seek diverse perspectives. “You can invite people in so that [teams] can be better and more expansive at what it is they’re trying to accomplish,” she said. Throughout the long-term work of DE&I, it’s also important to celebrate wins publicly. “It can’t be a one and done. You need to put together a comprehensive strategy with accountability measures and milestones,” said Beato. “I integrate in my strategy ‘milestone moments’ that are internally public. Many of the milestones I put into place require leaders to share, with their entire global network, what their progress is on the goals we put into place.” By doing that, accomplishing goals becomes a company-wide mission, as opposed to a siloed HR initiative. “It’s becoming a part of ingrained organization practices and communication processes,” Beato said, “that leaders must be front and center to do the work and speak to the work they’ve done to move the needle.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | December 29, 2020
Why the Diversity Industry Has Failed–and How to Fix It

Author and journalist Pamela Newkirk, PhD, has spent a considerable portion of her life in journalism and higher education. “In three of four newsrooms, I was the only African American news reporter. I would later become one of two people of color on New York University’s tenure-track journalism faculty,” she writes in the preface to her 2019 book Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. “During more than three decades of my professional life,” she continues, “diversity has been a national preoccupation. Yet despite decades of hand wringing, costly initiatives, and uncomfortable conversations, progress in most elite American institutions has been negligible.” In a conversation at From Day One’s December virtual conference on inclusive leadership, Newkirk reflected on the theme of her book as well as the surge of corporate commitment to diversity in response to this year’s racial-justice movement. “It was already beginning to boom, as I was completing the book around 2017, early 2018. And since that time, it blossomed even more,” Newkirk told Fortune associate editor Emma Hinchliffe in a fireside chat about why the diversity industry has failed–and what can be done to fix it. “It is one of the huge growth industries right now, and I think a lot of that was due to the ways in which race has been so highlighted during these past four years, beginning with the election of Donald Trump.” In recent years, many Fortune 500 companies, as well as organizations in higher education and government, have hired their first chief diversity officers. “Surely many institutions had long had someone in a role like that, but the idea of chief diversity officers has just caught fire,” Newkirk said. “Many people see it as a cure, as if having these people in the organization is the answer.  The hiring of a diversity officer is the beginning. It should not be seen as the end game.” Fireside chat: Fortune's Emma Hinchliffe interviewing author Pamela Newkirk (Image by From Day One) Chief diversity officers arrive in an organization as, in Newkirk’s words, “change agents.” That’s what the job calls for, but the system around them doesn’t always welcome that disruption. “Oftentimes, they are among the most marginalized people, particularly in executive roles. Time after time, they say they are marginalized, they are not given the resources, they don't have a direct line to the CEO or to the university president. All of these things will just undermine any chance they have of being successful,” Newkirk said. It’s almost as if top management believes that “just the symbolism of having them there is enough.” In fact, a chief diversity officer can do very little without the full commitment of leadership. D&I professionals will be only as successful as those in power allow them to be. A 2019 report by management consulting firm Russell Reynolds Associates, which examined diversity in Fortune 500 companies, found out that only 35% of diversity officers had access to the personnel metrics of the organization, which meant they could barely see where the problems were. “All the ways bias can metastasize, you can only know if you have transparent metrics that you can quantify,” said Newkirk. “And so that's just an indication that many people in that role are not given the support that they need to actually be successful.” The main shortfall of employers’ efforts toward diversity, Newkirk said, is a check-the-box approach, rather than a holistic one. “It’s as if you can have a diversity survey, a climate survey, do one or two things, and ‘Voila!’,” said Newkirk. Newkirk explained that research is showing that anti-bias training may at best change attitudes for a day, but it can also make the problem worse by prompting resistance. “Anti-bias training, in itself, is not working,” said Newkirk. “So what I would say, whether you do anti-bias training or not, these institutions need to shift their focus from trying to change hearts and minds to actual interventions.” One of those interventions the employee-recruitment pipeline, which can help employers reach out to a broader candidate pool. “Many organizations continue to hire from a very, very small network,” Newkirk said. “We live in a rigidly segregated society. People hire who they know, they hire who their friends know, they hire who's recommended. And oftentimes people of color are just left out of that network, so this kind of workplace homogeneity is self-perpetuating,” she said. “Breaking that cycle takes intention, and it takes will.” Organizations also need to be intentional about outreach and mentoring. “If we keep doing the same thing,” Newkirk warned, “we’ll keep getting abysmal results. Many would rather spend millions in diversity efforts,” she said, alluding to training workshops, “rather than invest in mentoring or expanding the pipeline in looking outside the familiar.” For many years, Newkirk observed, people tended to assume that after civil-rights movements, all had been resolved. “If there’s one silver lining from the tragedies that took place over the summer, I think that it has finally broken through to more people that we still, despite the progress that has been made, have not completed the job. And without vigilance, we can lose ground on even the progress that was made,” she said. As for organizations, their hefty down payments toward racial justice were welcome as far as they went. “This is all well and good, but there was no looking inward into the bias that’s living within the walls of these organizations,” said Newkirk. “It’s not just about writing a check, it’s looking at what leaders can do to ensure there’s greater justice, racial inclusion, representations.” Alas, even success stories are not necessarily permanent. “One of the companies that I featured in the book is Coca-Cola, and I looked at how they built a more diverse and inclusive workplace after a discrimination lawsuit settlement in 2000,” Newkirk said. “Over a five-year period, with a system of transparent metrics, where they looked at employees across racial lines–they were looking for issues of equity and pay and promotions–they were able to see where the virus had metastasized.” The company kept that kind of transparent system going and added a layer of accountability on top of that, with a task force that was overseeing the efforts to change the workplace, Newkirk said. In a period of five years, the company was able to make significant strides in diversifying the workplace, even in management positions. “Now, I understand that in recent years, there's been some backsliding,” said Newkirk. (From Day One reached out to Coca-Cola for comment and will update this story with any responses we receive.) “But I don't think that diminishes the model that was set in the way it was done,” Newkirk added optimistically. “It could be replicated by any institution that really wanted to change.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | December 24, 2020
How to Give Diversity Leaders the Clout They Need

In the wake of this summer’s protest movement, a particular job posting became much more common–that of the chief diversity officer. It was one of many efforts from companies to tackle long standing questions around diversity, equity and inclusion that became even more urgent. For Salima Bhimani, the chief equity and inclusion strategist for the Other Bets at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, the new moves raised a question: Were such postings the result of a true “gut check” from the companies doing the posting? “What I’m quite frankly tired of, along with other folks who have been doing this work for decades, is a lot of the false promises,” she said. “This reactive posture … the thing I worry about is what is motivating you toward that [job]. For me, it’s important to ask what is incentivizing this.” Bhimani was a panelist in a candid conversation about giving diversity leaders the clout they need, which took place during From Day One’s December conference on inclusive leadership. The moderator was Emily Nordquist, senior program manager with the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise & Responsibility at Loyola University Chicago. Throughout the conversation, panelists stressed that diversity initiatives need to be deep and meaningful–as opposed to short-term, reactive “compliance exercises,” as Bhimani put it. Key to that shift is internal work prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as well as empowering diversity leaders within the company. “There’s a lot of pre-work to be done before deciding that a [chief diversity officer] is the answer,” she said. What does that pre-work look like? Shay Zeemer, chief diversity officer of Newell Brands, took on the work herself. “It occurred to me I could spend the time begging for us to hire someone experienced in DEI to lead and teach us,” she noted, “or I could spend the same amount of time doing it myself to build it and prove it was worth it to everyone and that we will see benefits, then hand it off to that person who can really, really accelerate.” The speakers, top row from left: Emily Nordquist of Loyola University Chicago, Salima Bhimani of Google, and Stephanie Braid of KPMG. Bottom row from left: Alexandria Ray of Hinshaw & Culbertson, Shay Zeemer of Newell Brands, and Jamal Lopez of Weill Cornell Medicine (Image by From Day One) At Weill Cornell Medicine, the senior director of institutional equity, Jamal Lopez, said the organization is staffing an “equity and inclusion council,” as well as rolling out resources and procedures for business resource groups (BRGs). “That gives the employees a voice and it gives those in C-suites and senior leaders a better opportunity to understand what people are looking for,” he explained. Once the BRGs are running, he added, the company will develop a recognition strategy that acknowledges five different types of impact: business, community, workforce/workplace and allyship. “We also want to prominently feature members of our BRGs … so they get a chance to have exposure,” Lopez said. Stephanie Braid, director of inclusion and diversity for KPMG, stressed the importance of giving employee resource groups (ERGs) a voice. “Too often this work is eating into employees' personal time or the contributions of an ERG lead can be deprioritized,” she said. “My advice is to give them a real voice–they should be informing the organization’s diversity, inclusion and equity strategy and telling you where biases and barriers are showing up,” she continued. “And value their work … it takes an influential person to move things forward, so at the bare minimum increase the visibility of work they’re doing to CEOs, leaders and managers.” Bhimani noted that ERGs and BRGs are often not positioned well within companies to enforce change–which often results in frustration among the employees participating. “There is a key partnership that has to happen that is very strategic and very nuanced, saying what is the role that ERGs need to be playing within the larger equity, diversity and inclusion strategy?” Alexandria Ray, diversity, equity and inclusion lead for the law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson, stressed the need for “allies and accomplices” in ERG and diversity work: “When you have allies and accomplices that are part of your organization, that’s what moves the needle–that’s what make people really stand out.” In that vein, several panelists spoke to the increase of solidarity from white employees–and the opportunity for more of it. “I’m starting to see lots of white people on the Teams meetings just listening, not taking up space but listening,” said Zeemer. “Then they take it to their team meeting and do a discussion group.” Nordquist wrapped the conversation by asking panelists to offer one piece of advice for companies looking to empower their diversity leaders and spur real change–work she called “nuanced, ambiguous and complex.” Braid stressed that “inclusion needs to be built into everyone’s role in the organization” as opposed to putting it in a silo within HR, recruiting or leadership, where the conversation might be isolated. Ray offered: “Be comfortably uncomfortable. This is not the time to choose to be offended, this is a time to think outside the box, to act on what the suggested change needs to be.” Zeemer pointed out that the ongoing work of diversity, equity and inclusion can be balanced with shorter-term goals. “There are some easy things that can be done … everyone can do a pay-equity audit now, you don’t need a strategy there,” she said. Lopez encouraged the people invested in DEI work to also take care of themselves. “There can be pushback in doing this work and that can be painful. It can be disappointing,” he noted. “I need to figure out what I’m gonna tell myself when I run into an obstacle, that I’m not going to let disappointment weaken my ability to do the work.” Bhimani offered this advice: “Invest for the long haul,” she said. “This is not a marathon, this is not a sprint, it is a long-term, lifelong journey.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | December 22, 2020
8 Marks of the Best Employers for Working Parents

