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Angelica Frey | August 25, 2020

Want to Build Engaged Teams? Lead Like a Human

Culturally, the 1990s seem like a lifetime ago: for most people, the ending of The Sixth Sense was still a surprise, and cell phones were clunky devices with tiny screens. In the workplace, employees were only beginning to crave rewards beyond compensation and benefits, like flexibility and autonomy. HR was still mostly an administrative function. Crucially, millennials, who now constitute 35% of the work-force, were just kids. Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce, and they value a company’s value, purpose, integrity and professional opportunities over the stability sought after by Boomers and Gen-Xers. This does not mean, however, that the corporate environment has fully adapted. “Has the HR industry caught up to that change, are we still oftentimes operating more in that administrative mode?” asked Adam Weber, co-founder of the data-driven employee engagement platform Emplify, asked in his recent From Day One webinar, “Lead Like a Human: The HR Leader’s Guide to Building Engaged Teams.” The answer is in the headlines about conflicts between employee values and corporate policies. Employers have not fully caught up with the culture of the newer generation in the workforce and, as a consequence, millennial workers tend to be disengaged from their work. How do you recognize a disengaged worker? “[They’re] not as productive as they should be. They're not as innovative as they could be. When a process is broken, a disengaged person puts the blinders on, clocks in and clocks out, and that ultimately hurts the bottom line of the business,” said Weber. Adam Weber, CEO and co-founder of Emplify (Image by From Day One) Engagement on the job, said Weber, “is an employee's intellectual and emotional connection with an employer, demonstrated by motivation and commitment to positively impact the company's vision and goals. So simply put, it's how an employee thinks about the business in their head, how they feel about the business in their heart, and how that's impacted by the work they do every day with their hands.” Data shows that engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the company than their disengaged counterpart. Compared with employee satisfaction, a condition that has more of a lean-back posture, engagement has a lean-forward attitude, which inspires a worker to go above and beyond. Engagement starts by training managers to become leaders. “Prior to COVID, one of the biggest issues that we saw in a booming economy was [that] managers, line-level employees, were promoted into management early. And [as] they moved into that role, they lacked the soft-skill training they needed,” Weber explained. “They started managing every person as if they were themselves, and they wreaked absolute havoc on companies. And specifically the places where they lacked was creating psychologically safe environments and giving helpful and productive feedback to their employees.” Weber offered six tips to create teams of highly engaged people, drawing on the insights in his forthcoming book, Lead Like a Human: Practical Steps To Building Highly Engaged Teams. Be Centered That means being the most authentic leader one can be. As abstract as this might sound, it consists of engaging in healthy discipline in pursuit of self-awareness. As part of that journey, it’s important for leaders to have interests and hobbies outside work. “It roots you, it helps you become more of yourself,” Weber said. Finally, it’s important to focus on a holistic view of one’s own health. “If you truly want to become the leader that you aspire to become, [it’s important] that you set disciplines in your life, whether it's through meditation or physical exercise,” he said, noting that the following bullet points are moot without an underlying layer of commitment to the first one. Align Around Company Purpose An employer’s meaning and purpose should matter to the individual worker. When a company’s values don’t seem to be connecting with employees, leaders need to “do translation.” This means highlighting the reason why a particular team exists within that organization, and start living it out and showing the impact that it can have. As legend has it, when President Kennedy visited NASA in the early 1960s, he encountered a janitor carrying a broom and asked “Sir, what are you doing?” The janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” To achieve this connection between individual tasks and larger purpose, leaders can create systems of cadence, which establish tempo and rhythm in pursuit of goals; they can celebrate milestones through symbolic tokens and gestures, and they can create initiatives that provide the space and opportunities for people to over-deliver. Activate your Core Values Too often, company values are just collecting dust on a shelf. If corporate values seem stale, Weber suggested singling out “culture rock stars,” people with an instinct for revisiting the fundamentals and recreating them. Once a company’s values have been refreshed, it's important to integrate them into the hiring process. This applies to employee feedback and performance reviews as well. Instead of asking a worker, “What did you do?,” a leader should assess, “How did you do it in a way that’s aligned to your values?” Set Goals Weber draws a distinction between the “purpose,” which is the alignment to the company’s “Why?” and “meaning,” which is the alignment to an employee’s personal “Why?” Having both a purpose and a meaning in a workplace yields highly engaged teams if an examination of motivations is followed by planning, accountability, and integration into one-on-one situations. Improve Continuously “I have this fundamental belief,” said Weber, “that no high-performance team exists unless everyone on the team recognizes that where we are today, we have to get better. Nothing is static. We're either improving, or we're moving backwards.” This boils down to leaders being open to feedback, which is a process that goes both ways. Weber suggested the technique of doing the job of other employees, which can build empathy and help repair a broken process. Employ Data Despite Weber’s emphasis on holistic and human-driven workplace culture, he acknowledged that an excessive use of gut feelings won’t yield a complete picture of the workplace team. He suggested a process which starts with gathering data, which provides statistical confidence about what’s going on, and the discovery of insights, which in turn allows the leader to align with the truth about the issues. “Creating engaged culture is finding statistical confidence, where batches of drivers are moving together on teams pinpointing that issue,” he said, and unblocking that issue.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar: Emplify. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Emily Nonko | August 13, 2020

The Future of Work After 'a Vast Economic Experiment'

As the new world of work moves from crisis mode to the longer haul, where are we in the process? Kausik Rajgopal, managing partner of the West Coast office for McKinsey & Company, breaks down his pandemic work life into two categories: “unsustainable sprint,” followed by a “sustainable marathon.” In the weeks following the outbreak of COVID-19, his schedule was packed with wall-to-wall meetings on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Realizing it was unsustainable, he started introducing breaks into his day and alternatives to his screen time, like “walk and talk” phone meetings around his neighborhood. “It feels like the mortar between the bricks of a more sustainable marathon than an unsustainable sprint, which was just wall-to-wall brick. Rajgopal is keeping the values of a marathon in mind while considering new ways we’ll be working in a post-pandemic world, he said in a From Day One webinar last week. In a conversation Bryan Walsh, the future correspondent for Axios, Rajgopal laid out the need and opportunities to rethink the basic elements of how and where people do their work, as well as ways to maintain healthy workplaces in an increasingly digital world. “The crisis has forced many organizations, ourselves included, to challenge our thinking and orthodoxies to ask what work needs to be performed in person, can we engage customers and clients without traveling, and what technologies do we need in place to create more efficient working models?” Rajgopal said. “In many ways these past few months have been a vast economic experiment.” Imaging the future of work: moderator Bryan Walsh of Axios, left, and Kausik Rajgopal, a managing partner at McKinsey & Company Pre-pandemic, Rajgopal believed it was technologically feasible to shift to predominantly remote work spaces, but he was less sure if it would be productive, successful and sustainable for employees. In the past few months, he has found, many companies and institutions established workable remote models while maintaining employee productivity. To continue on this “sustainable marathon,” Rajgopal sees a new kind of workplace emerging, in which companies identify where remote work can be the default mode and where a “hybrid mode” is necessary with some people coming into the physical workspace. “The workplace will not be the same again,” he said. He laid out challenges ahead. There’s risk of two workplace cultures emerging if some employees stay remote while others do not. The predominance of digital meetings means that employees lose those important few minutes after a meeting to brainstorm or touch base about what was said. In remote work there’s also a lack of “slack time,” as Rajgopal called it, when employees can clear their minds of detail–or think about bigger ideas. And big questions loom: how do you navigate the best ways to onboard new employees into a remote workplace, or manage a company merger? There are already best practices emerging for the virtual world. As far as management, “the quality we have seen that makes managers stand out is empathy,” Rajgopal said. “We have found that remote working models affect different segments of people differently.” That’s why it’s important for a manager “to be thoughtful and think about each member of the team as an individual,” he said, “and figure out what may be most helpful that they stay motivated and operate in a sustainable way.” Pulse surveys, as opposed to the long-form annual questionnaires, can be an effective way to measure how employees are doing at a given moment. McKinsey runs a weekly pulse survey (which employees answer anonymously) that helps leadership identify “hot spots” where employees feel particularly stressed. Such surveys should be a tool for managers to follow up with employees, keeping empathy in mind, Rajgopal suggested. To discourage disparate workplace cultures within one organization, it’s crucial that employees are aligned with the company and its goals. “It’s important to be vigilant and transparent as possible, to make sure leaders are being inclusive and we don’t backslide from that,” Rajgopal said. Diversity and inclusion should remain front of mind, especially as the structure of work is being rebuilt. One advantage of remote work for both employers and workers, Rajgopal pointed out, is that location matters less, giving companies the opportunity to recruit more diverse workforces from around the country. “We’re seeing lots of examples of companies who want to do a much better job of recruiting more diverse colleagues, and want to go to different places to find talent,” he said. Diversity and inclusion efforts that were working pre-pandemic should be adapted for the remote workplace. For example, McKinsey continued a summer internship program that brought a diverse cohort of hundreds of young workers to the company. To adapt the internship, McKinsey leaders paid more attention to onboarding and integrating the new employees. “It included surrounding these colleagues with deliberate support: a buddy system, sponsors who are checking in with them a bit more frequently,” Rajgopal said. The internship also offered lessons on how to welcome new employees to a remote workforce, whether that be onboarding or a company merger. Leadership should work closely with HR on what the onboarding process looks like–the “moments of truth,” as Rajgopal put it, when indelible first impressions are made. “What does it look and feel like when you meet your supervisor for the first time? What about an interaction with an assigned mentor or sponsor? I think there will be guidelines and best practices that emerge.” The lessons of these past few months will be crucial in determining what that “sustainable marathon” will look and feel like in the extended era of COVID-19. Rajgopal believes there’s opportunity for innovation, too, like new tools to capture takeaways from employees following a team meeting, like short videos of each person’s point of view. “We are creatures of habit and comfort,” Rajgopal noted, and people do some of their best work when they’re comfortable. That said, we also adapt quickly, which ensured a fairly successful transition to remote working in a short amount of time. “If we step back, in the context of the terrible time of the pandemic,” he said. “I do think it’s worth pausing and celebrating what a lot of institutions and employees have accomplished.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our knowledge partner for this webinar: McKinsey & Company. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and 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.