With its lack of mandated support for working parents, the U.S. has a competitive disadvantage­–it has trouble keeping talented women in the workforce. An estimated 43% of new mothers leave their jobs within a year of giving birth. And that was before the pandemic created a full-fledged child-care crisis. “What was a leaky bucket is now a waterfall of talent leaving the workforce,” said Katherine Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven, the world’s largest virtual clinic for women’s and family health. For enlightened companies, however, it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, the best employers for working parents, who offer them better benefits and greater flexibility, tend to perform better overall. These companies see 5.5 times more revenue growth, thanks to greater innovation, higher talent retention and increased productivity, according to a comprehensive new survey, “Parents at the Best Workplaces–The Largest-Ever Study of Working Parents,” from Maven and Great Place to Work, an authority on workplace culture. “The results make a strong business case for employers who support working parents,” wrote journalist Lydia Dishman in Fast Company. The report, based on a survey of more than 850,000 employees, including 440,000 parents across 1,244 U.S.-headquartered companies, explores what sets parent-friendly workplaces apart and how they’re responding creatively to the challenges created by the pandemic. Remote work, remote schooling, and the stresses of front-line work have created a crisis of burnout and disengagement in the workplace, but also an opportunity for innovative companies to rise to the occasion. “Employers need real, proven strategies and solutions, and they need them now,” said Ryder. “The best solutions are not perks. Instead, what stands out are real investments in stretched populations that help attract and retain perspectives at all levels of a company.” What do the best companies for working parents have in common? Among the survey’s findings: They Provide More Parental Leave:  The companies who ranked as best workplaces for parents typically offered more days of maternal and paternal leave. Working mothers lose nearly a month of income on average when they extend their allotted maternity leave, adding a financial burden to the challenges new parents face. Providing more maternal leave helps close the gender pay gap, since fewer new mothers wind up sacrificing income and dipping into unpaid leave. Working fathers need more management support to take parental time off, since they are using only 30% to 50% of the leave offered. They Offer More Help for Parents Returning to Work: These workplaces offer benefits that support parents when they need it, including telemedicine for pregnant and postpartum families (49% of best workplaces), return-to-work career coaches (48%), and breast-milk shipping for traveling moms (52%). Other benefits include lactation consultants, infant sleep coaches, and parenting coaches. They Give More Support to Parents-to-Be: One in eight U.S. women of childbearing age are affected by infertility, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And it’s expensive when they are, with patients often spending more than $50,000 on treatments. Eighty-one percent of best workplaces for parents are providing reimbursement for fertility treatments. Over the last three years, nearly half have increased their coverage. They Provide More Help With Childcare: Childcare has always been critical for working parents–and it has become even more important during the pandemic as parents have had to navigate changing daycare and school protocols. Among best workplaces for parents, 78% offer support finding childcare, 56% offer backup childcare, and 61% support parent employee resource groups (ERGs). University of Chicago Medicine, for example, has offered employees reimbursement for 15 extra days of backup childcare, on top of the 15 days a year already provided. They Recognize That Supporting Parents Aligns With Their D&I Efforts: Since underrepresented racial groups are more likely to be working parents than White employees, better support for parents helps employers address the different needs of a diverse workforce. For example, the survey indicates that 33% of Black mothers are experience burnout, in comparison to 25% of White mothers. When working parents are free from burnout, they are 20 times more likely to intend to stay at the company. They Engage Non-Parents as Well: Since extra help for parents can create questions of fairness, the best companies create a culture of cooperation between parents and non-parents, especially around issues such as meeting times, deadlines and workloads. They’re Looking for Better Mental-Health Solutions: Many major employers, including Starbucks, Target, McDonald’s and Salesforce, have increased their mental-health offerings in response to the pandemic. PwC recently introduced well-being coaching sessions in which employees can talk with a counselor about whatever may be causing them stress, according to Business Insider. On Maven’s platform, there was a 320% spike in mental-health appointments in the month after the pandemic arrived. They Offer Creative Solutions: Many employers in Corporate America have responded creatively with programs to help parents with issues ranging from remote learning to childcare. Marsh & McLennan, the global insurance giant, built the digital Marsh Kids Korner to offer activities and exercises categorized by age groups up to high school, plus yoga and meditation for kids and adults. The National Basketball Association organized a virtual take-your-child-to-work day, while Allstate Insurance helped parents produce original learning content. To provide more job flexibility, McDonald’s empowered workers to negotiate directly with their managers to accommodate their schedules. Providing these benefits and options for working parents apparently doesn’t just help just the employees with children, but it provides a halo effect throughout these companies. Compared with other workplaces, the best places for working parents get higher grades, vs. other companies, when it comes to perceptions of fair pay, management involvement, benefits and opportunity. Editor's Note: From Day One thanks our sponsor of this story, Maven.

the Editors | December 14, 2020
How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women, at Work and Home

Throughout the pandemic, women are the ones who’ve borne the brunt of the distress. The recent Women in the Workplace survey by McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org found that one in four women are considering downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce, largely because of the critical shortage of childcare. An alarming number have already left. In September, of the nearly 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the workforce, about 865,000 were women, while 216,000 were men, according to the National Women’s Law Center. We’re in the middle of a she-cession, a mass exodus of women from the workforce, with women of color particularly affected. Women were already at a disadvantage at home and in the workplace, carrying most of the load as parents and enduring longstanding inequities on the job. Now that the situation has become an emergency, one of the pressing questions is whether women will be expected to solve these issues on their own. They shouldn't, according to the authors of the new book Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, by professors David G. Smith and W. Brad Johnson. They argue that men, who are often the most influential stakeholders in an organization, need to pitch in–now more than ever. “I think companies are wrestling with, How do we prevent losing two or three decades of progress on diversity and inclusion when it comes to gender? And that's a huge challenge,” said Johnson in a conversation with the co-authors moderated by Faye Penn, executive director of women.nyc. Speaking at From Day One’s recent conference on how employers can help working parents, the authors offered insights from their longtime research on gender equity: No, It’s Not Just a “Women’s Thing”: “Too often we find that men hear words like women or diversity or equity, or inclusion about gender, and they immediately check out. They assume that's a women's thing: That's not for me, I don't really have a role in that. I don't have a voice. That’s not me. Men have been nowhere in sight,” said Johnson. “We want to flip the script. It’s not about women, this is about leadership–inclusion, equity, making people feel genuine, belonging–this should all be part of our leadership’s brand.” On that note, to some men, it’s quite an abstract concept. “Guys believe in gender equity, but most will say they’re not sure what their role is,” said Smith. “The guys who really do believe in it, they’re not doing as much as what they think they are.” What About Your Household? Allyship does not end in the workplace. “We’re never gonna get to equity if it’s always women who have to step away from work during the pandemic,” said Johnson, noting that, when it comes to domestic duties that arise during work-from-home situations, women tend to do twice the work of their partner. (Single moms, of course, carry an even greater burden.) “As long as that’s the case, no matter how good we are at work, they’re always going to have this double shift,” he said. So, any man partnered with a woman should ask himself the following questions: Am I doing my share of the housework, of the child care, of everything that comes with that? Am I helping with the emotional labor of running a family? Am I planning the next event? Do I know my children's clothing sizes? These concerns tend to fall on women–and tend to go unacknowledged by men. Role Modeling Works: At home, seeing their father being engaged in household and family-management chores gives a good example for both sons and daughters, the authors pointed out. Sons will learn that equally heavy lifting in the house is the norm. Daughters, by contrast, will grow up to expect the same from their own partners. At work, Smith said, men who want to be good allies of their female coworkers should talk about having to take one of the kids to the doctor, or having to leave a little earlier for a parent-teacher conference. In the good examples they’ve observed, “They talked about leaving loudly, they made it very visible when they were leaving and why they were leaving,” Smith said. “That’s to role-model for the junior men [at work].” This also means de-stigmatizing flex-work arrangements. “Most of us recognize that these are not women's programs anymore,” he said. “Not that they ever were before, it's just that women took advantage of them more often than men did.” The Rules Have to Be Backed up by the Culture: If a company establishes equitable parenting policies for men and women, but fosters a culture that discourages fathers from taking advantage of them, the situation tends to prolong the inequity. Fear of being sidelined is strong, especially among men. While young fathers do want to lean in and be better partners at home, knowing that it’s better for a child’s development, they often face this kind of headwind, both from their supervisors and their peers. “If a guy takes two months [to take care of his new baby], men are like, Dude, why do you wanna be home with a baby? That’s something we have to overcome,” said Johnson. Speaking on allyship in the workplace, clockwise from upper left: moderator Faye Penn of women.nyc and authors David G. Smith and W. Brad Johnson (Image by From Day One) America Is Not Scandinavia, But We Should Do Better: It’s well known that other countries have better maternity- and paternity-leave policies than the U.S.–120 countries offer paid maternity leave. In the U.S., the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows employees 12 weeks of leave after the birth of a child, but they’re not required to be paid and only 60% of workers are eligible. America’s laws tend to reflect its traditional views toward work and family. “The notion of what work is, and the nature of work–it's this very individualistic perspective that we have that, Hey, having children is your choice,” said Smith. “There’s no collectivist idea that children are a natural thing, that we should have children, and that it's healthy for our country and our families and our society to do that.” Plus, there’s the conditioning of the American Dream: That if we work hard enough, then we can move up. As a corollary, taking time off is not a sign of hard work. It’s a notion that’s hard to shake off, even subconsciously. “I believe in the American Dream, too,” said Smith. “But I also believe that we have to support our families, because they're going to have children. And part of a healthy society is having that support network there.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | December 13, 2020
Why the Facebook Lawsuit Should Be Celebrated, Even If It's Flawed

Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published on Techonomy.com. There is one unalloyed benefit from the vast antitrust assault unleashed against Facebook this week by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 46 states, plus Guam and the District of Columbia: the company will have to finally start being more careful. Facebook has been heedless, and society has been harmed. This has been true over many years but is becoming more and more apparent, especially to government regulators and officials all over the world. Along with many others, they are concerned not just about its failures to compete fairly, but also to protect user privacy and safety, restrain hate speech, fairly govern the flow of information and especially to ensure its services do not harm democracy. For all that, the two antitrust lawsuits filed this week–one by the Federal Trade Commission and one by the states–are relatively narrow in their purpose. They aim to show that the company has taken a predatory approach to competition and has engaged in a pattern of harming competitors, in several key cases buying them to eliminate threats. The plaintiffs want to force Facebook to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, two major parts of its social-media empire. The cases are compelling in enumerating examples of predatory behavior, and there is no question Facebook has acted improperly in numerous instances. However, it is highly unlikely that in the end government lawyers will succeed in prying Instagram and WhatsApp away from Facebook. And that may be OK. I am not convinced that for all the different kinds of damage this company causes society, its continued ownership of these two properties should be at the top of the list. I am also not convinced that its ownership of these services is the most important way Facebook harms consumers, protecting whom is ostensibly the purpose of American antitrust law. And finally, I am not convinced that consumers–or call them here “voters”­–want their government officials breaking apart a company that more than half of all Americans use every day. This doesn’t even address how legally viable is the suit, which many question, or how hard Facebook will fight it—which will be unbendingly. Here’s one reason: eMarketer calculates that this year Instagram will account for almost 49% of Facebook’s total U.S. ad revenues, a percentage that has almost doubled in just the last two years. In some ways Instagram may BE the future of Facebook. (WhatsApp, by contrast, generates essentially no revenue.) Yet other good things could come from this effort, for example new rules about what rights different services, apps, and websites have when they interact on the net. The Wall Street Journal examines that promising possibility. So is this the right lawsuit? Possibly not. Does there need to be massive government pushback against the company? Absolutely. I welcome this lawsuit because Facebook must be forced to pay more attention to the needs and concerns of society. The scrutiny that will now be directed at Facebook for a prolonged period will undoubtedly cause it to move more carefully and deliberately in a variety of realms, not just in its approach to mergers and competitors. While the company ostensibly retired the slogan “move fast and break things,” in reality that psychology remains alive and well at the company, and in the head of its unchallengeable leader. (Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash) CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s arrogance and hubris is the primary reason for the company’s heedlessness, and he is able to think and act that way because he has absolute control of the company. His personal voting control over the company’s stock allows him literally to do whatever he wants. When several members of the company’s board of directors in the last two years questioned his judgement on key matters, he simply removed them. The Facebook board today is essentially a rubber-stamp body. If internal governance has failed at Facebook, government governance may be required. In other words, if Zuckerberg won’t sufficiently improve Facebook on his own, he needs to be forced. One of Facebook’s central problems is that Zuckerberg refuses to accept any analysis suggesting his company has made fundamental errors in its public posture or social role. And of course, if there aren’t errors there isn’t need for fundamental corrections. He is completely convinced that the world, including government regulators and legislators in every country, fail to understand the macro benefits of Facebook’s ability to bring people together. He believes that even though there may be shortcomings in Facebook’s behavior or social impact, those shortcomings are far far outweighed by the virtues it brings to the world. Government needs to assert its primacy over Facebook because Facebook risks overpowering government. Facebook, along with several other well-known companies, has an influence, power, and even authority in society that threatens governments’ own capacity to oversee the systems of countries and the safety, security, and health of their citizens. One way this is manifest is Facebook’s disproportionately large impact on the conduct of elections in every country in which it operates. The decisions Facebook makes about what constitutes appropriate campaigning online are often more influential on the outcomes of those elections than decisions of the governments themselves. That has to change. As a major article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs puts it: “Internet platforms cause political harms that are far more alarming than any economic damage they create. Their real danger is not that they distort markets; it is that they threaten democracy.” Does this lawsuit address that? Not really. Setting parameters, though, and even simply slowing the relentless expansion of Facebook, has virtues in itself. The main thing I hope and expect will come from this and other like actions around the world is a more responsible and cooperative stance from the company when it comes to modulating the negative impacts it has on society. This is the first big step in forcing Facebook to operate in a world of rules. So I applaud New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who led the coalition of states, and the FTC. They may not get exactly what they want, but they will slow Facebook down. The fact that government in Facebook’s home country has finally put it on notice, finally stood up in a substantial way to its unreasonable power, is in itself a cause for celebration. David Kirkpatrick, the founder of the conference and media company Techonomy, has covered Facebook extensively since October 2006. He wrote The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World way back in 2010. His views of the company and its founder have hardened considerably since then.

davidkirkpatrick | December 12, 2020
Diversity Hiring: Innovative Ways to Meet Your Goals

Over the course of this year, the trajectory of corporate diversity-and-inclusion efforts has been particularly under a spotlight. Protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing prompted many organizations to commit publicly to more equity-conscious efforts, while the remote-working conditions brought on by the pandemic made more starkly evident the economic and social disparity among different communities. So how can employers, amid these conditions and grappling with an ever-changing work environment, successfully recruit diverse candidates­–and keep them? Executives from across multiple sectors convened recently to talk about these issues in a From Day One webinar, moderated by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman, titled “Diversity Hiring: Innovative Ways for Companies to Meet Their Goals.” Chief among the key factors for success, the panelists agreed, are out-of-the-box thinking, transparency, follow-through and, in actuality, listening to diverse voices in the first place. “After a lot of the social unrest and really just emotional exhaustion from a lot of the employees here, we began to get together and really have candid conversations about, What are pillars? What do we really want?,” said Brittany King-Offord, a lead talent-acquisition manager at AT&T. “What do we want people to buy into and, currently as a corporation, then how can we sit back and create the branding around it to where we can engage potential candidates [who] want to believe that AT&T is not just talking the talk, but we’re also walking the walk?,” said King-Offord. “So we actually enhanced one of our programs called AT&T Believes, where we are going back into the communities and really serving–not just with doing basic community service,” she said. “We’re also looking at, How do we engage with upskilling opportunities and also other education opportunities to engage potential candidates ... to create a pipeline that makes sense–so they can reap the benefits of the conversations that we’re having internally?” The value of a talent-development pipeline, particularly in letting candidates know what jobs exist and encouraging them to apply, was repeatedly touched upon throughout the webinar. “Things that we’ve seen a lot of organizations starting to adopt: One, to go beyond just the traditional diversity job boards,” said Leah Daniels, SVP of strategy at Appcast, a developer of programmatic job-advertising technology. “That’s an unfortunate box-checking exercise that we have seen,” she said, since “there are low volumes of people engaging on those sites.” She recommends looking for candidates on a much broader level. Her second recommendation was to reach out to many different kinds of colleges. “Just because they’re not a historically black college does not mean that they don’t have variety of great candidates and opportunities,” Daniels said. From Day One's panelists, clockwise from upper left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Yvonne Soto of the New York City Department of Education, Leah Daniels of Appcast, Chad Nico Hiu of the YMCA of the USA, Brittany King-Offord of AT&T, and Monique Carswell of the Walmart Foundation (Image by From Day One) Daniels offered a third piece of advice: “Taking a really hard look at your job descriptions and requirements and asking, Are you creating barriers to diversity unintentionally? Does this position really require a four-year degree or master’s degree? Are we just asking for that because we can?,” she said. “And so really making sure you’re reaching a diverse audience and you’re not asking them to opt out. One of the things we know is that women and people of color, particularly, are more likely to try to match all the requirements in your job description, where oftentimes white men will not. They will say, ‘close enough,’ and they’ll still apply for your job. So if you’ve created the bar too high, you’ve actually created an opportunity for candidates to take themselves out of contention–without even the need to do it. So really making sure that you are asking for things that are real, as opposed to a wish list.” Follow-through is just as important. Candidates need to see evidence of companies truly enacting their pledges and policies regarding diversity and inclusion, with potential employees wanting to “see performatively” that organizations are living up to their commitments, according to Chad Nico Hiu, senior director of diversity and inclusion at YMCA of the USA. Before reaching out to candidates, individual leaders should look inward. “We sometimes, as leaders in this area, or trying to be leaders in this area, jump to the organizational change before we do the individual work,” he said. “What is our own bias? What is our own learning, where are our own blind spots, how does that show up in the policies we proposed or the leadership we try to embody in the spaces we aim to create?” Organizations need to provide solid evidence that they've got what job candidates are looking for. Earlier in the year, Hiu said, “Everyone was looking for three words in somebody’s statement: Did you have Black Lives Matter? And if you didn’t, you got nailed. Very rarely did we see, initially, the words address systemic racism, foster anti-oppressive tactics, and ensure that all people feel safe and welcome. The tactics to the performative aspect of this work sometimes get glossed over.” Hiu quoted a favorite saying of a colleague: “How do we make this a movement, not a moment?" He continued: “That’s a part of what I think we all are trying to talk about in diversity. There’s a movement here that, if we don’t lose it, can change the makeup of every one of our sectors, every one of our companies, every one of our neighborhoods, if we hold onto it and systematize it while people are still paying attention.” He added: “There’s a need to ask the candidates that we keep, What has made you stay?, instead of assuming. There’s a need to make sure that employee resource groups or business resource groups are tapped into deciding how we talk about them.” Yvonne Soto, executive director of organizational development and effectiveness for the New York City Department of Education, said the department had already made concrete strides and demonstrably reached its diversity-and-inclusion goals, with over 50% of new teachers this year–for the first time–identifying as people of color. But she too stressed the necessity to be vigilant and continue showing evidence of the department’s follow-through to candidates, staff members, and the wider community. “One of the points that I want to make is not grandstanding or having platitudes around pledges, but how can we ensure that that’s embedded into the fabric of what we do through our priorities and core values–and really centering the voices of people of color within our organization to inform our decisions as we move forward?” Soto said. “So as we think about returning to work and what that looks like–and creating return-to-work guidance and resources, how can we lead with inclusivity and empathy? How can we acknowledge that there has been disproportionality to our black colleagues and Asian colleagues across the system?” she asked, emphasizing the need to ensure “that they play a role and reviewing our resources around structured interviewing, diversity, recruitment, toolkits, etc., to ensure that we are going beyond just the mission and vision, but also ensuring that employee voice is centered in the conversation.” And while proactivity, innovation and concrete achievement are imperative, so too is transparency, which is needed in order to maintain that drive, said Monique Carswell, head of associate and customer engagement at the Walmart Foundation. “When you make these announcements and commitments, you have to continue to let people know where you are on that journey. So here’s where we are; here’s how we’re getting there,” Carswell said, which should apply both internally and externally. At Walmart, “we’ve moved from an annual diversity report to mid-year. So how can we continue to make improvements and let people know where we are at the same time?,” she said, recommending “constant communication and feedback flow.” She added: “In terms of our current associates, and even the pipeline of folks who are looking to work for us, there’s this sense of urgency. So you want to act swiftly, you want to come out big, you want to come out strong, but at the same time, you have to have this steady momentum. So do you have the actual tools in place internally?” Maintaining consistent, effective procedures can be “a huge hurdle, depending on the size of your organization,” she said, especially given variations in “where everybody is coming from and where they’re at on that journey. So you do have to have a little bit of grace around that and continue to  question yourselves and your actions.” Editor's note: You can watch a video of the webinar here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Sheila Flynn is a Chicago-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 | December 08, 2020
Job Flexibility: How It Can Be a Lifesaver for Families