Michael Stahl | August 11, 2020

Financial Wellness: a Benefit Employees Need Right Now

The 30 million Americans collecting unemployment checks at the moment are living on the brink, with their future benefits caught in a political debate. But in the midst of the pandemic, even working-class families with jobs are now facing new headwinds in the form of reduced wages, depleted savings, health-care bills, and increased child-care burdens. A Pew Research Center survey found that “the impact is falling more heavily on lower-income adults, a group that was feeling significant financial pressure well before the current crisis.” Indeed, “Having a job far from guarantees financial stability,” the Urban Institute said in a report last year. What can employers do to help? For one thing, several retail giants including Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart have all increased their minimum wage in the U.S. to $15 an hour. Beyond wages, some companies have considered additional ways to reduce the financial insecurity of their workers, including improving benefits like sick leave and providing tools to help workers with personal budgeting and financial literacy. Doing so is in the company’s best interest as well, since workers with financial struggles often have problems on the job, including absenteeism and lower productivity. In a recent From Day One webinar, “Pay With a Shared Purpose,” several experts in the field of benefits explored ways for employers to provide better financial security for workers. Moderated by Lydia Dishman, reporter and editor at Fast Company, here are some notable takeaways: Adopting Flexible Benefits for Uncertain Times What the pandemic has taught us is that employee health is on the line, which means that employers have been motivated to increase or expand healthcare coverage. Marina Vassilev, director of compensation, executive HR and mobility at BASF Corp., the giant chemical producer, said when the pandemic hit the U.S., her company was willing to make adjustments. BASF immediately implemented paid leave for employees infected with COVID-19, as well as those with a family member struck by it. From Day One's panel on "pay with a shared purpose," on financial wellness (Image by From Day One) Suzanne Usaj, who oversees North America benefit & retirement plans and global employee-program strategy for Live Nation, said that her company has a health-care benefits package in place that’s based on a percentage of income, so that lower-income workers pay smaller premiums than higher-income employees. The company has an on-demand, health-care concierge team as well, which can guide workers through their benefits. “In a time of pandemic, all these things that are built in there for them already turn into an actual tool or resource for them once they need to use it,” Usaj said. In terms of unexpected health-care costs for workers, “I think we're heading it off at the pass.” Helping Employees Achieve Better Financial Literacy Many people, especially those from underserved communities, may lack information on how best to utilize newly obtained resources and take advantage of provided benefits. But such information can be crucial during a personal crisis (pandemic-induced or not) helping to facilitate better decisions. “One of the things I’ve always focused on in my career is building programs that enhance communication at the time of the compensation events [like pay raises]. That includes total rewards and benefits education,” Vassilev said. “We tend to be very specific around salary and bonuses, etc. But it’s the bigger picture [that’s vital], and building that knowledge over time really pays off for employees.” Jon Schlossberg, founder and CEO of Even, a digital payroll platform that helps employees plan their finances, said that if employees can focus on paying down debt–through financial assistance or appropriate budgeting, along with better financial literacy–greater equity will follow. “The average white family has roughly $150,000 of household wealth and the average black family has roughly $25,000 of household wealth,” Schlossberg said, a gap as wide as it was in the 1960s. “When you eliminate student debt, that number closes significantly. So helping folks eliminate their debt is, I would say, the longest lever that you as an employer can pull. Unfortunately, the gap is so wide, that is not the only lever that we need to pull if we want to actually solve the problem. But that’s where I would start.” Being More Transparent About Equity Employers should address inequities in compensation as well, in which women and people of color suffer a pay gap. Greater transparency is one of the solutions. Leaders could conduct “pay-equity assessments” by an external auditor, particularly to explore unfair gaps across demographics and ways to close them, said Kilolo Kijakazi, a fellow at the Urban Institute who coordinates partnerships that help tackle economic and social issues. “A lot of employers think they have their hearts in the right places,” noted moderator Dishman, “but without those internal audits really sort of scrubbing the data and looking at it very carefully, it's hard to tell,” she said. “It’s challenging for somebody coming in, who’s historically underpaid. Even if they get promoted and get a raise, they’re still not earning what a counterpart who happens to be a white dude would be earning.” “If employers sincerely want to improve financial stability for workers, they need to eliminate the structural barriers in the labor market,” said Kijakazi. “Namely, racial discrimination in hiring, pay, promotions and in benefits as well.” Such problems are best addressed by consistent, long-term programs to reach equity, said Maria Reis, director of compensation and benefits at LG Electronics. “You don’t fix a problem that’s happened over decades in one year. You’d never have enough money to do that, but we do what we can,” she said. “We tell employees, ‘Look, this may take a few years to fix,’ and I think it’s been effective for us so far.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar: Even, the financial-wellness platform. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Emily Nonko | August 07, 2020

Corporate America, Your Employees Want a Word With You

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and following the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an upper manager at AT&T asked TeNita Ballard, lead consultant for diversity and inclusion at the company, how she was doing. After responding she was fine, he pushed her further. “He caused me to slow down–he really wanted to know how I’m doing,” she recalled. She answered him honestly: “I let him know, I’m not doing good.” Ballard was reflecting on a talk with her family about being Black in America, particularly the fears of her brother. After the killing of George Floyd, she took the conversation with her family and boss and wrote a letter to share with fellow employees. “It was raw, it was real, and it was vulnerable,” she said. Her open letter prompted further workplace conversation around race and being Black at this moment in American history. Ballard shared this experience during Bridging the Voice Gap: How Diverse Points of View Can Help a Company Thrive, a webinar hosted by From Day One. It was a frank conversation that examined the benefits of an open and honest workplace, while addressing why employees are often thwarted for speaking–and how employers can provide productive listening space for those who challenge the status quo. The speakers all acknowledged that at the intersection of a pandemic and racial-justice movement, employers can no longer expect workers to simply show up and do their jobs as if their lives aren’t affected by the world outside. Managers have to take into account the needs and vulnerabilities of employees as they evolve, while creating the outlets for their opinions to be aired. From Day One's webinar on the need for workers to speak up, moderated by Lydia Dishman (top row, center), an editor and writer for Fast Company (Image by From Day One) Instead of labeling such conversations as “uncomfortable” or “unwanted,” employers can view them as productive for the overall company. Many companies are making new efforts to embrace a more vocal workforce. At Siemens, the industrial giant, company leaders compiled racial-justice resources, plus a knowledge board with “micro learnings” around empathy and anti-racism, before hosting “courageous conversations,” according to Nichelle Grant, head of diversity, equity and inclusion for Siemens USA. Rather than pushing employees into discussion together, Siemens provided conversation-starting tools, including a facilitator guide and manager-information sessions to address questions early on. “What’s really working for us is that we’ve paired them with a racial-justice coach, so they’re not going at it alone,” Grant said. “We recognize the conversation about race is rare in the workplace, and it’s not easy for people to talk about in general.” Other speakers shared steps their organizations are taking to encourage honest dialogue. Corey Flournoy, Groupon’s global head of inclusion and diversity, said the company hosted a global open forum following the killing of George Floyd. “Employees got to really share how they’re feeling … and the entire senior-manager team was part of the discussion,” he said. “It was a catalyst to start a lot more work and conversations that Groupon is doing.” Erin Bramblett, head of HR for Communities in Schools of Atlanta, said the organization is hosting town halls, employee well-being surveys every four to five weeks, and regular mental- health check ins. She also stressed the importance of building an HR department based on trust. “It should be known for reacting and handling things properly and confidently, so that trust and that space is there,” Bramblett said. Jana Morrin, CEO and co-founder of Speakfully, a platform for workers to document and report mistreatment, addressed the perspective of top managers: “As leaders, if you want [employees] to come forward and talk to you, you have to be vulnerable yourself and share experiences yourself,” she said. Chief executives have a responsibility to foster the culture of workplace trust, openness and vulnerability: “It has to come from top down, because otherwise people won’t believe it,” she added. “If they see senior leadership having these hard conversations on an ongoing basis, they understand the CEO wants to know what’s happening to them.” Investing in long-term progress on workplace equity–as opposed to quick fixes–was a recurring theme of the panel. Siemens works with historically black colleges and universities and is exploring mutually beneficial partnerships in which the company can recruit from the schools and help support them as well. Groupon has an anti-racism book club with global sessions that will include top leadership. Participants won’t simply read books like White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, but will open a conversation of how it may apply to company culture, according to Flournoy. The company also started a Black Lives Matter room on the Slack platform to maintain racial-justice dialogue. The webinar speakers also suggested that while consistently pushing for more diverse and equitable workplaces, company leaders should simply “stick to the facts,” as Flournoy put it. Track the data on female and minority leadership within the company, he said, and point out where diversity falls short. “Yes, we may have a high number of certain employees, but what [leadership] level are they?” asked Ballard. “It’s all different ways to look at our pipeline to make sure we’re doing the work.” The panel was upfront about the challenges ahead. Among them: the all-remote workplace often adds a layer of complexity, there’s fear that the energy around social justice and equity will die down, and there remains a lack of mentorship to help people of color move into top leadership. But the speakers suggested that workplaces can take a good first step by simply listening. “Meet people where they’re at,” said Grant. “I start with listening and then it’s a dialogue, a conversation about where they’re at. It’s not just one conversation, it’s multiple conversations over time.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partners who sponsored this webinar: Speakfully, LumApps, and Achievers. 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.

Michael Stahl | August 05, 2020

The New Contours of Hiring in an Economy Under Siege

The COVID-19 pandemic and sharp economic recession has produced dramatic crosscurrents in the labor market. It has brought mass unemployment at rates not seen since the Great Depression, with tens of millions of Americans out of work. Yet at the same time, portions of the economy have begun to recover or experience new demand, especially the providers of essential goods and services. Some companies, in fact, are not only hiring back laid-off workers, but expanding their organizations. To say that hiring will just go back to the way it was, however, is ill-advised. The pandemic has brought new practices and expectations in labor, from the C-suite to the factory floor, further altered by the historic new wave of civil-rights protests. Workers have new demands, and employers will have to adjust. In the short term, “our labor market may actually look unrecognizable, even when compared to the very recent past,” said Nick Baily, co-founder and CEO of From Day One, introducing the organization’s recent webinar, “Talent Outlook 2020: Defining the New Contours of the Labor Market.” “For recruiters,” Baily continued, “aligning best techniques, from algorithmic targeting to compelling job titles, will be essential to increasing the volume of quality candidates.” Moderated by Lydia Dishman, reporter and editor at Fast Company, the panel discussed several ways business leaders can connect with the best candidates for prospective hiring in this rapidly evolving market. Here are a few key takeaways: A New Normal Calls for New Workers Whatever the new normal looks like, for some time the economy will be exceptionally fluid, and some companies are operating based on shifts in demand as well as anticipating a time when the economy emerges from the crisis. Heidi Myers, director of global talent acquisitions at the Ball Corp., North America’s largest maker of recyclable aluminum cans, said that the company is putting the finishing touches on two new manufacturing plants. One of them, in Rome, Ga., will craft aluminum cups. Why? Originally, the cups had been designed for major live events. “Where there’s outings and large sporting events and stadium events, those should be the cups that you're going to be drinking your beverages and your beer out of,” she said. But now those cups are being marketed for use in the home, where people are doing more of their beverage consumption, also creating an precedented shortage of aluminum cans. The speakers at our From Day One webinar on hiring new talent (Image by From Day One) As a result, Ball’s priorities have shifted, and Myers called plants like that one “absolutely crucial” to the sustainability and growth of the corporation, where she said there’s an “all hands on deck” approach to find the workers and managers to operate these plants. Other companies developing their post-pandemic strategies, particularly in tech fields, are seeking to hire data engineers and analysts. Dharmendra Sethi, SVP of talent acquisitions and management at GlobalLogic, a digital product engineering company, said such hiring is “a very key focus” for his company right now, and in the upper levels of its corporate structure. Adopting Flexible Recruiting Strategies and Tools Work-from-home arrangements, which suddenly became a massive experiment in response to the pandemic, are likely to endure in some fashion even after the crisis eases. “We’re trying to meet folks where they are,” said Hilary Darnell, director of talent management and acquisitions at Comcast. This means utilizing virtual interviews, for example. Once Comcast hires a new employee, “We’re actually shipping them all of their equipment that they need to their home prior to their first day,” Darnell said. “On their first day, everything is virtual.” Larry McAlister, VP of global talent at NetApp, a data-management company, said digital hiring platforms are now equipped with “mind-blowing technology.” Among the services NetApp uses is Eightfold, which engages A.I. technology to match candidates with companies on the hunt for them, as well as predicting how a candidate can grow within a company through development. “We all want to keep the human touch,” added Sethi, “but technology is coming and helping us be more efficient, and actually more productive because there is no concept of I’m stuck in the traffic and I can’t find your address.” Onboarding Efficiency is Key in Recovery With many companies eager to get their operations back on track, some will need to onboard many more people, often carrying out the process remotely. Greater efficiency in the hiring process can only help here. “One of the things we’ve seen done effectively in order to help with this process is a simple thing you can do at the beginning, which is set expectations for the candidates,” said Leah Daniels, SVP of strategy at Appcast, which provides programmatic job-ad distribution. Telling candidates up front how long the onboarding will take, and whether they’ll have to pass a drug test and background check, for example, will not only keep candidates engaged but also increases the chances that the candidate will successfully navigate such potential obstacles. Overall, this helps the company “keep the candidate experience on the more positive side,” Daniels said. “It’s such a simple thing to do, but something we all sort of miss in the process,” Daniels continued. “And the really good companies I’ve seen do it right on their career site, or their first page of their application process.” Diversity and Inclusion Must Be Prioritized Dishman shifted focus to the ways in which companies can prioritize diversity and inclusion because “here in the U.S., we have reached an inflection point,” she said, thanks to widespread protests against racial and economic inequality. “People are holding companies’ feet to the fire and saying, ‘What are you doing in terms of diversity, inclusion and equity?’” McAlister said the A.I. technology integrated into new digital-hiring platforms helps companies to identify diverse candidates better and faster. “You can just press a button and say, ‘I only want female candidates for this job,’” McAlister said. “So the technology is there; the bigger lift is getting managers to hire the candidates.” Because of similarity bias, in which people are apt to welcome individuals who look like them onto their teams, the preponderance of white males in management positions means there are still stubborn challenges to the hiring of women, people of color, and other often-marginalized candidates. Diversifying interview teams is key to a resolution, the panelists agreed, but problems arise, again, when there are too few minority team members to take on that time-consuming responsibility. Sethi suggested hiring a “trusted interviewer,” a non-biased individual or team, separate from the hiring manager, who can be trained on what the company is seeking, to carry the load. A little more open-mindedness wouldn’t hurt either. “It’s all about the decision makers and making sure that they can look at a diverse background and take the appropriate risk of somebody that might not meet the exact mold or doesn’t have the exact experience someone else has,” Darnell said. “It’s about the diverse background, and so I just think we need to be more creative and how we're looking at talent, how these transferable skills can be really applicable, and how it’s okay if they don’t come with all these boxes checked.” Companies can target candidate pools from out of Historically Black Colleges and post-secondary schools that empower women, panelists said. Long-term, if companies create greater upward mobility for diverse workers, eventually giving them more hiring power, that can help solve the problem as well. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partners who sponsored this webinar: Appcast, Eightfold, and Monster. Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Emily Nonko | July 29, 2020