As working parents struggle to cope with the profound stresses of the pandemic era, one of the most important accommodations they need from their employers is flexibility. Parents are asking to do their work at odd hours, in different ways, and with sensible expectations. That’s fair enough in theory, but how to make such changes work in practice? At McDonald’s, the biggest policy shift in terms of job flexibility was allowing employees to work directly with their managers to accommodate their schedules, said Havonnah Johnson, a McDonald’s people officer. “Two of my direct reports are caregivers. One has two children at home, both with special needs. She blocked her calendar for 20 hours of the workweek and, candidly, the question that I asked her was, ‘OK, so do we need to work together in the evenings? Do we need to carve out some times that are morning?,’” said Johnson. “But as her boss, you know, it was my job to figure out how to accommodate her.” Rachelle Carpenter, VP of total rewards, employee experience and HR operations for Dish Network, said her company does likewise. “We do have folks that are stressed out or burnt out or working too much. And so we do offer different schedule types,” she said. The two HR leaders were speaking on a panel of experts on the issue of “Job Flexibility and Its Limits: What’s Productive and What’s Fair?,” part of From Day One’s recent conference on how employers can respond to the child-care crisis brought on by the pandemic. With millions of families juggling remote work, remote learning, and often doing it all in cramped quarters, the stresses have created a national emergency. Ironically, remote work so far seems not to impact productivity too much–on the contrary, without a separation between work and home, people tend to work longer hours. But how sustainable is that, with burnout already becoming a ubiquitous complaint? For managers, the need to allow job flexibility while maintaining performance standards is the new balancing act. “Our systems account for a lot of the accountability. We know when people log in, we know when they log off, we know all the different checks and balances,” said Lisa Nichols, SVP and HR advisor at Citigroup, “But the reality is there has to be another layer of trust, regardless of how you can check behind an employee.” The panelists, clockwise from top left: Moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Rachelle Carpenter of Dish Network, Lisa Nichols of Citigroup, Havonnah Jonson of McDonald's, and Andy Pittman of Mailchimp (Image by From Day One) To guide its managers, the email-marketing company Mailchimp launched a new initiative, called a “leader lab.” The first program focused on “leading in times of uncertainty,” rooted in integrated awareness to help leaders understand what they’re experiencing personally as well as what their teams are going through, said Andy Pittman, Mailchimp’s VP of talent strategy. For the managers, one goal is to understand their own stresses and how that may show up in their work. “We don't want our managers, as they're showing empathy, to go into ruinous empathy, where you just say that everything is wonderful, because it's not,” Pittman said. “Mixing confidence and hope with realism is a general concept that we started training on this year.” To Nichols of Citigroup, which has 60,000 employees in the U.S., empathy in this regard mainly means acknowledging different types of households and realities, which allows HR managers to develop tools to facilitate remote management. Each part of the U.S. has faced a different set of challenges during COVID-19, Nichols noted, so a blanket set of tools was going to be unhelpful. Flexibility extends not just to schedules but also to productivity, since working parents in a pandemic can’t reasonably be expected to perform the same they do in more normal times. “The pandemic only amplified wherever people were trending, on both ends of the [performance] spectrum,” said Johnson of McDonald’s, where managers reassessed key deliverables during the pandemic and decided what could be cast aside for the time being. “We knew that performance motivates folks and people were really concerned about how they would perform in this virtual world,” she said. “And so we added a COVID goal: whatever you're working on to support the business, but then also how COVID impacts your overall work stream.” At Mailchimp, the company has been redeveloping behavioral blueprints for its leaders. “We actually launched an entire new behavior model across the organization for essentially the flip-side of the coin around work and accountability,” said Pittman. “So it's not only what you produce, or what you do within the organization with those goals, but how you do it. It just boils down to understanding: What are we? What does success look like in our roles? How are we supposed to show up in our roles as well–and understand that no two situations with all the humans in your team and the organization are the same? That's kind of our guiding principles around this.” For Citigroup, which has offices worldwide, observing the way its Asian employees behaved when the pandemic hit their region helped inform the company’s response when the pandemic arrived in the U.S. “We were able to go back to Asia and go, ‘OK, what did you put in place that allowed you to get in touch with employees and negotiate deliverables?,’” said Nichols. “We had a little bit of a head start.” The pandemic has inspired companies to be flexible about their benefits as well, not only for parents but also other caregivers and non-parents facing their own particular challenges. “When we went all remote, we doubled sick time available for all employees,” said Pittman. “We introduced new programs for parents for PTO if they have a child in virtual school.” The key, to him, was thinking creatively about how to expand benefits and adapt them to a new reality. At McDonald’s, “the big deliverable is us extending counseling benefits to families,” said Johnson. “No matter what your health-care provider is, whoever lives with you, we extended our third-party vendor benefits.” This provides everything from discounted cell phones to counseling and tutoring. Dish TV has made an effort to find resources for different age groups, even in cases where the company is not offering a benefit directly. “We've been really focused on being the catalyst for communicating different resources that are in the community,” said Dish TV’s Carpenter, who emphasized the company’s priority on clear communication in general. “One thing that I've loved that our leadership has done is that our own our CEO, every single Friday since this started in mid-March, has done a video that is out there on our internal website for all employees to access,” providing business and COVID-19 updates, as well as reiterating “our  goals and our values, and what that looks like.” In a positive way, the conversations about racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing paved the way for more open discussion about other difficult situations in the workplace, panelists said. “That's when we basically came out to the entire organization and said it's OK to have uncomfortable conversations. It's okay to talk about things that maybe historically in the workplace were taboo,” said Nichols. “I think it actually helped to also open up the door to talk about some of those things from a work-life balance [perspective] that maybe people were not as comfortable to bring to their managers, because we were now starting to just naturally have more uncomfortable conversations,” she said. Her fellow speaker Johnson agreed: “We’ve gotten personal in a way that's made our work interesting, challenging, but I think richer as well.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | December 02, 2020
Getting Past the Shame: Mental Health Care in the Workplace