Why a Culture of Coaching Is Like a Well-tended Garden

James Lopata, a workplace coaching expert, recalls sitting-in on a recent client meeting in which the chief HR officer told his employees the company would not release a statement about the Black Lives Matter movement because the company didn’t want to engage in politics. Lopata, the vice president of coaching supervision for AceUp, observed employees express frustration and disappointment on the Zoom call. The company’s plan to facilitate roundtables and produce solutions and action items was not enough. Employees wanted to be listened to in a process that facilitated deeper cultural changes within the company, as opposed to short-term fixes. As workplaces around the country grapple with similar discussions, Lopata believes a culture of coaching across a whole organization–as opposed to individually focused coaching–is uniquely suited to offer a productive path forward. He outlined the values of coaching with culture in mind during a presentation at From Day One’s July virtual conference on The New Push for Workplace Equity. Lopata compares a company that’s only willing to make short-term, surface-level changes to a desert with arid soil. A company invested in a culture of coaching–as well as values of diversity, equity and inclusion–is more akin to a garden. To achieve it, “companies need to dig, and dig deep,” he said. Values of gardening also align with the International Coach Federation competency model: setting a foundation, co-creating a relationship, communicating effectively, and finally cultivating learning and growth. James Lopata, vice president of coaching supervision for AceUp A skilled gardener is sensitive to different needs of different plants in the garden, and creates conditions for each plant to thrive within the larger garden. Corporate leadership, too, should “create conditions for cultures to grow,” as Lopata put it, by identifying strengths and needs of employees and listening to them to foster change, rather than forcing change upon them. An important first step in developing this kind of culture is to identify existing leaders. Managers who already have an innate coaching approach should be supported in that role, for example by providing resources or calling attention to their distinguished behavior. They can then serve as anchors to a larger “coached neighborhood network,” according to Lopata. This network is one where leaders are in close collaboration with the people they work with. “Individuals are not the key drivers of corporate success,” Lopata noted. “Collaboration counts for more.” While most coaching measures individual interventions at the individual coachee level, there’s growing research that this culture of coaching is an effective model for change. An analysis in the Journal of Psychology observed a “coaching ripple effect”: transformational leadership and an increase in psychological well-being for those who received coaching within a network. In addition, the closer any member of the network was identified as being connected to those who received coaching, the more likely they were to experience positive increases in wellbeing. Lopata also sees promise in the role of coaching supervisor, an emerging certified position in the U.S. “It’s uniquely suited to overseeing the development of coaching cultures,” he said. Coaching supervision allows the company to focus on individual coaching alongside a large-scale vision for a collaborative workplace. “Coach supervisors don't merely attend to the design of the garden, we tend to the underlying assumptions and belief systems that conditioned the soil of your entire organization,” Lopata said. He also pointed out that coaching has been found to be the most effective tool for change management, as opposed to training, mentoring and consulting. “Why? Training, consulting, mentoring and the like are backwards facing– expertise and teaching experience only offer what has already been known,” he said. “Coaching is uniquely forward-facing and helps identify what has never been before, what is emergent,” concluded Lopata. “It assists in discovering what an optimal future looks like in ways never encountered.” 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.

Michael Stahl | July 29, 2020

How Empathy Can Lead to Equity in the Workplace

The phrase often repeated during the protests over racial injustice, energized by the police killing of George Floyd, is that this time “feels different.” In one of many media commentaries offering hope for lasting change, CNN’s John Blake, who covered riots sparked by the Rodney King police-brutality verdict and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, wrote, “[A]fter the George Floyd demonstrations I find myself filled with a guarded optimism.” Amplifying that feeling was the response of Corporate America, which rushed to answer the bell. Though not without criticism, business giants pledged billions of dollars to community-outreach programs. Many have promised to address shortcomings in diversity and inclusion through new initiatives. Yet to prove they’re not just “woke-washing” their reputations, these organizations will need to take concrete steps toward real change. How they might do that was the topic of a panel discussion at From Day One’s July virtual conference, The New Push for Workplace Equity. In a conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman, an editor and writer for Fast Company, five leaders in the field of diversity and inclusion offered suggestions to corporate leaders who are eager to enact change: Start With an Expression of Empathy The renewed focus on the well-being of employees, which has arrived after a half-century of corporate fealty to shareholders, has been sharpened by the emotional impact of watching people of color killed by police and the struggles of workers throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Now is a time when business leaders need to show that they care. “There are issues of bias and inequity in COVID, and thinking about who is affected most, who are considered essential workers, what are the infection rates within different neighborhoods,” said Dion Bullock, who leads strategy on equity, inclusion and belonging at Bravely, a coaching platform. “How do you work, and how do you have this conversation about racial equity within this context of, quite frankly, mass infection and death, and mass unemployment and loss?” From Day One's panel on workplace equity, let by moderator Lydia Dishman (upper left) of Fast Company When Bravely employees started working from home this spring, leaders sought ways to address employee morale–if only after some prodding, he said. “Part of the challenge was to get our leadership from, ‘Here’s how we just keep the lights on,’ to ‘OK, but the people who help us keep the lights on also need our support,’” Bullock said. “We really need to make sure we’re checking in with folks.” A wave of internal communications were sent to workers, with leaders boosting transparency. They outlined strategy considerations, remote-work best practices, safety procedures, and employee-support options. That same active approach, with some tailoring, can be applied to other difficult periods, notably the nationwide protests over racial injustice. Develop Comfort and Trust So Difficult Conversations Can Occur The Coca-Cola Co. did not shy away from taking a public stance on racial injustice, which the CEO called “a wound in the fabric of America.” The company announced four pillars in its efforts to enact change, centered around “listening, leading, investing, and advocating.” The organization has developed “allyship guidebooks” and “talking points for leaders to use during difficult conversations,” said Valerie Love, SVP of HR at Coca-Cola of North America, who acknowledged that some leaders within the corporation “need help” in engaging the issue. But for the sake of building trust, those leading the company’s D&I push have told them, “We’re gonna meet you where you are.” “I like that one of our associates said, ‘The table is set for the conversation,’” Love recounted. “‘We’re gonna slow it down and we’re gonna speed it up for wherever you are on this journey.’ … We’ve asked our leaders and our employees to be patient, and have empathy, and realize not everyone is at the right place to start the conversation.” Matt Orozco, an organizational-change consultant at Peakon, a platform that measures employee engagement, said his company has developed metrics for measuring progress in D&I. But he acknowledged that the collection of voluntarily submitted data won’t tell leaders much if employees don’t feel as though they can honestly express their opinions on fairness, equity, diversity, inclusion, and support in the workplace. And leaders might not even want to ask the tough questions in the first place. “Not many people feel comfortable telling their friends about those kinds of things,” Orozco said. “We’re trying to help [leaders] get comfortable with the discomfort of asking questions and getting responses they haven’t received [before], but also building trust.” Orozco urged managers to consider the question: “How do you create a foundation of trust so that people feel OK giving you this information, with the intention of using it in a thoughtful way, rather than in a not-thoughtful or adverse way?” Establish a D&I Task Force and Actively Listen With much of the world’s economy temporarily hitting the pause button during the pandemic, many corporations are taking major financial hits, which may inspire them to disregard D&I initiatives and focus on exploring new revenue opportunities. Ruchi Jalla, chief D&I officer of BAE Systems, a multinational defense, security, and aerospace company, said that her company instead decided to double-down on its diversity commitments. “We have goals, specifically tied to diversity and inclusion in our leadership population, and we had a conversation [with leadership] about that as a recipe objective, and they said, ‘We’re keeping on course; there’s going to be no give here,’” Jalla said. She implied that it was as if BAE’s leadership, in an effort to keep morale strong, told company leaders: “If you can’t make your financial [goals], you better make sure that you’re meeting your goals around safety and diversity and inclusion.” BAE has recently formed what Jalla called “Racial Equity Vision Teams,” in collaboration with the company’s Black and African-American employee resource group, to “help inform” and “ensure that we don’t march along thinking we know the answer without asking employees that are impacted.” These teams will offer insight into how BAE can make, according to Jalla, “equitable progress within all of the representative categories, whether it be processes, practices, and people.” Establishing such a group within a company is only an initial step, however. One of the primary keys to any company’s D&I mission is its leadership’s listening ability. “One of the things that was very exciting for everyone around the globe was having a weekly webinar,” said Olga Yakimakho, director of leadership and organizational development at Special Olympics International, a nonprofit whose very existence is to drive inclusivity. During these webinars “we really shine the light on our athletes,” Yakimakho said, giving neurodiverse people a chance to tell their stories about how they have been marginalized and excluded. “So now the entire world is able to understand how they feel when they can’t go outside, when they stay at home, the loneliness, the disconnect.” Yakimakho said the webinars have had an impact on the organization’s in-house team as well. Yakimakho admits that even this group, which could be seen as a beacon of inclusion, has room for improvement. “Any organization, any company has work to do,” Yakimakho said. “It’s a journey; we’re never quite there [and] so we’ve been trying to learn from [the athletes], learn from their resilience, learn from them how they overcome their challenges.” Play Games With a Purpose Nothing will change if employees, as well as leaders, aren’t engaged in the journey. Sitting in an auditorium and watching a PowerPoint presentation won’t cut it. (Besides, in these pandemic times, such a gathering isn’t even allowed to take place.) Bullock says Bravely has developed a role-playing game called Just-in-Time Coaching, taught to company clients. If an employee has a performance review approaching, for example, they’ll act out the roles of both manager and employee, with the goal of leaving both sides more mindful of “different dynamics when going into those conversations.” Yakimakho discussed a similar role-playing game designed to illustrate different perspectives among diverse employees. “We have a blind colleague with an intellectual disability and he would do a session blindfolding everyone in the room,” she said. The colleagues would spend 30 minutes blindfolded, engaging with each other. “When you really step into his shoes, you understand why we don’t have boxes in the corridors so he couldn’t trip.” Such an exercise, though now by necessity a virtual one, would likely lead to a better comprehension of the viewpoints of others. Once that kind of understanding takes hold, empathy–so vital to change today–could find a way to flow much more freely. Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Emily Nonko | July 28, 2020

Diverse From the Start: What a Holistic Recruiting Strategy Looks Like

Recruitment is the first step for creating racial, gender and economic diversity within a workplace, but it cannot stand alone in fostering inclusion. Rather, recruitment should be seen as the launching-off point to a wealth of strategies that bring in, retain and empower a diverse employee base. A panel of experts on recruitment convened at From Day One’s July virtual conference, The New Push for Workplace Equity, to discuss how recruiting can come out of its silo and serve as a powerful first step to more equitable workplace cultures. “We’ve been looking at the full employee journey,” said PaShon Mann, VP of talent acquisition for Comcast. “Many folks in talent acquisition focus on that front end, on hiring, but really you want to look at the sourcing stage and all the way through to onboarding, development and promotion.” Comcast applies a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) lens throughout an employee’s lifespan with the company, according to Mann, and does so with support from top leadership. Al Cave, national practice leader at Apprenti, stressed the need for buy-in across a company: “If you have the leader of the organization at the table, everybody else will come along,” he said. “You absolutely need the head of the organization fully bought in and supportive on an ongoing basis.” Once leadership is onboard, the company can invest in tools that support holistic recruitment. Mann suggested creating processes to track feedback from the employee after they’ve been hired. Comcast also partnered its talent-acquisition and talent-management teams to ensure the processes are linked with similar DEI values. Crystal Andrews Banks, diversity and inclusion director at Ulta Beauty, explained the company started a “Champion’s Network” to make sure people feel they belong within the company and help them identify opportunities for growth. She added that company culture is a draw for prospective hires, with open communication between the chief executive and employees, diversity-focused events, and learning from brand partners. From Day One's panel of recruitment experts, led in discussion by Emily Nordquist, upper left, senior program manager of the Baumhart Center at Loyola University Chicago Marquis Miller, chief diversity officer for the City of Chicago, offered a public-sector perspective of improving workplace culture to retain diverse employment. He noted that Chicago began looking at “new ideas of wellness and how that wellness is actually connected to professional development.” The city is exploring establishing “City Resource Groups” that help city residents identify career paths in municipal employment. At Apprenti, an organization that helps democratize tech-job opportunities, the key to holistic recruitment was changing the attitudes around who’s best qualified for tech positions. “Our belief is that far too many companies … rely on far too narrow a pipeline,” said Cave. He pointed out that last year, there were 4 million tech jobs open, but colleges produced only 320,000 degrees in computer science or engineering. “We try to recruit from the broadest, most comprehensive body of entities and sources as possible,” Cave said, noting the company works with community organizations, educational institutions, government and business entities, while also sponsoring and speaking at various events. Panelists delved into more specific strategies of accessing equity in the recruitment and hiring process. Cynthia Hedricks, chief analytics officer for SkillSurvey, a data-driven recruitment consultancy, spoke to the importance of creating, documenting and following a consistent hiring process. Structured interviews are also important. “It will help your hiring managers to make sure questions are job-related and consistently asked of all applicants,” she said. If a company uses personality assessments, she added, that company should speak with its vendor to make sure it monitors for biases. Emily Nordquist, the panel’s moderator and senior program manager with Baumhart Center of Loyola University Chicago, pointed out that job candidates pick up on the signals about a company’s commitment to diversity from the get-go: “Who’s on that interview panel? Who are they seeing in the office? Who are they connecting with?” she asked. “That can have a huge impact on people’s psychology as they walk into the room.” Apprenti developed a multi-point assessment model that measures aptitude, rather than specific educational skills. Structured interviews measure behavioral and interpersonal attributes, as opposed to education background or professional history. “At each point of the process we’re looking to expand the pool as much as we can and assess aptitude, and nothing else,” Cave explained. Mann, of Comcast, pointed out that anti-bias training should be used for employees who conduct interviews: “We could have the most beautiful process, but if we have folks with unconscious and conscious biases it’s not going to matter how we design things.” Mann also believes such training should be revisited by companies on an ongoing basis to reflect new research and information on how biases play out. Many panelists noted that COVID-19 turned recruitment and employment upside down, given the impact on both the economy and the physical workplace, but could still serve as an opportunity to revisit strategies for holistic recruitment. “Historically there’s been a bias against unemployed applicants, but right now there’s a segment of the workforce who’s lost their jobs during the pandemic,” Hedricks said. “We can revisit our biases, turn everything on its side and re-look at it.” Nordquist ended the panel with a “power round” question on where companies can start when it comes to holistic recruiting. Cave emphasized that companies need to begin diversity work within the internal culture, before turning to talent acquisition. Hedricks suggested that as the workforce starts to return to the office after stay-at-home measures, companies should consider task forces, surveys or forums in which employees can speak honestly about their workplace culture. Andrews Banks of Ulta Beauty stressed the importance of the company’s leaders getting on the same page. “Ground yourself in the why,” she said. “Ground yourself in representation data and figure out what success looks like to you as an organization, then how you can connect the dots to your future aspirational goals.” 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.

Michael Stahl | July 28, 2020

Old Is New: a Compelling Case for Age Diversity in the Workplace

By the year 2024, nearly one quarter of the labor force is projected to be age 55 or older, double what it was in 1994, when the figure was just under 12%. This trend has dramatic implications for how we view the workforce. Age discrimination in the workplace is illegal, but nonetheless a widespread phenomenon. It creates unjust challenges for older individuals in job retention and the securing of new ones. But studies show that a diverse workforce, in terms of gender, race, and age as well, is better for business, and companies will be well-served if they catch on to this. When it comes to building better diversity and inclusion across a company, age is one element that corporate leaders often disregard or place lower on their priority list, according to Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor of financial resilience at AARP. She spoke last week at From Day One’s July virtual conference, The New Push for Workplace Equity, offering a data-rich presentation on the impact of longevity on how we view talent. In it, she pointed out that limiting work opportunities for the growing older population–as has been the case, to a degree, in recent years–can have dire consequences, starting at the individual level. “Jobs are a foundational way to address previous inequities,” Tinsley-Fix said. “For many, they’re an access to healthcare. They’re access to good wages. They’re sometimes access to long-term financial planning, and all of those elements impact how long you live.” Corporate leaders who keep this social impact in mind, as well as the qualities that older workers can bring to the job, can benefit the company as well as society. Tinsley-Fix cited the results of a PwC global CEO survey, which found that some of the most important skills that companies value in workers are also the hardest to find. In this time of growing automation, these skills–including leadership, emotional intelligence and adaptability–cannot be performed by a machine. Other skills and qualities that often improve with maturity–problem solving, critical thinking, relationship building, empathy, coaching and mentoring–will also be required on the job during the epic shift toward automation. Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor of financial resilience at AARP (Photo courtesy of AARP) “These are the kinds of higher-order cognitive skills that take time to develop. You often accrue them through experience, on the job and also interacting with others, and growing as a person,” Tinsley-Fix said. “I note that because older workers tend to have a lot of these skills, and if you’re able to leverage them, particularly in the areas of mentoring and in the transfer of tasks and knowledge, the presence of an age-diverse workforce can actually help instill these skills.” Age diversity in the workforce also improves productivity and performance, which, of course, helps the bottom line. For some corporate leaders to open up to the idea of hiring older people, they may first have to get over one particular bias, likely rooted in what Tinsley-Fix called “the myth about intelligence and atrophy.” Many believe that the human brain begins a slow decline after about the age of 20, but that’s not true, she said. Citing research by the author Heather E. McGowan, who wrote The Adaptation Advantage Book, about thriving in the future of work, Tinsley-Fix observed, “Our brains remain fluid and plastic all the way up through late ages, as long as we stay active ourselves and stay engaged in our own brain health.” Human ability to concentrate, for example, peaks at age 43, while it isn’t until age 50 that we’re at our peak learning capabilities. “Crystallized intelligence,” which Tinsley-Fix described as “contextual” and generally has to do with “synthesizing information” and “making judgements,” doesn’t peak until age 60. “Anyone can learn from anyone else, as long as we provide opportunities for them to do that,” Tinsley-Fix said. Given the fluidity of our brainpower, Tinsley-Fix suggested that, culturally, we should expect career trajectories to move through waves as opposed to climbing up ladders, in what she called “non-linear and multi-stage careers.” “We’re going to need to have periods where we lean out in order to re-skill, because we know that the landscape of skills continues to change, and we also know we’re going to need to lean out sometimes to care for others, either children or our elders,” Tinsley-Fix said. “The implications of this are pretty big.” If equity and compensation in the workplace are tethered to title and “experience,” ladder-based equations are easy: The longer an employee has been around, the better their position and pay. But deciding an employee’s standing in a company and their compensation when they’ve taken time to train or attend to personal needs becomes much trickier if restricted by the ladder-based outlook toward career trajectories. “What if a person’s significance, and the pride they take in their work; what if their compensation, even, was not tied to title?” Tinsley-Fix asked. “We’re going to have to come up with new ways of recognizing and rewarding.” “And how do we preserve the intent of driving equity if titles are not the only way to measure that?” she asked. It could take “flexible classification models” that allow for “softer exits” and “better re-entries,” Tinsley-Fix said. This would improve upon the “one on-ramp, one off-ramp” system typically in place at companies today. Tinsley-Fix noted that famed millennial Mark Zuckerberg once said, at age 22, “Young people are just smarter.” But next year, the first millennials–a generation of people who, according to an AARP report, make up 35% of the workforce–will turn 40, which is when they become protected under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. “That’s a big group of your workforce, in addition to Gen-X and Boomers and Traditionalists,” Tinsley-Fix said, all of whom need to work longer to fund their longer, healthier lives. With millennials increasingly in positions of power, this is a great time for them to show off just how smart they are, and keep a diverse workforce, mindful of the inclusivity of workers from many generations. Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Emily Nonko | July 27, 2020