Amelia Wilcox, founder and CEO of the employee-wellness company Zenovate, can talk in depth about the future of mental health care in the workplace. But in order for most of us to join that conversation, she believes, we need to eliminate any shame in talking about it in the first place. In that vein, Wilcox opened her presentation at From Day One’s November conference by sharing the story of her friend Shannon. The friend is an Olympian and entrepreneur whose business was dramatically affected by COVID-19. She’s now experiencing financial stress, emotional isolation, marriage strain and physical reactions like picking at her fingers. “Her story is not unique,” Wilcox said. “She’s the healthiest, happiest, most optimistic person I know, with no signs or symptoms of mental illness previous to COVID-19.” “There should be no shame in what she’s experiencing–it’s actually a common human response a lot of us are experiencing due to the unprecedented amount of stress,” Wilcox continued. Then she laid out what that stress looks like at the moment. According to an American Psychological Association study, new stressors this year include COVID-19 fears, remote work, social unrest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization. That’s on top of pre-existing stressors that range from climate change to mass shootings to the opioid-addiction epidemic. Amelia Wilcox, founder and CEO of Zenovate (Photo courtesy of Zenovate) Wilcox made a forceful argument that employers should concern themselves with this issue. Mental illness is now the most expensive health problem in the U.S., surpassing cardiovascular disease, and it results in an average of 35 lost work days per person, Wilcox said. There are also factors harder to measure: detrimental leadership, negative social interactions, and larger impacts on culture and morale. Fifty percent of employees who would benefit from mental health care never seek it, according to the Center for Workplace Mental Health. Barriers include cost, lack of availability (which has worsened in light of COVID-19), transportation, and inconvenience. There’s also attitudinal barriers, Wilcox noted, including stigmas, concern about confidentiality, its perceived ineffectiveness, and not a failure to understand the severity. Wilcox sees a promising opportunity in our abrupt shift to working and living online: “The future of mental healthcare is digital,” she said. “The good news is that digital solutions exist and by going digital we can eliminate a lot of the barriers to care.” These are new, on-demand services that an employer can seamlessly connect their employees to, as opposed to a multi-step process that routes an employee to a specialist for a few sessions before they have to find longer-term care through their insurance company. “The future of mental healthcare is also holistic,” added Wilcox. She pointed out that Corporate America has long focused on wellness and health programs. “No longer is that sufficient … organizations today need physical and mental wellness programs to care for the whole employee.” Leading companies, she added, are providing access to proactive care like mindfulness and meditation, tools to help employees manage stress, and financial well-wellness services. A slide from Wilcox's presentation Proactive care should be coupled with on-demand treatment, which doesn’t necessarily have to be provided by licensed therapists, and then be followed by ongoing maintenance through education, training, and the creation of safe spaces to discuss mental health. “The most important thing your organizations can do is to talk about it,” Wilcox said. “And the way you do that is by having your leaders talk about it.” She pointed to the real-estate company Homie, whose chief executive regularly talks about mental-health issues in the community. “If leadership has talked about their challenges, employees will feel more comfortable and safe managing their challenges as well.” When it comes to the bottom-line benefits, Zenovate found that every $1 spent on employee mental health has a $4 return. Benefits come in the form of fewer sick days and absences, increased productivity, positive company culture, and better employee retention.  “It’s a proven fact,” said Wilcox, “that when you invest in mental health, the organization sees huge returns on that.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership presentation: Zenovate. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this conference live. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | December 01, 2020
America's Child-Care Crisis: 'a Humanitarian Disaster'

As the pandemic drags on with little government support in sight for families with child-care needs, Marianne Cooper, a senior research scholar with Stanford University’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, has faced this nagging thought: “I don’t think America loves its children, and I’m starting to think it hates its parents.” Cooper, who has long studied women in the U.S. workplace, has now focused on how COVID-19 has impacted working mothers and their families. She spoke in conversation with Bryan Walsh, the future correspondent for Axios, during From Day One’s conference last week what can be done to help working parents during the crisis. Throughout, Cooper delivered a strong argument that the U.S. is in an unprecedented emergency, that women and children bear the brunt of it, and that government and businesses must step up more than they have so far. Women in this country, particularly women working low-paying, blue-collar or service jobs, have long struggled to balance work with child care. The U.S. is unique among developed countries in its lack of paid family leave and sick leave, a lack of universal health care and few federal safety nets to support families. “What the pandemic has done is laid bare all those challenges,” Cooper said, “And what were challenges are now a full-blown crisis.” She clearly laid out the stakes: This October, there were 2.2 million fewer women in the workforce than in February, falling to levels the country hasn’t seen since the late 1980s. Economically, women aren’t recovering as quickly as men as they face what Cooper called a “double whammy”: job loss and financial uncertainty alongside closure of schools and daycares. In the conference on parenting, Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper, at right, was interviewed by Axios correspondent Bryan Walsh (Image by From Day One) Women and families of color have been hit the hardest. Cooper shared survey data from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which found that cleaners, nannies and other workers had a jobless rate of nearly 40%. “Among people who were low-income workers to begin with, they're concentrated in jobs that we would call low-quality jobs with low pay, nonexistent benefits, and often dangerous working conditions,” she added. “Those families have always lived very close to the edge and are at a high likelihood of experiencing economic instability.” Even for working parents with more resources, the child-care situation is far more dire than terms like “work-life balance” can begin to encompass, Cooper said. “I think we're facing what many are just starting to describe as a humanitarian disaster.” Government has fallen short of providing enough relief to meet the long-term implications of the disaster, Cooper said. The U.S. needs a stronger safety net, particularly to support people who were already living in economic insecurity before the pandemic. She also pointed out many schools and day-care facilities don’t have enough resources to open with new safety protocols, and most school districts don’t have testing capacity for their teachers. “When the government can’t step in or won’t step in in an emergency like this, pre-existing inequalities just grow,” she noted. In the absence of new government supports, Cooper and Walsh discussed ways that corporate employers could further step up for both the short term and long term. Right now, Cooper said, companies need to frame the situation as an emergency comparable to a war–and set productivity expectations, deadlines and priorities accordingly. Companies also need to push against the expectation that employees should always be available. “There should be collective practices of working that create that space and divide,” she said. One example is a no-email policy for evenings. Looking further down the line, companies need to think of this as a long-term investment in their employees over a multi-year emergency. “It’s thinking: can we reduce hours, have days off, expand vacation times and be clear about our expectations around productivity?” Cooper said. Cooper shared some discouraging findings of a wide-ranging survey she led, the Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org, which included 40,000 workers. Only half of their employers had communicated their expectations about productivity to their employees in the wake of COVID-19, the respondents said. Some women interviewed in depth for the survey reported their managers hadn’t even asked them basic questions about how they were coping. “That to me shows much more can be done on this front,” she said. Leadership in a pandemic poses many challenges, but a lot of it boils down to responsiveness, open communication, flexibility and resource sharing. “Sometimes it’s just enough to acknowledge it … to reach out and offer to talk it out,” Cooper said. “Sometimes it’s the little things that can be the difference for people.” As companies look to managing well through the long term, Cooper mentioned a few important components. The first is not only to set priorities for leadership and management to clearly communicate with employees, but ensure managers are following through. In Women in the Workplace survey, Cooper said, “Something like 70% of employers asked managers to check in with employees to make sure their workload was manageable, but only 40-something percent of employees said that was happening.” Leaders should also be educated and aware of maternal bias in the workforce, like the idea that a working mom is falling short if she can’t be available to the company all the time. Maternal bias is even more likely to come up now, as many female employees balance child care and other demands from home. Performance reviews should either be paused altogether or take all these challenges in mind, as “the time is ripe” for such biases, Cooper said. She also suggested that companies track parental status alongside gender and race demographics when they assess their workforces for diversity and inclusion. Cooper hopes that in this pivotal historic moment, the U.S. takes a hard look at how it treats families and acknowledges where we could do better. “Once people realize, ‘It’s not my problem to solve, because I can’t individually solve it,’ they begin to put their head up and look around,” she said. “And that's where companies can start pushing on the policy front, which is leading with their own internal policies on family leave, for example, but really, talking and lobbying at the public and federal level to change things for everyone.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | November 23, 2020
Will the Pandemic Bring More Help for Working Parents?