The Racism of False Assumptions in the Office

“You don’t look like a lawyer” was a comment often heard by the Black female attorneys interviewed by Tsedale M. Melaku, a sociologist and author. Melaku had originally wanted to go to law school and work for a law firm herself, but was turned off by the unforgiving lifestyle. She also noticed another fact of legal life: There were few Black female attorneys and close to zero Black female partners. “I wondered–what is it about this space that creates this dynamic? How does race and gender impact their career trajectories?” Those questions led her to pursue a doctorate in sociology in which she examined the race and gender dynamic of law firms. In interviews with Black female attorneys, she tracked similar threads. “These women were often mistaken for non-attorney staff,” she said. “They constantly had to negotiate their presence and explain what put them in these positions–it’s like you have to read your resume every single time.” Melaku spoke about her work last week in a conversation with Kristen Bellstrom, features editor for Fortune, on how these women’s experiences outline broader challenges of race, gender and class equity in the corporate world, offering steps that law firms and other organizations could take to make their workplaces more inclusive. They spoke at From Day One’s July virtual conference, The New Push for Workplace Equity. Melaku, who is now a post-doctoral research fellow with the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas & the Caribbean at The Graduate Center (CUNY), turned her research into the 2019 book You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism. When Bellstrom pointed out that You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer might be considered an untraditional title for academic writing, Melaku said she felt the experiences of Black woman attorneys would resonate outside academia and law, speaking to larger challenges around race, gender and inequality in the workplace. Kristen Bellstrom, left, features editor at Fortune, interviewed Melaku at the From Day One virtual conference Her book also tackles big challenges standing in the way of workplace equity: structures of both systemic racism and systemic gendered racism, the “invisible labor clause” in which marginalized people spend time and energy navigating predominantly white spaces, and an “inclusion tax” that entails the resources spent–like time, money and labor–to adhere to or resist white norms. Because there are few people of color in corporate spaces like law firms, Melaku explained, they can be easily tokenized as “diversity hires” or “benefits of affirmative action” by white colleagues. One step for law firms to improve is for white people in leadership to simply get to know more people of color than the few within the company, she added. Corporate America also needs to move away from “diversity” as a catchphrase and move into real action that fosters more intersectional workplaces. “Name what the problem is in the organization–racial equity, gender equity–and make it a core value of your organization, and properly fund these values so people of color aren’t doing that work within,” said Melaku. Within U.S. law firms, the problem couldn’t be more stark: between 2008 and 2019 there has only been a .01% increase in the number of Black attorneys, she said. Melaku suggested making changes to recruitment strategies, examining workplace culture that pressures employees to “fit in,” and re-evaluating training, mentorship and sponsorship opportunities offered to attorneys early in their career. “Why can’t Black women bridge those gaps with white males to gain access to sponsors?” she asked. “What are we not saying?” Sponsors who advocate for attorneys of color, and pass along insight like soft skills to build client relationships or practices around billing and time, can serve as powerful allies to increase workplace equity. “It’s someone who will publicly do that racial and gender work, so everyone sees they are holding themselves accountable for what goes on in the organization,” Melaku said. She believes now is the time for law firm employees to “step up in the moment” and become allies who take a critical look at how practices, policies and culture hinder workplace equity. Those actions could be bolstered simply by learning and listening. She suggested a reading list beyond her own book: Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression by Joe R. Feagin, Racism without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools, and Racial Inequality by Wendy Leo Moore. “Build your own knowledge base and then listen,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt to listen.” Editor's note: Participants in the session asked if Tsedale Melaku would recommend additional titles for further reading, which she has provided: Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, a collection Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism by Yanick St. Jean and Joe R. Feagin Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Future Reparations by Joe R. Feagin Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing White Supremacy & Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander Unequal City: Race, Schools and Perceptions of Injustice by Carla Shedd All the Women are White, All the Men are Black: But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith White Men on Race: Power, Privilege and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness by Joe R. Feagin and Eileen O'Brien The Black Power Movement and American Social Work by Joyce Bell Flatlining: Race, Work and Healthcare in the New Economy by Adia Harvey Wingfield Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture by Erica Chito Childs. 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.

Michael Stahl | July 24, 2020

Can Employees Feel Unique Yet Included? Why We Need Both

The reinvigorated racial-justice movement in America has given new energy to many parallel conversations, notably about cultivating workplace equity more broadly for people from underrepresented and underserved communities. Yet even the most open-minded, conscientious allies might require more insight about how to make this a reality. To start, they could try a little empathy about universal human needs. “All humans have these two basic needs, and that is we want to belong–we want to be accepted and valued–but we also want to be unique, which means we want to be our full selves,” said Stefanie Johnson, author of the new book Inclusify: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams, during a fireside chat during From Day One’s July virtual conference, The New Push for Workplace Equity. “Those core things, that are part of your identity. You don’t want to have to hide or mask at work.” These dueling truths aren’t easy to accommodate, but leaders willing to take risks and create an environment for sometimes-uncomfortable conversations will reap the rewards of a more creative workforce, said Johnson, who also teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. Prof. Johnson, at right, in a From Day One interview with Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (Image by From Day One) “It’s easy to have everyone belong when you’re all the same, or it’s easy to all be yourselves when you don’t care about creating a cohesive team,” Johnson said, “but the magic is really in finding a way as a leader to allow people to belong, but as their true, best self.” For the employee, this can begin at the very start of the hiring process. Speaking with Lydia Dishman, a writer and editor at Fast Company, Johnson suggested that corporate leaders rethink their recruiting approach. Many well-meaning leaders and their HR staff might declare the goal of hiring simply “the best person” for the job and strip away concern over race or gender in the process, Johnson observed. But the leaders doing the hiring might be better served by parsing through their criteria, examining it on a more granular level, while being mindful of inherent bias within each of those prerequisites. “Probably the biggest thing that I’ve done that has changed people’s mindset is showing them who they would end up with if they selected based on totally anonymized résumés–or just based on whatever it is that they define as merit–and then comparing that to the people that they actually chose,” Johnson said. “And then when there’s this huge disparity–and there usually is–it kind of shocks people into the reality that maybe they were unwittingly using criteria that are not at all meritocratic, like similarity bias.” Managers who are more intentional about identifying objective criteria for hiring could help change company culture in a positive direction. However, Dishman noted that many from “majority groups” and people with privilege seem to wonder why more progress doesn’t come from bottom-up initiatives–as if it’s easy for underserved, undervalued populaces to “rise up” and “take action” to achieve equality. “Why would that argument not work?” Dishman asked Johnson, who examined the issue from a feminist perspective as one example. Citing the “Lean In” initiative, which began seven years ago, Johnson said, “We’ve seen the research since then that when women lean in, and they try to be just as aggressive and negotiate just as hard [as men], then they’re actually viewed negatively because they’re violating their gender roles.” Walking the line between “competent” and “likable” is not only challenging but something women shouldn’t have to endure in the first place. “So I think that just shows that ‘just try harder’ doesn’t work,” Johnson said. She added that, in the case of racial injustice, society has set up “huge systemic barriers” that also make the “just try harder” outlook ineffective at providing people of color greater access to vital resources, such as money and education. Johnson said corporate leaders should be actively hiring from diverse populations and, as part of the hiring process and beyond, asking them what they want to achieve and how they want to contribute. Leaders should follow up with constructed plans for accomplishing those goals and making sure diverse workers are considered for the crucial career-development steps: high-profile tasks, projects and positions. Inclusion is telegraphed on the job in sometimes subtle ways. For example, leaders should valso be on the lookout in meetings for behavior that robs workers of feeling that they’re included, such as not being on the receiving end of eye contact, not being given the chance to speak, being spoken over, or having their ideas co-opted by someone else without the originator receiving proper credit. Johnson said that other team members not necessarily in positions of power should also do their part, noticing those same behaviors, and changing their own. “It really is a team effort to be more inclusive,” Dishman noted, and there might not be a better time than now to start putting forth such efforts. “The world, the workplace, everything has been torn down by COVID,” Johnson said. “We’re all doing things differently, and I think this is our opportunity to rebuild it in a way that’s more inclusive, more equitable, and just more effective.” Editor's note: you can read a sample chapter of Johnson's new book here on From Day One. Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Mimi Hayes | July 02, 2020

Keeping Employees Engaged When Everything Is Changing

In recent months, the rhythms and structures of work life have been, well, deconstructed. Employees fortunate enough to have a job will be working from their kitchen tables for the foreseeable future, adding pressure to working families with children. Career development seems hazy at best for many employees, especially those unsure about how their roles will change in the coming months. At the same time, Corporate America is scrambling to combat systemic racism, asking painful questions about diversity and inclusion. As these pressures add up, how do we ensure that our employees are engaged in the work they’re doing and that they’re feeling aligned with new corporate directions? Are they feeling included, heard, and valued during this season of change? Are they feeling burned out and in need of a mental health day (or two)? Surprisingly enough, according to a recent survey in Gallup, employee engagement has been on a historic rise in the U.S. during the pandemic, with a reported 38% of employees feeling “engaged” in their daily work, as of early May. Among the possible explanations: a heightened sense of purpose during the pandemic, as well as efforts by employers to prioritize worker health, wellbeing, and a sense of camaraderie. But will this rally last as the pandemic months drag on? In a recent webinar, From Day One gathered several HR leaders to consider the factors of vulnerability, inclusion, and the changing nature of keeping employees connected during such tumultuous times. Some highlights from the webinar, which was moderated by Fortune associate editor Emma Hinchliffe: What Fosters Employee Engagement Now? “It's really about the emotional connection,” said Liz Pavese-Kaplan, senior director of the Limeade Institute, which helps companies measure employee engagement. “Then the behavioral actions that energize you to put more into what you're doing.” We often think about engagement in terms of productivity: how many products they can launch, tasks they can cross off, and sales they can close. But our panel of experts emphasized that the key to engagement lies more in how employees feel while doing their work than the work itself. Engagement has also been tied to psychological factors: worker confidence, the ability to trust in colleagues, and even feeling well-equipped to deal with stressful situations. “How do you feel about how you belong within the organization? Do you feel included within the organization? Do you feel that your opinions and interests are respected and valued? Do you feel like your voice is heard?” asked Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of global diverse executive engagement at American Express. Engagement also connects to an individual’s personal growth within an organization and whether they can weather an economic downturn with a company when things can get difficult. “How do we reinvent ourselves and reinvent what we do?” asked Pavese-Kaplan. “Because it is different, and that's not a bad thing, right?” Elevate the Humanity of Your Employees While it might be easy these days to assume that all is well with employees when their tiny avatars show up on your computer screen, less evident are the overlooked stressors in their daily lives. Many companies are strategically addressing this aspect of work with new programs and digital HR tools to stay in touch. TTEC, a company that provides customer-engagement and other services, launched a campaign called “It’s OK, We’re All Human” during the pandemic, encouraging employees to be as transparent as possible about what they are going through, via community message boards and access to mental health resources. “We wanted to provide different channels of communication that we didn't have before,” said Judith Almendra, TTEC’s VP of talent management and employee engagement. “So truly making sure that employees have a venue for them to voice what's on their mind.” Our panelists, clockwise from upper left: moderator Emma Hinchliffe of Fortune, Mikeisha Anderson Jones of American Express, Judith Almendra of TTEC, Lara McLeod of Zillow Group, Christine Doucet of Ace Hardware, and Liz Pavese-Kaplan of the Limeade Institute (Image by From Day One) While employees have become more open about discussing mental health, there is still a lingering social stigma about it. All the more reason, said our panelists, for leaders to bring these issues front and center. Lara McLeod, senior pathways manager at Zillow Group, gave an example: “One of the things that we focused on was actually providing a company-wide chat where we had our chief people officer and our VP of community and culture sit down together and discuss what they've gone through with mental health and how that has affected their work. And how important they see that, as well as to reiterate the message that it is OK. Not only from a stigma side, but from a business side to take mental-health days.” Breaking down the sense of shame can have myriad positive effects for employees, like bringing authenticity to the workplace. “I think that it's allowing people the ability to truly bring their whole selves to work in a way that was perhaps different six months ago, a year ago,” said Anderson Jones. A Shared Mission It might have been a different story just a few months ago, but aligning employees to a shared mission or purpose is pivotal right now, especially for businesses undergoing drastic changes. Ace Hardware, deemed an essential business at the start of the pandemic, has made adjustments to embrace employees in a shared mission. “I think we all want to be part of something bigger,” said Christine Doucet, director of the Ace Hardware Foundation and head of employee engagement. “To me, that's the ultimate engagement when you can tie that passion and purpose together. That's when magic happens,” she said, noting that one of the company’s mottos is “we exist to help others.” She added: “Regardless of your role, whether you're working in a store, in our warehouse, or here at corporate, we all have that same mission.” What that mission means in the detail of daily work is something that needs to be clearly and constantly communicated. Managers have a responsibility to prioritize connection with their employees and meet them where they are, not just where we hope they will be. Pavese-Kaplan added: “What do we want our employees to leave [work] knowing, feeling, doing? And if we're seeing a lot of redundancy in our goals, that's a red flag for us to say, OK, are we just doing this to make ourselves feel better? Or are we really checking in with the employees to see what they need at any given point and really letting them lead, vs. responding from a fear response?” Compassion for the Unknown As the pandemic wears on, what was once hopefully pictured as a few months of uncertainty has dragged on to form a much more complex idea of the future. The antidote? Compassion. “It's really important to acknowledge that better health and wellbeing, and safety psychologically and physically, also lead to better performance,” said Anderson Jones, adding: “But better health and wellbeing will lead to happier, more whole people. And that drives engagement.” Companies dealing with layoffs and furloughs are in a pickle here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take actions to lessen the harm to morale. TTEC has continued to provide benefits to furloughed employees as well as partnering with sister companies to help find jobs for those employees in open positions elsewhere. For Zillow’s part, the company leads layoff conversations with transparency, making sure not to promise things they can’t back up. “That's where you can run into trouble,” warned McLeod. For employees with children at home, compassionate engagement also includes having permission to step away from their work to address family matters, which may be something they struggle to speak out about or ask managers for. “We were hearing from our employees that they were feeling guilty. Like, ‘I have to help my kids. Is that OK?’,” said Doucet. And they may ask themselves: “Am I doing all the right things and being pulled in all directions?” Added Doucet: “I felt that too, and so what our leadership did was literally give permission and acknowledge what was happening, that we're all in different situations. As long as you get your work done, we'll be flexible. And I felt that weight lifted off some of our folks’ shoulders.” Listening intently to the concerns of employees, whether they’re parents or not, is a key skill for managers to sharpen if they hope to engage their workforce in meaningful ways. Recently, the Black Lives Matter Movement has propelled this need for compassionate communication and understanding of employee needs. Many companies have encouraged their black employees to speak openly about their experiences if they want to, which itself can be exhausting. McLeod said this was a meaningful moment at Zillow Group. “There were ‘aha’ moments happening everywhere. We went from a company that was not making statements on social justice to one that's now saying racism has no home here and educating employees on Juneteenth and creating multiple spaces not only for our black employees to be able to process and grieve and share what that experience is like, but also we're putting out resources for allies, for employees and for managers. Everyone is watching what is happening in the world right now.” “Look, we are all human,” added Anderson Jones. “And we are all going through this at exactly the same time. And the way that we were experiencing it is not identical. That ability to be human and open about what those distractions are, or about what those changes are, has created a different type of relationship amongst all of us.” Thank you to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Mimi Hayes is a New York-based author, comedian, and assistant director of content at From Day One. You can read her work at mimihayes.com, check out her podcast "Mimi and The Brain," or find her first book, a comedic memoir about her traumatic brain injury on Amazon.

Mimi Hayes | June 30, 2020

How Internships Are Being Reinvented During the Pandemic

On the path from school to a career, internships are often pivotal experiences. They give students access to on-the-job experience, networking opportunities, and mentorships that can propel them into their future careers. But what happens to internships during a global pandemic, when so many workplaces are closed? How can fresh talent get their feet in the door if that door is temporarily locked? While hundreds of companies simply canceled their summer internships for the year, many others have made valiant attempts to shift programs online while keeping alive the integrity of a traditional internship. Moving to a virtual format can present challenges, but the situation has inspired companies to come up with creative workarounds. In a recent From Day One webinar focused on the future of internships, a panel of HR leaders said they have not only pivoted their internship programs, but enhanced them in some ways as well. “We're really thinking through being intentional about the goals for our program and making sure that those experiences are as impactful in a virtual environment as they are in the in-person type of environment,” says Brooke Rice, senior director of workplace learning at NAF, a non-profit that brings educators and business leaders together to create student internships. Highlights of the discussion, which was moderated by Seth Green, founding director of the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility at Loyola University Chicago: New and Improved Programs At this time last year, summer-internship programs were in full swing, with millions of students reporting to work. But this March, HR leaders suddenly realized they needed to make radical changes. “It's just kind of an interesting year, right?” said Tom Kleber, senior manager of university relations at Biogen, a biotech company focused on neurological diseases. “Right as we were wrapping up recruiting, that's when things started to come together, when we realized the traditional internship experience probably wasn't going to happen.” One of the challenges was shipping laptop computers and headsets to the new interns, which for some companies meant hundreds or thousands of devices. Then there was the reinventing of programs. In an effort to revamp extracurricular activities to the remote space, Biogen includes weekly lunch-and-learn Zoom calls, as well as video-game competitions. Kleber said his team’s favorite is “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes,” a game that encourages players to work together to defuse a bomb. Zillow Group, the real-estate hub, provides “swag” and care packages to get interns started. The company even sends interns a house plant, encouraging them to set up their home offices in creative ways. “It gives the interns a little bit of a sense of belonging because they all have the same items in front of them. And they're all kind of in it together, even though they are dispersed,” said Scott Moore, Zillow’s senior manager of early-talent recruiting. At Fox Corp., interns have infinite access to master classes and unique online experiences to take the place of in-person networking events, said Mercheley Beuns, Fox’s VP of talent acquisition. Companies have adapted in other ways too. NAF, which partners with the global professional-services firm KPMG to operate the Future Ready Lab for high-school students, have expanded the program calendar so that so that students can join internship programs during the school year too. Accountability and Buy-in (From Managers Too) Interns aren’t the only ones who need attention in these new programs. Managers can also benefit from special training to make sure that interns have a rewarding experience despite the shift to a remote-work situation. “I think what we found was there were some managers, quite frankly, that were having a hard time managing their own staff remotely,” said Beuns. “And so what we did not want to do was hinder the internship experience for that intern by having them reporting to a business manager that potentially wouldn't have full onus, or the time to really give that intern a full robust experience.” Our panel, clockwise from upper left: Scott Moore of Zillow Group, Brooke Rice of NAF, Tom Kleber of Biogen, Mercheley Beuns of Fox Corp., moderator Seth Green of Loyola University Chicago, and Amanda Beaver of KPMG (Image by From Day One) Especially given the remote environment, HR leaders have needed encourage managers with interns to step up as leaders and mentors. Among the techniques: frequent check-ins and ample amounts of communication. Important too is a sense of compassion, especially since the look and feel of internships has fundamentally changed and interns may be vulnerable to feelings of isolation. “Do they remember being an intern themselves to remember the kind of guidance that they got?” asked Kleber. Motivating managers to give back in the same way they may have started their careers can bring energy to the remote office as well. Being Intentional About Diversity Conversations about race and diversity have intensified in recent weeks, but the need for active recruitment of diverse talent is an abiding one. Young people need role models, including ones who look like them. “If I am a black or Latina or queer child in this country, and I have not seen my story reflected in in your profession, I could never see myself having a place there,” says Amanda Beaver, associate director of community impact at KPMG. “And so we're really trying to close those gaps so that we can grow an increasingly inclusive and diverse future workforce. This has been how the program has been designed.” Leaders who recognize this gap can work closely with diversity-and-inclusion teams to align inclusive values with in-bound interns and their needs. This also applies to interns with family circumstances that might hamper their participation. “They [may] have parents who are essential workers and they have increased responsibilities in the home,” said Beaver of interns whose families have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. To take the pressure off individual managers, Zillow assigned additional mentors to the program. “We just wanted to make sure that they got more support than they would have in a face-to-face environment,” said Moore. Fox caters its program to intern interest as well, allowing interns to take a survey at the start to match their passions with their projects for the summer. This has a dual impact of engaging interns in their work and giving them a sense of belonging in the program. Inspiring Stories to Keep the Program Alive For companies that might be on the fence about keeping their internship programs going under these difficult circumstances, our panelists offered some inspiring reminders. “I think it's really important for businesses to also acknowledge how important internships are to them. Interns bring their fresh eyes. They don't know the box, so they can't think inside of it yet,” says NAF’s Rice. She recalled a past intern several years ago who happened to be a teen father. Watching him climb the ladder to a successful career brought her hope and reassured their team that the program was for just that: changing the lives of the people involved. Beaver added: “Do we expect a high-school intern to walk away with technical accounting skills? Of course not. But we think they walk away knowing how to look at a problem from many angles, and focus on asking as many questions as possible instead of seeking the right answer.” Internships have the potential to not only jump-start a young person’s career, but also gives companies an opportunity to welcome young people into their industries, sometimes as life-long professionals with impressive careers. Of a past intern, Moore remarked: “Fast forward five years from there, she's now an adjunct professor at North Carolina A&T State University. She's also a career coach and has started her own business. But that first internship experience really gave her the opportunity to learn about what a career in accounting could do, and all the different ways you could branch off from it.” “We're all learning this together,” said Rice. “And so the interns really bring in that kind of new energy, new vibe, new things to think about as we are learning our way through this. And for those of you in the audience who haven't had an intern before, get one. It's an amazing experience. You'll learn a lot about yourself and a lot about others.” Thank you to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Mimi Hayes is a New York-based author, comedian, and assistant director of content at From Day One. You can read her work at mimihayes.com, check out her podcast "Mimi and The Brain," or find her first book, a comedic memoir about her traumatic brain injury on Amazon.