HP, the tech company, has operations in Wuhan, China, so its managers had an early warning when COVID-19 began affecting business as early as January. Something that struck the company early on was feedback from its employees around the world: caregivers, from parents to grandparents, were struggling as their care arrangements were disrupted by the virus, and it greatly impeded their ability to work. “Early on we were thinking, What can we do to address the issue right away?, because we were hearing it was coming,” said Luciana Duarte, HP’s global head of employee experience. “Our chief HR officer hosted a webinar where we pulled together three teachers and a home-schooling parent and did a panel discussion with the whole company to just get their questions answered. It was an immediate kind of response.” Duarte was one of five expert speakers exploring “the Future of Parenthood and Careers: How Will Corporate Culture Evolve,” a panel discussion at From Day One’s virtual conference this week on how employers can offer better support for working parents in the midst of the pandemic. Moderated by Myla Skinner, chief of staff of OneGoal, the speakers tackled issues ranging from the day-to-day challenges of working parents as both employee and caregiver, up to longer-term, transformational changes that Corporate America could make to empower caregivers. Companies first moved swiftly to address immediate needs that had sprung up. HP listened closely during its webinars to “understand what was most concerning for parents at that time,” said Duarte. “We then created additional tactics to address those issues later on.” The company has since offered gym classes to keep kids engaged and Slack channels for employees that correspond to their children’s age group, among other creative approaches. Marsh & McLennan, the global insurance giant, built a digital “kid’s corner” to respond to needs that emerged from an employee pulse survey, said Rochelle Rosato, the company’s talent, learning and inclusion leader for the U.S. and Canada. The Marsh Kid’s Korner offers activities and exercises categorized by age groups up to high school, plus yoga and meditation for kids and adults. “Into early May, we began to ask colleagues, What do you actually need now?,” Rosato said. “Rather than one-size-fits all, the needs were so different.” In many cases, the company worked with overwhelmed employees to create more manageable, flexible schedules. From Day One's speakers on working parents. Top row from left: moderator Myla Skinner of OneGoal, Gina Nebesar of Ovia Health, and Rochelle Rosato of Marsh & McLennan. Bottom row, from left: Luciana Duarte of HP, Sarah Sheehan of Bravely, and Lauren Lopez of the NBA (Image by From Day One) At Ovia Health, a provider of maternity and family benefits, there has been a focus on the managerial staff, according to Gina Nebesar, the company’s co-founder and chief product officer. “We’ll bring in experts to educate the management on how to support employees and how to retain women and working families at this time,” she said. The company is addressing both client and employer needs, offering one-on-one support and distributing a “parent mental health toolkit,” Nebesar said. “It’s not just COVID safety, because there’s not a lot of information out there for new parents during COVID.” Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of Bravely, an employee coaching firm, noted that “HR teams are being tasked with solving all the world’s problems.” She emphasized the importance of leadership: “Right now there’s an opportunity to no longer keep the personal and professional separate–it’s an impossible thing to do.” Leaders need to foster an honest, safe culture in which employees feel comfortable sharing what they’re going through, she said. Lauren Lopez, head of talent and engagement for the National Basketball Association, said the company held a virtual take-your-child-to-work day “because we wanted some of that normalcy for the children and parents who enjoy that.” It also celebrated Halloween, sending candy to employee families. The NBA focused on leadership as well: “We had to equip leaders with tools to have those difficult conversations, but those difficult conversations all of a sudden became a bit more difficult when we brought in the social-justice component” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Lopez noted. “We held community conversations where we equipped leaders with tools.” As working parents struggle to manage work and family, one of the issues that has emerged is the need to distribute work fairly, given the different realities of each employee. For example, corporate efforts to help parents with extra benefits created a backlash among non-parents. Duarte, at HP, said that managers are frequently checking in with their teams and then updating leadership in regular check-ins. “They talk very openly about the need for flexibility, making sure that people are safe and well cared for, and also their mental health and ability to stay productive,” she said. Duarte added the company has distributed resources to meet different employee needs in an engaging, thematic way, with each day of the week designated to resources including training, wellness, volunteering and family fun. There’s no easy way to track whether work is truly being distributed equally in the midst of the pandemic, said Rosato. “When we look to the future, what are going to be the learnings in all of this?” she asked. “To me, this is going to be the future of work–what are the learnings where we can pivot and sustain the momentum into the future, so we can lean into the future to work and build this out further for working parents.” Sheehan pointed out that the issues caregivers are facing today have long bubbled under the surface. “We know women are leaving the workplace in droves. COVID is shining a light on a problem that has already existed for women for decades,” she said. “It’s a whole new way of supporting employees, from a leadership perspective.” Panelists were candid about the challenges they face as working parents and caregivers, struggling with feelings of guilt, anxiety and even shame as they navigate the day-to-day challenges of the pandemic. The panelists also spoke about the struggle of caring for their employees and balancing their own needs. In facing such challenges, Skinner emphasized the importance of a community support system. And the speakers all agreed it’s okay to lower one’s expectations, given the situation. “You are doing the best you can,” Lopez said at the panel’s conclusion. “There is no striving for perfection at this point, it’s just not there. As long as you’re making sure you can get up each day, still feel like you’re keeping some semblance of sanity, you’ve done your job for the day.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | November 22, 2020
How to Manage Your Workforce for the Future with Capabilities in Mind

Even before multiple crises challenged the engagement of employees with their companies, workers were restless and ambitious. Eighty-three percent of employees want to change roles, 53% want to change companies, and 64% want a clear career path, according to a survey by Eightfold AI, an AI-powered Talent Intelligence Platform. How will they achieve those ambitions–and how will employers help them do it? The essential component is being open to learning, according to Kamal Ahluwalia, Eightfold’s president. “Everybody needs to learn more things. I think there are more assets than we ever realized, and the No. 1 is learnability,” Ahluwalia said in a presentation at From Day One’s recent conference on the workforce of the future. Eightfold’s mission, delivered through its Talent Intelligence Platform, is to help chart the right career for everyone, based not so much on a worker’s experience but instead on the person’s skills and capabilities that can be discovered and enhanced. (The company’s name derives from Buddhist philosophy, in which the Eightfold Path guides each person to wisdom and nirvana.) In everyday practice, this approach will make traditional approaches to talent obsolete, said Ahluwalia: “Resumes are useless and job descriptions are even worse.” Likewise for job-hopping merely to get a boost in pay. “People don't leave their current role to do the same thing in their next job,” he said. Kamal Ahluwalia, president of Eightfold.ai (Photo courtesy of Eightfold AI) What AI contributes to the process is bringing together billions of anonymized data points and algorithms to help assess a worker’s potential. “What we are able to do with our AI is identify the validated skills, missing skills, likely skills and skills to be verified, based on what candidates have shared with us and the context of the job,” Ahluwalia said. The data at hand shows that hiring based on potential and aptitude makes more sense than focusing on the candidate’s current skills, which are just a snapshot at a moment in time. In that respect, AI is an invaluable resource in keeping track of a constantly evolving array of skills in demand. In the current job marketplace, there are 1.4 million uniquely identifiable skills, and the half-life of each skill is four to five years, Ahluwalia said. Thanks to AI, “not only do we understand what they are, but we also understand how to apply them. We understand the adjacency of these skills and how to put it in the context of a job,” he said. One of the areas in which this method its proving is effectiveness is in developing the careers of  military veterans, who represent 6% of the U.S. workforce. In September, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS), chose Eightfold in a competition “to build an application to better match transitioning military service members’ skills with employers’ needs,” the department announced. While military veterans have often learned skills that are much in need in business, sometimes the jargon that’s used in the two different worlds leaves something lost in translation. A slide from Ahlawulia's presentation (Image courtesy of Eightfold.ai) U.S. military-service members “are amongst the best trained in the world. They are used to working with technologies that some of us won't even see for another five to 10 years,” Ahluwalia explained. “And [they have] the other soft skills that we all yearn for our workforce leadership skills: the ability to work in ambiguity; having each other's back; the trust, loyalty, and transparency. It’s a workforce that we should be opening our arms to. And yet, it's not as easy for them when they're ready to transition out of the military service.” The complications of hiring during COVID-19 have aggravated the challenge. Ahluwalia described a layered process for bridging the gap. First, the company aggregated data such as military job-occupation codes and the military version of the resume. Then Eightfold  representatives deployed its Capability Matrix, which allowed them to determine not only what the candidates were capable of doing, but also to account for their aspirations. One service member wanted to go back to school, another wanted to be a sound engineer, another one wanted to go into the performing arts. “When we talk about the Capability Matrix, we are talking about something that's self-updating, and automatic,” Ahluwalia said. “So nobody is sitting there updating stuff and trying to find every single thing.” With a focus on learnability, employers can avoid identifying candidates solely with their skills, which is limiting. “If somebody is willing to learn,” said Ahluwalia, “none of us should be in the way.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this session: Eightfold AI. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | November 21, 2020
A Media Founder's Pivot to Stories With a Social Impact

Welcome to She Leads, a series digging into the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a woman in business. In each piece, we chat with a different founder about her experiences, the issues women face in business, and how they’re powering through in the face of adversity. At only 11 years old, Erin Ralph began freelance writing for fashion and lifestyle magazines. At 13, she launched her own, LuxuryFashion.com. She went on to help found Zink magazine, the Serene Social wellness community, and Bullett magazine, an indie fashion favorite. Ralph was working her way through the fashion media world, but she didn’t like what she was seeing. “I had been in media for so long and seen the game. Back in the magazine days, I wanted to write an article about how there are toxic ingredients in makeup. But it was like, ‘No, you can't do that because then we'll lose our biggest advertiser, L'Oreal,’” she told From Day One. Ralph also cited advertiser conflicts as a factor in leaving Bullett, which she co-founded with five partners. “It started to feel like a straw that broke the camel's back, where it's like, we have to do the right thing.” Ralph was disillusioned by the industry, but she was feeling stronger than ever about the power of media itself. Not long after leaving Bullett, she started thinking about how media could be used for good, and last year, she officially launched CoCre. The New York City-based company, mostly bootstrapped in its financing, facilitates collaborative action between organizations, companies, and individuals. It also acts as a production company, capturing stories about the work to inspire people and make a social impact. On the CoCre site, articles and videos tell stories about initiatives like refugee relief, urban farming, and work with organizations like the Trevor Project. CoCre also provides readers with simple ways they can get involved. One story, for example, spotlights an education initiative called Yoga Foster and invites readers to donate a used yoga mat or $20 to sponsor a student. Podcast and docuseries content was in the works for major streaming services too, though production was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, CoCre oversees dozens of initiatives with companies and organizations through its Giving Facilitation program, including those mentioned above. Recently, the company launched a new version of the program directed at Fortune 200 companies, the Impact Facilitation Program, in which CoCre is advising not just on their giving, but their operations’ own footprints on the world. We talked to Erin about CoCre, her entrepreneurial journey, and how to jump into something new. Excerpts: What inspired you to start CoCre? The basis of the idea is that media and stories move people. We've seen it with this whole range of [craft] beers. We’ve seen this story of controlling the diamond supply, inflating their value and putting them out in the media as a girl's best friend. The whole entire concept of the engagement ring is a media tactic, you know what I mean? With all the ways people are being moved and influenced by media, it’s like, what matters right now? The only thing that matters to me personally is that we should all be living well together. The inspiration is definitely wanting to see the world be a greater place. The other big part was knowing that so many of our problems are because of how we cultivate natural resources and the big business behind the things we need. So the idea was, can we just start exchanging resources differently? A lot of people think support has to be money, but your giving assets can be time, scale, network, overstock of goods, anything. You can give extra airline miles. If you're a graphic designer, you can give 15 hours work. There are so many ways we can all make an impact. So let's have a centralized location where people can make an impact and take action on the things that they care about. You say CoCre aims to “gamify giving.” What does that mean, and why did you go with that approach? It's almost like if you're playing a video game and you get really into it, interacting, trying to level up and solve problems, and you're working with people you don't even know. I was inspired by this true story of two engineers who read about a girl in need of a prosthetic arm. They were in different parts of the world, but online, on this little scientist forum message board, the two of them felt the story, collaborated, and virtually co-created an arm for her and sent it to her. Never having met, they came together and created a solution that changed that girl's life. It's just stories like that, and how we can have fun doing stuff like that. If people can get excited and motivated to get some extra points in a video game, imagine if they were actually making a real impact. Of course, you’re also a serial entrepreneur and have been at this since you were 11. How did getting so much experience at such a young age teach you to hold your own in business, and as a woman in business? I was a teenager, so a lot of people in the industry would just be like, ‘Oh, you're so cute. Come. I'll take you through.’ I was ushered in and taken under people's wings because I was so young. I definitely see the struggle women in business have, specifically in the corporate environments. In my experience, I've definitely been in rooms where I've been looked at like I was probably not going to say the brightest thing. I just think that if you walk in the room and you know what you have to offer, if you truly know you have something good and valuable to offer, you just walk in with that energy. I believe in the work that I'm doing, and I believe in what I'm offering to this world. I was always able to walk in rooms and be like, ‘I have something. Let's talk.’ I'm friendly. I've had different experiences where if someone has ever doubted me, I'll smile right through them, and then I'll intellectually override them. One of your endeavours, Serene Social, was about bringing women together for experiences that would empower them socially and financially, from yoga to mentoring. What inspired you to launch that, and how did you carry that mission of supporting women into your companies that followed? That was a pivot in my life where I was doing the fashion thing and then I started to question everything, and I just cracked, like, ‘Oh my god, life is not this.’ I wanted to grow and went into my own self-care. I had always been into wellness, but it had been on the back burner. My friend was holding these rooftop yoga classes in New York City, and she was gathering quite a great group of women. I was there for about three years as a partner with her developing it. We had chapters in London and Los Angeles and different events in all three places. We built up this really incredible beautiful community, and in that community is where I had a lot of the conversations where I started to learn how it was for other women. You were also a co-founder of Bullett magazine, which was an impactful but quick project for you. What advice would you give to women about bouncing back and diving into something new? Just think it through. So you want this dream to come true? Okay. So what does that look like? Why do you want it? Make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. In the beginning after Bullett, it was abrupt. It felt like I had birthed something and then it was just ... wild. I was in conflict with advertisers and wanting to speak the truth, again. There was a lot going on there. I think if you just trust in the process and detach, and you learn to let go, even if it's a dream that you birthed, just learn to let go and learn that it's a step in the process. Because I let that go, the idea of CoCre came to me. Sage Lazzaro is a New York City-based journalist covering tech, business, culture, women and diversity & inclusion. Her work has appeared in WIRED, Refinery29, VICE, One Zero, Bustle, the New York Observer, and more. Follow her on Twitter here.