Mimi Hayes | June 29, 2020

The Workplace Web: Helping Employees Stay Connected and Involved

Especially for remote workers, quality communication is king these days. Most of us don’t have the luxury of popping our heads around our computers to ask our coworkers a question or pause at the snack bar to update them on the coming and goings of our lives. Instead, we turn to our screens, and our colleagues behind their own screens, for guidance. There’s no shortage of digital work tools these days, but which platforms stand out from the pack? Are there tools to actually help us get our jobs done while staying connected, but don’t just add to our digital distractions? How can these digital spaces better engage our employees and leaders? From Day One talked with Shaun Slattery, director of change management at LumApps, platform for workplace communication, community, and collaboration. Among our questions for him: how can leaders leverage technology to keep employees both engaged and productive? Some highlights: From Day One: Why is effective communication such a priority right now? Slattery: [Managers] have to execute communication well and thoughtfully. And in order to execute well, you really need to know what's going on in your organization. And so that bottom-up communication is important to have, to be aware of, and to mine for insights into new market opportunities and new cost-saving measures. Across every organization there's a wealth of knowledge in the minds of all the employees. Yet they lose a ton of time fishing around or asking six different people, ‘Hey, do you know where the latest X is?’ Or, ‘Is this the most recent version of Y?’ If we can serve up a platform where that's very findable, and easy for a company to manage its own content, that can really bring a lot of benefits. The other thing is, once you've found which direction you're going to go as an organization, how quickly can you align employees with that direction and get them engaged and involved? I always talk about strategic alignment like this: It doesn't happen when you issue a decree. The alignment happens through dialogue. I experienced a great example of that several years ago, when I was part of an organization that had just gone public. I think we had a bad quarter. And the CIO explained what the call to Wall Street would be like. And it was an opportunity for us to discuss through commenting platforms. We were able to ask questions. And it was through that dialogue that we bought in [to the company’s position]. And even if not everybody agreed with all the messages, we at least had heard what the rationale was. And in terms of achieving actual alignment with strategic objectives, there's nothing more powerful than that. What are some communications challenges that organizations face? And how does LumApps help to alleviate those concerns? When an organization has an office, they put a lot of effort into the front-door experience of how you come into work and what that office environment is like. Organizations need to be every bit as mindful of how they build the digital employee experience as they do the physical employee experience. Too often organizations don't put enough effort into that. If my front door to my organization is my email inbox, or a Slack channel, or what have you, the organization themselves have very little control over the look and feel of that experience. But if it's a social intranet, or a very customizable portal, my company can put a lot of attention and detail into what my experience is when I land on that LumApps homepage. What information is coming to me and how does it look and feel? Having a digital front door to my company can be a very powerful thing in terms of crafting an employee experience. It's a one-stop shop to get to all the 30 different applications I might need to get to in the course of a workweek. In some cases, I no longer have to go to two, three, four different applications in order to answer one question. Sometimes that information can be pulled together for me in one place through integration capabilities, and that's something that's very exciting. In LumApps, it’s easy to make that collaboration more public and discoverable, if you want, which can go a long way to improving company-wide coordination. [Another] challenge that organizations face is the silo-ing of information. And that happens if collaboration is happening primarily via email–or even phone and Zoom meetings if there's only a handful of people on that call. How does anyone else become aware of what went on in that meeting, unless notes are posted or something like that? Same with chat-based applications like Slack, which does great at supporting very local collaboration or team-level collaboration. But there's a real need to disseminate what happens at that level out to the wider organization and increase visibility. What is your role at LumApps? My role is director of change management. But what's important to know is that our change management is focused on helping our customers deliver LumApps into their organizations. My focus is to help our customers maximize adoption, employee engagement, and therefore maximize the value of LumApps to them as they roll out an exciting new technology to their employees. Shaun Slattery, director of change management at LumApps (Photo courtesy of LumApps) What unique services does LumApps provide? As a platform, we offer the ability to target communications based on user's profile information. So that's always a challenge for organizations: How do I get the right information to the right person at the right time? And our content-targeting capabilities really help there. We've also got a good balance of push and pull communications. So it's easy to target communications to specific audiences. But we also have capabilities where employees can select what they want to follow and be notified of. And then finally, there's great bi-directional conversational capability. Through commenting and discussions, we can flatten some of the hierarchy and break down silos so folks can hear from disparate members of their employee population. Has the usage of this platform changed during the current coronavirus pandemic? There's this capability in our platform called ‘Communities,’ where teams or communities of interest can set up their own area for discussion and collaboration that can be as open or as closed as they wish it to be. So there's opportunities for private collaboration or sensitive information. For example: an area for the New York City office to share ‘Hey, how are folks sourcing groceries?’ Or, ‘How are we approaching the possible return to the office and making that safe and manageable for employees?’ Most of our customers have popped up communities for remote-working best practices, as many people have been thrust into new work situations by having to work from home. There has just been a real hunger for information about how to do it well and how folks are coping. And these kinds of collaborative places where employees can share and post pictures and things like that have really given them an opportunity to feel it together. And that's also important for an organization's ability to move through this, is for their folks to feel banded together as an organization. A lot of companies are supporting social advocacy right now, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement. Excitingly, LumApps has a social-advocacy module that can be purchased as part of the platform. It gives owners the ability to post written content that they would like employees to share on social media. And how this works best is when organizations populate that with content from their community-engagement programs. If they are participating in social-advocacy events out in the community and are creating content around that, it would normally just go through the organization’s official channel. But the social-advocacy module provides an opportunity to say, ‘Here's something else we're doing. We'd love it if you would share that with your personal social networks on Twitter or LinkedIn,’ for example. And that does two things really well. One, it helps employees have an easy way to help spread the message, especially those messages that they're proud of. And so if my organization has Diversity and Inclusion Employee Resource Groups, and they have activities going on, and I wish to support that and push that out, great! Another powerful thing about that is employees can be an organization's best brand ambassadors. If they're invested in those messages and the social-advocacy activities of their organization, they have an opportunity to amplify that. And that expresses their personal values as well. That's the best marketing that you can get: an invested and engaged employee who's proud of the work their company is doing. What’s your advice for companies wanting to take advantage of the LumApps platform or reorganize their “digital front doors”? They [may] have a ton of digital information, and that’s part of their challenge as well. You should do a digital spring cleaning every year and kind of make an event of it at your company, and encourage all employees to go and clean up and update and get rid of stuff, just as we do in our homes each spring. It can be useful to do that in your digital environments as well. I would encourage organizations to give themselves plenty of time to do this. To really have a successful social intranet you're going to want to involve employees. It takes a village to come together and make some decisions and agree upon how you want to manage information. And that has little to do with the platform itself and more of how to manage information in large, complex companies. And that takes some coordination. It's important for organizations to really get moving on these conversations and be very thoughtful in how they are going to organize their information, as well as how they are going to get employees aligned and engaged so that they can deliver a great employee experience. Mimi Hayes is a New York-based author, comedian, and assistant director of content at From Day One. You can read her work at mimihayes.com, check out her podcast "Mimi and The Brain," or find her first book, a comedic memoir about her traumatic brain injury on Amazon.

Opinion

Is Facebook a Media Company? That's Not Up to Mark Zuckerberg

Editor's note: this story was originally published on Techonomy.com Facebook is facing, finally, the historic moment that many of its critics, including me, have long expected. Its true customers–advertisers–are saying Facebook cannot continue to pretend to be “neutral” about dishonest and hateful speech. The resulting societal harm is too great. That opinion had already become something of a consensus for many influential societal actors, including government leaders in most democratic countries, human rights advocates, journalists who cover the company, and much of the public. Even many Facebook employees have come to agree. But up until now, the most important and influential group had mostly kept silent. Facebook is a near-miraculous environment for advertisers large and small. Its ability to target users based on fine-grained information about their personality and preferences often yields extraordinary results for companies. That is the primary reason the company’s revenues have grown so quickly—in 2019 they exceeded $70 billion. That, unbelievably, is almost 10X what revenues were in 2013. And Facebook’s net margin last year was over 33%–meaning that for every dollar of revenue it kept 33 cents, after all expenses and taxes. Very few large companies have ever been so profitable. That profit is because of Facebook’s success selling advertising. So if collective dissatisfaction among advertisers were to grow, the company’s response would inevitably be unlike its reaction to pushback from any other quarter. Since it has generally ignored all its other critics, those of us who feel it is genuinely harming society have reason to hope this time is different. And a major movement has emerged. In mid-June a coalition of U.S. civil rights groups including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and Color of Change called for advertisers to boycott the company for the month of July, in protest. A newspaper ad they purchased said Facebook “allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbert, Rayshard Brooks and so many others. They amplified white nationalists…[and] they turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression on their platform.” The ad concluded with a message for Facebook: “Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence.” In a statement, Color of Change President Rashad Robinson said, “Facebook’s failure of leadership has actively stoked the racial hatred we see in our country and even profits off its proliferation.” That is a powerful and uniquely resonant accusation in this fraught moment. Outrage has been growing in recent months and weeks as Facebook gave favorable treatment to incendiary posts from President Trump, and seemed generally to bend over backwards to accommodate rightwing speech, even if it contained falsehoods. Twitter, by contrast, attached warnings to several posts by the president, statements Facebook left unchanged. And the company has drawn widespread opprobrium by adopting an active policy, repeatedly defended by Mark Zuckerberg, that politicians are explicitly allowed to lie in paid advertising purchased on the platform. A group of outraged ex-employees wrote a protest letter to Zuckerberg, saying that Facebook “claims that providing warnings about a politician’s speech is inappropriate, but removing content from citizens is acceptable, even if both are saying the same thing. That is not a noble stand for freedom. It is incoherent, and worse, it is cowardly.” At first, a number of important but generally smaller advertisers announced they would join the ad protest–including The North Face and REI, owned by VF Corp., as well as other youth-oriented outdoor goods brands including Patagonia, Eddie Bauer, and Arc’teryx, plus freelance platform Upwork, Magnolia Pictures, and, significantly, Ben & Jerry’s. The ice-cream maker is a subsidiary of global consumer goods giant Unilever. A digital ad agency for Unilever, 360i, part of global ad giant Dentsu, publicly endorsed the boycott, saying “Any social platform that earns profits by amplifying the voices of their community must have a zero tolerance policy for hate.” Then the breakout happened. On June 26, Unilever itself, the 33rd-largest advertiser on Facebook in the first quarter, had pulled ads for all its brands indefinitely, and not just from Facebook and Instagram but from Twitter, too. “Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society,” the company said in a statement. Meanwhile, telecoms giant Verizon, too, had joined. Unilever said its move would last at least through the end of the year, and Verizon said it was stopping “until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable.” The chief executive of the World Federation of Advertisers told the New York Timesthat this appears to be an “inflection point” for Facebook. Pressure appears to be growing on really big advertisers like Amazon, Samsung, and Procter & Gamble. It is a big deal. Mark Zuckerberg has insisted forever that Facebook was not a “media company.” But media companies like newspapers or television stations, for example, need to ensure that everything they carry reflects well on the company’s environment and brand. A key reason media companies do that is to maintain a safe environment for advertising. Zuckerberg instead says Facebook is a “neutral platform” that is committed to amplifying all voices, and thus bears no responsibility except in narrow cases mostly involving violation of the law. But ultimately, a company that puts viewers in front of advertising to make money is unequivocally a media company. And those advertisers are finally, in this case, telling Facebook that yes, it really is that kind of media company, with the responsibilities that go with it. We ordinary people, the users of Facebook, are often properly described as “the product.” We are what attracts the real customers, the advertisers. For any company, paying customers are ones who can most effectively demand change. Facebook loves to say, as it did in this instance, that it still has “work to do,” to deal with hate speech and socially harmful behavior on its platform. Predictably, communications chief Nick Clegg told journalists this week “we need to do more,” and as usual bragged about “significant progress.” Facebook ad chief Carolyn Everson issued a statement saying “Our conversations with marketers and civil rights organizations are about how, together, we can be a force for good.” But to truly become a force for good, Facebook has to take a stand. There can be no truly neutral platform for speech. So what are its real values? Is it big enough to live up to this historic moment? Is it for protecting people, whatever the cost? If this so-public company cannot answer that question sufficiently during today’s historic awakening regarding racial justice, many may begin to see companies that advertise on Facebook as tantamount to ones with a statue of Robert E. Lee on their front steps. David Kirkpatrick is the founder and editor in chief of Techonomy, a conference series and journalism platform focused on the intersection of technology and the global economy. Kirkpatrick is also the author of the bestselling book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World.” He spent 25 years at Fortune, and founded and hosted its Brainstorm and Brainstorm Tech conferences

davidkirkpatrick | June 26, 2020

Feature

Corporate America Wakes Up to Systemic Racism. But What Happens Next?