sagelazzaro | November 12, 2020
Parenting in a Pandemic: What Can Help Make It Work?

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, working parents have discovered that just about the only way to cope with family life in a state of crisis is make things up as they go along–and compare notes with their fellow parents and co-workers. “In the spring, my third grader was only getting about 90 minutes’ worth of schoolwork to keep her busy during the day. I don't blame the teachers, they were not prepared for this,” said Rose Sheldon, the director of enterprise learning and development at Allstate Insurance Co. “And I found that I was starting to create learning content to keep my kids busy. Soon, employees started aggregating their own home-made learning content on one page, so that they could all share resources.” Almost no one was really prepared for this. Most homes were not built to serve as both schools and offices. Most parents weren’t trained to work and teach at the same time. And the U.S. as a whole wasn’t prepared either, being one of the few developed countries with a lack of federal guidelines for parental leave. The result has been tremendous stress and anxiety for working parents, a point of concern for their employers as well. Can Corporate America find ways to help? This was the topic of a recent From Day One webinar (as well as a virtual conference). The stakes are high: in a setback for gender equity, the vast majority of people leaving the workforce in the midst of pandemic-related parenting challenges are women. In the webinar, led by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman, five business leaders explored an array of within-reach solutions. Among them: Make Resilience More Than a Buzzword The twin themes of resilience and well-being have been buzzy in recent years, but in a time of disruption like this, they became crucial. “We started some support resources, like our daily Zoom wellness calls, just covering topics related to wellness and resilience,” said Jackie Bassett, director of people strategy at University of Chicago Medicine. “That's become a recurring theme that has stayed in place since COVID. And in fact, we have Family Fridays, when it's a family-related topic that we talk about,” Bassett said. “We’ve had an employee-resource group (ERG) for quite a long time for working parents; we've brought in guest speakers to talk about mental-health related support, talking about educating kids at home, topics that are especially important for parents right now.” Materially, UChicago Medicine offered employees reimbursement for 15 extra days of backup childcare, in addition to the 15 days a year already provided. The panelists, top row from left: Rose Sheldon of Allstate and Jackie Bassett of University of Chicago Medicine. Center row, from left: Gina Nebesar of Ovia Health, Susan Bridges Gilder of Beiersdorf and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. Bottom row: Quentin Watson of the Salvation Army  (Image by From Day One) “On my team, we were seeing some needs for just people wanting to self-educate on things like resilience,” said Sheldon. “So we partnered with some of our content providers like LinkedIn Learning to put together some channels that our employees could go and learn more. We’ve seen people really taking advantage of that opportunity to develop.” This extends to employees’ children, as Sheldon discovered. Educational companies in these times have sought to be helpful. Tutoring companies, Sheldon suggested, might be willing to strike a deal with an employer for a one-year access pass, which can then be extended to employees as a benefit. It wouldn’t hurt to inquire with, say, ABCmouse or Kumon, she said. Be Mindful of People’s Time It’s hard to disentangle the notion of productivity from the notion of time. Quantity does not equal quality. In his almost three-decade-long career, Quentin Watson found that the only place where work time was strictly regimented was at his current employer, The Salvation Army, where he is employee relations manager. “Most of our employees work just 36.25 hours a week; they only work 7.25 hours a day with two 15-minute breaks that they take religiously, and a 45-minute lunch,” he said. “When I tell you that this is the first organization I've worked at that when they say 8:30 to 4:30, they mean it. You go home.” He added that because time is limited, “most of us work at 120% productivity.” With the onset of the pandemic, Watson and his colleagues have been doing things differently in order to maintain a similar level of engagement. Right before COVID-19 arrived, they had implemented a live, online behavioral-health component into their benefit plan, which at first had low participation. But once the pandemic really spread, its use skyrocketed, and this mental-health support boosts employee engagement, Watson said. Gina Nebesar, co-founder and chief product officer of Ovia Health, which provides maternity and family benefits, is open about the struggle in productivity that comes about by having work life, home life and childcare all in one place. “I have the interruption of the kids all day long,” she said. “We have a very transparent work culture. I lead product and engineering, so it’s agile development. Everyone sees your workload every week. But we've been making a lot of accommodations for each other.” A colleague might say, for example, “I don't have childcare from 1 to 3. Can we reschedule the meeting?” Nebesar added: “I've noticed more of a team camaraderie. We're all in it to help each other out.” In all, there needn’t be a set view of what productivity looks like. “Productive isn't necessarily working 9 to 5 without a break,” said Susan Bridges Gilder, director of HR operations and people experience for Beiersdorf, the skin-care company. “It might be compressing your week. It might mean working in the evening, because those hours help an employee balance their workload. Ask [managers] to show that empathy and ask those questions: How can I help you? You know, you're trying to meet this goal, we have this deadline, let's figure out how we can work through this together.” Consider Mental-health Resources At this point, the crisis that working parents are experiencing during this pandemic extends to family planning as well. “There is a 250% increase in the interest in home births, which carry a lot more risk,” said Ovia Health’s Nebesar. “You can see all this fear of people thinking they won't be able to bring in their family or their partner [to a hospital birth], so they’re changing their birth plan around it.” The company studied the impact of COVID-19 on prenatal care, delivery, and fundamental access to health care. The pandemic aggravated inequities that were already present. “We noticed that over 60% of Black women were saying they were receiving less frequent and lower-quality care, compared to a little over 50% [previously]. This pandemic, you know, it's not just affecting our work environment, this is affecting our family dynamics, and our fundamental access to care and services,” Nebesar said. “The most important thing to parents is the health of our kids and our ability to make sure we’re able to take care of them.” At Ovia Health, the company measures the well-being of their teams through anonymous surveys and feedback. Added Nebesar: “Much of our effort is channeled towards, ‘How do we help people detect their risk for depression or perinatal mood disorders amidst the pandemic?’ We’re delivering digital depression tools and screeners at three times the rate that's delivered in the clinical setting.” On Ovia’s platform, these screenings start early as when a woman is trying get pregnant, then multiple times through their pregnancy, and then several times postpartum and the baby's first year. “And then based on their assessment, we'll navigate them to the company's mental-health resources,” Nebesar said. At the Salvation Army, employees were offered an extra 10 days of paid leave for those affected by COVID-related situations. “For quarantining, or just for dealing with the mental stress around dealing with COVID-19,” Watson said. “And they got an opportunity to use that time, if they can validate the time was necessary.” Because the Salvation Army doesn’t have the financial resources of a Fortune 500 company, the cost of the paid leave may affect the distribution of raises in the coming years, “but it's better for us to do this and really get through this whole situation, retain our employees, and the end of the day, get that return on investment because employees are definitely going to be more engaged by how you treat them,” said Watson. “And it's during these times, where you're challenged financially, that you have to think about those out-of-the-box solutions.” Embrace Zoom Imperfection (and Don’t Overuse It) While Zoom is efficient in its own way, bits and pieces of employee home life are bound to seep in–and that’s OK. “I remember one particularly challenging incident, where I was on a call with about 50 people, and I was getting ready to present and my son would not stop screaming,” recalled UChicago Medicine’s Bassett. “I was just so exasperated. And I remember yelling at him, and profanity may have been involved. And then suddenly realizing I was not on mute. So clearly not my finest parenting moment.” Moments like these, though, did make Bassett a more empathetic leader, she acknowledged. The key for Beiersdorf’s Gilder is approaching our new normal with a sense of curiosity, empathy, courage, and humor. “We were rolling out a special  project this summer,” she recalled. “And then I heard someone flushed a toilet somewhere on the phone.” No big deal. It’s crucial not to use Zoom as a panacea, though. Early in the pandemic, Zoom meetings ranging from important professional ones to virtual happy hours were perhaps overused. Allstate’s Sheldon remembers that at the beginning of the pandemic, her company asked managers to have a happy hour with their team at the end of every work day. “And make sure you're checking in and that they're visibly seeing you,” was one of the directives. “That's a terrible idea,” Sheldon recalled thinking. “Like, why would you want to slam this extra meeting onto their day and this forced social time when most of my employees are parents, and they would probably rather have that extra half hour to either go start dinner, or help with homework, or maybe sneak out another 30 minutes of work on a project?” Clearly, adapting corporate culture for a pandemic era is a work in progress. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who supported this webinar: Ovia Health. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | November 10, 2020
To Develop a Workforce of Agile Leaders, Look to Middle Managers

In a study evaluating how the 2008 economic crisis affected employee engagement, the research found that middle managers suffered the most. Employee engagement decreased within middle management by 13%, vs. only a slight drop for top executives. The decline was particularly concerning given that the study also found middle management had a higher influence on overall employee engagement than senior leaders. This data is telling in the midst of current economic and business challenges, according to Rachel Ernst, chief human resources officer for the performance-management company Reflektive. In a presentation at From Day One’s recent conference on the workforce of the future, Ernst made the case for why organizations need to focus on middle management as they strategize to overcome the upheaval of this year–and move effectively into 2021. But first, Ernst highlighted the main challenge when it comes to this management cohort: “Middle managers are really squeezed between an executive team who is setting the vision and strategy of the organization, who tell middle managers what they need to do to create a plan and drive execution across the organization,” she explained. “Then you have the employees they are overseeing who ask, Why are we making these decisions? Middle managers aren’t in that executive suite to really understand the information behind the decisions being made.” During a crisis or upheaval, things can change across an organization quickly. Middle managers have an important role to play that is often lost. Ernst pointed out that HR offices more often focus on executive development, employees deemed “high potentials,” and front-line managers recently promoted. Before organizations turn their attention to middle managers, they should first identify who they are. “Who reports to executive teams and has significant influence across your organization?” Ernst asked. Once organizations identify those critical leaders, they can develop a program helping them drive the behavior desired across the organization. Ernst used her own company, Reflektive, to demonstrate how this process could look. Reflektive developed a Director Master Class Program based on the 70/20/10 learning model, in which 10% is offered through a formal program, 20% through social learning and 70% dedicated to experiential learning. The goal, Ernst said, was to build a leadership community among middle managers as well as develop adaptive leadership that’s well-prepared to respond to organizational changes. The formal learning portion of the Director Master Class Program asked middle manager participants to identify their top five strengths and share their leadership style. It helped participants to not only identify their own strengths and learning styles, but partner with managers offering different qualities. Reflektive also asked company directors to read the book Leadership Agility to help them identify skills in being agile and moving up in levels of leadership. There’s a role here for the company as well. Ernst said Reflektive redefined its values at the beginning of the pandemic and integrated those into the program. “You need to break down, ‘Hey, middle management, this is what we expect from you in terms of our values and how we want you to model them for the rest of the organization,’” she said. The social-learning component is offered through an executive mentorship program. Ernst defined it as a loosely structured, agile partnership in which a middle manager and executive leader speak once a month for 45 minutes. “What we’re learning is that our middle managers, regardless of how tenured they are, are learning a lot from the executive’s point of view,” she noted. It’s become an opportunity for the executive to explain how and why decisions are made, what Ernst calls “lifting the veil” on executive decision making. Experiential learning is offered by Reflektive through a few tools. The company has middle managers participate more actively in all-hands forums, presenting important updates about their departments and "deciding what and how to message information so that it resonates well with the employee base," Ernst said. Middle managers also have been invited into executive meetings to discuss the projects they lead. Finally, the company held an offsite to identify 2021 goals, then asked the Director Master Class to come up with implementation recommendations. “Investing in our middle managers is the most critical thing we can be doing to really drive the kind of growth and change we need in our organizations moving forward and into our future,” Ernst emphasized. “We need to define who are our middle managers and identify those critical skills for them to build on to lead their organization.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership presentation: Reflektive. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this conference live. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | November 06, 2020
Building an Anti-racist Culture in the Business Community

In response to the George Floyd protests of this summer, companies and other organizations released a flood of statements in support of Black Lives Matter. Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, founder and president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race (WISER), intentionally decided not to. “It was not just the feeling of ‘Here we go again,’” she said in reference to past statements on racial justice that never lived up to their promise. “But that there was so much pressure, not just from the racial injustice we saw, but that it was on top of this political climate.” She worried that if Donald Trump were not the president, the business world wouldn’t pay as much attention to these longstanding issues. (Update: With the confirmed election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the U.S. will have the first woman, Black person and Indian-American to serve as vice president.) Yet as Sharpe’s work consistently grapples with, racial injustice is baked into the past, present and future of this country. And awareness of that within the larger business community will only matter if it’s followed by action. “For me,” she said, “I want to know, What are you going to do?’” Sharpe joined three other speakers for a From Day One webinar last week that explored the challenge of building an anti-racist culture in the business community. The moderator, Erica Licht, a senior fellow at the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project (IARA) at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, opened with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.” It set the tone for a conversation on what business leaders can do to follow through on increasing diversity and inclusion at all levels of their organizations. Kendra Proctor Goldbas, director of professional development for McKinsey & Company’s West Coast office, described three steps in the realm of talent development and professional growth. “There’s the work we need to do around knowledge, skills and then creating the space for engagement,” she said. Self-awareness, personal growth and knowledge should lead the work; that’s followed by skill-building to engage in anti-racism. “The third piece is the notion of engagement,” Goldbas said. “How do we engage one another, take action and be vulnerable?” Speakers on the panel, clockwise from top center: Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe of the Women's Institute for Science, Equity and Race, Kendra Proctor Goldbas of McKinsey & Company, Bobby Griffin of CBRE and moderator Erica Licht of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at Harvard (Image by From Day One) Bobby Griffin, VP of diversity and inclusion for the commercial real-estate company CBRE Group, said the diversity commitment needs to encompass workplace culture, talent acquisition and the broader marketplace. “We want to enhance our relationships with diverse customers and our relationships to the various diverse communities in which we reside. It’s an ongoing effort,” he said. ‘It’s more like being in a relationship than speed dating.” Sharpe emphasized the importance of data. In her work at the WISER institute, she supports more inclusive women-focused research. “We really advocate for a micro-analysis,” she said. “And that is to have folks disaggregate that data by the characteristics you think influence the outcome, and then take an intersectional lens to talk about why you might see a particular outcome.” She notes that a categorical term like “women of color,” for example, is far too sweeping to shed light on the experiences of individuals. When it came to the topic of “uncomfortable conversations” on workplace equity, the panelists shared insights on their impact and how to go about them. “Growing pains don’t always have to be uncomfortable,” as Goldbas put it. Later in the conversation she offered a different term: “Radical candor.” She explained it as “a notion of how you provide both caring personally but challenging directly in the way you engage in feedback, discussion and conversation.” The key, she added, is that such conversations must start with a desire for change. What could that change look like, beyond the solidarity statements released this summer? Griffin noted that CBRE set goals around “visibility, capability and accountability” and outlined specific and intentional actions to back them up. “For visibility, for example, we want to make better data-informed decisions,” he said. “So how are we providing information and metrics from a data standpoint?” McKinsey set ten actions in place this year to move toward a more anti-racist culture, Goldbas said. The key will be tracking the progress of such actions in a year. “We have to be held to account for what we’ve committed to,” she said. Sharpe echoed the importance of transparency. “When I think about accountability, it’s the transparency in what was your goal, what was it you were planning to do?” she said. “A huge part of that is who is making decisions. And when companies are talking about diversity and inclusion, who are they having conversations with? Who are you speaking to so that you get an understanding of the work you need to get done?” A company that sets goals and is held accountable must respect the people who call them out. “Folks have to know they can speak up about injustice, in that moment, without losing their livelihoods,” as Sharpe put it. In a robust Q&A session with their audience, the speakers discussed confronting racism head on as a systemic power structure. “White people historically and currently hold power–this shift of power has not changed,” Sharpe noted. Allyship with white people who want to “utilize their power for good,” as she put it, is far from impossible. “It’s incredibly important to explain to them, in your situation, what do you need from them as an ally?” There’s no monopoly on diversity, Griffin added. It has to be about everyone, including those who still have some learning to do about people who are different from them. “It’s very important to have conversations in a way that doesn’t distance imperfect allies,” he said. “And allies have to be willing to show up and support with their imperfection.” The panelist’s insights suggest that the conversations around racial justice may well lead to real action in the coming seasons. To wrap up the session, Licht left the audience with a fuller quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “What always bothers me is that the long, hot summer has always been preceded by a long, cold winter, and that the nation has not used its winters creatively enough to develop the program, to develop the kind of massive acts of concern that will bring about a solution to the problem.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who supported this webinar: McKinsey & Company. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko | November 06, 2020