The NFL takes a knee. Juneteenth becomes a corporate holiday. NASCAR bans the confederate flag. The stereotypical product mascots Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Mrs. Butterworth are suddenly retired. The Oscars promise to be not-so-white anymore. Band-Aid says it will start making bandages in darker shades. A parade of corporate press releases announces that companies will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fight racial injustice and inequality. And at companies with widespread complaints about toxic workplaces for people of color, heads roll. All of these things could have happened over the course of decades, but they unfolded in a matter of days. Suddenly, Corporate America was promising to make the well-being of Black America a top priority. It was not necessarily a matter of courage. After the horrific police killing of George Floyd and the waves of protest that circled the globe, corporations could see which way the wind was blowing. According to many recent polls, a two-thirds majority of Americans support the protests against policy brutality and racial discrimination. Almost overnight, Black Lives Matter has gone from marginal to mainstream, from argument to consensus. The corporate turnabout began earlier this month with a flurry of statements offering contrition about past neglect and support for the BLM movement. Many were filled with promises to “do better” and “do more,” with some offering pledges of money and proposing changes in corporate and public policy. Adidas, under pressure from employees of color and their allies, committed $120 million to programs that support Black communities. As the company announced on Twitter, “First, we need to give credit where it’s long overdue: The success of Adidas would be nothing without Black athletes, Black artists, Black employees, and Black customers. Period.” Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, whose company pledged $10 million to fight racism, wrote in a LinkedIn post: “As the CEO of the world’s largest health-care company, I must state unequivocally that racism in any form is unacceptable, and that Black lives matter. And as a white man, I also need to acknowledge the limits of my own life experience and listen to those who have faced systemic injustice since the day they were born.” From IBM came a letter to Congress by CEO Arvind Krishna, who said the company would like to work with lawmakers “in pursuit of justice and racial equity, focused in police reform, responsible use of technology, and broadening skills and educational opportunities.” IBM, as well as Amazon and Microsoft, said they would back away from selling facial-recognition technology, at least for now, bowing to concerns about its misuse or abuse by law-enforcement authorities. While some of the declarations took flak for being disingenuous or too-little-too-late, they were generally welcomed as a potential turning point. “I think the statements and the additional efforts are extremely valuable,” Marion Brooks, VP of diversity and inclusion at Novartis Corp., told From Day One. Yet as dramatic as it all was, skepticism abounded too, given that “many of the same companies expressing solidarity have contributed to systemic inequality, targeted the black community with unhealthy products and services, and failed to hire, promote and fairly compensate Black men and women,” wrote David Gelles in the New York Times. “Corporate America has failed Black America,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a member of the board of PepsiCo, and who is Black. “Even after a generation of Ivy League educations and extraordinary talented African-Americans going into corporate America, we seem to have hit a wall.” Indeed, while African-Americans constitute about 13% of the U.S. population, their representation tends to be in the low single digits on corporate boards, at the C-Suite executive level, and in technical roles. Facebook has just a 1.5% black tech force, compared with Apple at 6%. Yet this inequality represents just the top of the income pyramid. Overall, since 2000, the wage gap between Blacks and whites has grown significantly. That feeds the huge wealth gap. On average, white households have nearly 6.5 times the wealth of black households, reports Bloomberg. Inequalities in wealth and access to health care have contributed to the vastly disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color. As Corporate America began to reckon with these realities, here’s how the responses unfolded: Statements and Gestures One of the earliest statements, on May 29, came from Nike, which posted on social media a simple black square with a saying in white letters protesting police brutality and racial injustice: “For Once, Don’t Do It.” Alluding to its trademark motto, the statement was in keeping with the company’s voice on social issues, including its ad campaign in support of Colin Kaepernick with the line, “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” Before long Nike’s white-on-black design became the default format for corporate statements, as dozens followed the template, diluting the impact. It became an exercise applying corporate branding to popular sentiment. “Unfortunately, the reality of the groupthink, even if backed by the best of intentions, transformed these messages into homogenous–and largely meaningless–wallpaper,” opined Jeff Beers in Fast Company. (Nike, for its part, followed through by committing $40 million to social-justice organizations.) Other companies attempted more original statements. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, knelt with staffers in a branch office, wearing shorts, sneakers and a mask. Chase says that it’s making multibillion-dollar investments to address racial and economic inequality, “particularly for the Black community.” Even so, advocates of social equity want to see results more than symbols. “There’s a lot of performative allyship going around,” Y-Vonne Hutchinson, CEO and founder of diversity consulting firm ReadySet told the Washington Post. “Nobody’s asking for a CEO to take a knee. You take a knee after you change your policies.” Well then, at historic moments like these, what are the most important words and deeds for companies to get across? Business Insider, with the help of a PR veteran, analyzed 27 memos from business leaders responding to George Floyd’s death. The conclusions: “The strongest memos acknowledged where leaders and their organizations had fallen short. They confronted discomfort head on, and invited difficult conversations. And they outlined concrete plans for cultivating diversity and inclusion, both in the workplace and in the U.S. more generally.” Many companies hurried to embrace a prospectively more durable gesture by recognizing Juneteenth, the day commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. Nike, Twitter, Target and Spotify were among the small but growing number of companies designating June 19 as a paid company holiday. Changing Positions and Products The NFL, which has fought with its players for years over their rights to protest police brutality by taking a knee during the national anthem, did a complete 180-degree turn. “We, the NFL, admit we were wrong,” the league tweeted in an official statement. In a video accompanying the tweet, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “Without Black players, there would be no National Football League. And the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of black players, coaches, fans and staff.” The turnabout had resonance far beyond sports, given how President Trump had exploited the controversy as a wedge issue, painting Kaepernick and fellow protesters as unpatriotic. Shunned by teams as too controversial, Kaepernick has not played professional football since 2016. Other organizations decided quickly to change policies that seemed discriminatory, culturally unaware, or dismissive of the different needs of diverse customers. Walmart said it would no longer place “multicultural hair and beauty products” in locked cases, which it had been doing in about a dozen stores. “Predominantly African-American people are buying those products, so the assumption is we’re thieves,” a customer told NBC News. NASCAR, a bastion of the white working class, said it will no longer allow the Confederate flag to be displayed at events and properties, while driver Bubba Wallace, the first full-time African-American NASCAR driver in decades, earlier this month raced in a car with a Black Lives Matter paint scheme. The moment proved a catalyst for change in products that for more than a century had continued to display mascots that seemed to endure from the plantation era, despite complaints over the years. Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben and the Cream of Wheat chef were all retired or placed under review by the companies that produce them. Where did these stereotypical characters come from? “The images of placid, smiling Black Americans on commercial products were often created during times of racial upheaval. Characters like Aunt Jemima, who was first depicted as a mammy, followed Reconstruction when white people were scared of what it meant to live alongside newly freed slaves,” reported the New York Times, citing an interview with Kevin D. Thomas, a professor of multicultural branding in the Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies Program at Marquette University. (The Frito Bandito, by the way, made his exit in 1971.) Band-Aids, a Johnson & Johnson product, have been made since 1920 in flesh color, which was fine as long as your color was a kind of soft pink. Earlier this month, the company announced that it will start offering “a range of bandages in light, medium and deep shades of Brown and Black skin tones that embrace the beauty of diverse skin.” Commented Ishena Robinson in The Root: “A whole damn century from the time it was first introduced, Band-Aid brand has finally come to the realization that Black people exist, have skin, get boo-boos, and need bandages.” Some companies started out on the wrong foot in their policy declarations. Starbucks, which in 2018 had closed its 8,000 U.S. stores for a day of anti-bias training after the misguided arrest of two Black men, responded to the current upsurge in protests by stating in a memo that their baristas and other employees were forbidden to wear shirts or accessories declaring support for Black Lives Matter. When a backlash ensued, the company not only reversed itself, but for good measure said it will produce 250,000 corporate T-shirts promoting Black Lives Matter to be given to employees and sold to customers. That may have been a well-meaning gesture, but this company too was criticized for engaging in performative allyship rather than concrete measures to boost employees and community members. Going Beyond Words Investing large amounts of money to create equity and new opportunity for Black Americans is a welcome measure. Apple pledged $100 million, while companies including Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Levi’s were among the name brands promising financial support. Less recognized were employees taking advantage of already-established corporate matching-fund programs to help maximize their donating power. In the week following George Floyd’s killing, the matching-fund management company Benevity saw more than $100 million donated through such programs to civil-rights and related causes. Even more direct efforts were shown by companies launching programs to train more young people of color for the skilled jobs of the future. Techtonic Group, a Boulder-based software developer, plans to add 100 black and Hispanic apprentices to its Techtonic Academy program, a paid, 14-week course sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Denver Business Journal reported. “We came to the conclusion that everybody’s putting up platitudes on social media and that doesn’t really do anything for anybody,” said CEO Heather Terenzio. “So we starting talking about our apprenticeship program and what we could do to help.” What other measures should companies pursue, beyond words of good intent? "Social statements mean nothing without real actions and investments," Elizabeth A. Morrison, VP of diversity & belonging for Live Nation, told From Day One. "I’m speaking specifically of commitments to increasing workforce diversity, tactics to drive equality and inclusion with clients (like diversity riders in contracts and supplier diversity), donations to social-justice organizations, and supporting legislation for equal justice. Ideally companies are doing many of these, and/or taking other action that is equally powerful and sustainable. Long-term commitment and partnerships are needed for this not to become the flavor of the month." Indeed, the Black Lives Matter movement strongly suggests that corporations need to get used to a new dynamic of social activism. Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of the news organization Axios, calls it a "bottom-up revolution" that presents a stark new reality for American CEOs. "Doing good is no longer a niche. It's a necessity," he wrote on Axios. "The judgment CEOs feared most in the past was pesky reporters or regulators. The judgment they should fear the most now is idealistic employees on the inside and the social media warriors on the outside." While this presents a new peril, there is a potential upside to embracing this change: "We have found the new generation will work as hard or harder than we did if we provide this clarity of purpose and rolling, unvarnished dialogue." Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | June 18, 2020

Feature

Calling Out the Implicit Bias in the American Workplace

Earlier this year, before live events were cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Brooklyn Historical Society hosted a panel discussion titled “Take Your Feet Off Our Necks: Implicit Bias in the Workplace,” exploring how “women and people of color all too often face microaggression, diminution, and exclusion in a workforce that equates white collar with white male.” From Day One contributor Angelica Frey, who attended the event, offers highlights from the conversation, which resonates deeply with America’s sharp new focus on systemic inequality. When Vincent Southerland, now the executive director of New York University’s Center on Race, Inequality + the Law, was working as a public defender, he was mainly active in courtrooms in the South, representing people on death row. In most of his encounters with people, he was mistaken for a paralegal, a private investigator, or a family member of his own clients, said Southerland. “The reality that I was a lawyer representing my client was the last thing on people’s minds.” A similar phenomenon routinely happens to his wife, he said. When she goes to a meeting with her white intern, who is much younger than her, she ends up being the one who, people assume, is the intern. The real intern is typically mistaken for the supervisor. These are just a few episodes of systemic racism that people of color encounter in the workplace. “Systemic racism is structured racism that is endemic, and when I consider what that racism looks like, I can’t help consider white racial framing,” said sociologist Tsedale Melaku, the author of You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer, which examines how this phenomenon is deeply rooted in law firms and the corporate world in regard to women of color. A phrase such as “you look so young,” explained fellow panelist Jamia Wilson, executive director and publisher of The Feminist Press at City University of New York, when uttered towards a person of color, “… is code for Black.” Moderated by Erica Chito-Childs, chairman of the sociology department at Hunter College, the speakers explained how the American workplace–including the corporate world, academia, and creative industries–falls short in rooting out bias despite oft-stated intentions to do better. The speakers offered proactive steps for both executives and employees to make much-needed course corrections. “Diversity and Inclusion” as Buzzwords In Corporate America, the term “diversity” over-promises and under-delivers, like the more recent term “woke.” In fact, due to the inherent conditioning of centuries-old beliefs rooted in white patriarchy, people of color are still bound to the false promises of the myth of meritocracy, asserted Wilson. “We’re taught in this culture that, Oh, if I just strive a little more, if I just prove a little more, someday I will achieve my way out of this,” said Wilson, “when by design you will always continue to strive and the only the people who benefit from that are the people who are making money off of that.” Diversity efforts have been in place for 30 years, yet, wondered Melaku, “where are the Black people?” She used as an example one of the firms she surveyed in her book You Don’t Look like a Lawyer. The firm had 11 white men and one white woman at the top, yet they billed themselves as 25% diverse. The person classified as a “person of color” was a “white-passing Latino,” who, thanks to his appearance, could benefit from the privilege that comes with passing as white, said Melaku. Her advice: stop using the word “diverse” unless you’re prepared to show the receipts. As for inclusion: “It’s more like who are you excluding?” continued Melaku. “You need to think about how we use language to exclude people. That's also very critical to this argument.” Southerland elaborated on this dynamic. “Without power, it’s just window dressing,” he said. “To me, the diversity thing let people off the hook, that’s what we have to dig into and be brutally honest about.” Will it be easy? No. “It is painful, there’s no zero-sum win,” he continued. “A lot of Americans want to get over racism and such and move on and have the benefits of utopia, but people have to give something up, and they should because they obtained it unfairly. ” Women of Color Have It Worse Than Most In the workplace, women of color encounter both racial and sexist bias, now defined as intersectionality. In the traditionally white, male hierarchy of Corporate America, “if you’re not gaining access to these social networks and events that happen in the workplace, then you’re losing out of opportunities to network with seniors,” said Melaku. “… and access to sponsorship too: Do the whites see you, a Black woman, as a viable candidate? How can you gain an organic relationship?” Then there is the matter of invisible labor. “I talk a lot about labor: invisible labor, labor that is uncompensated and unrecognized labor in addition to the work you do,” said Melaku. “Negotiating race and gender aggression is taking away from the work you’re supposed to be doing in order to build your craft or career.” She is referring to the resources that women of color, especially Black women, have to spend in order to be included in the work space they inhabit. These include: the mental toll it takes to endure racialized aggressions; relational labor, meaning the effort of building a language to communicate with privileged people who do not partake in that struggle in order to have a satisfying work relationship with them; and the financial cost of having to try to conform to a white, Europhile aesthetic, investing in hair and makeup–often in vain, Melaku said. “Diversity 101” Initiatives Are Mostly Ineffectual The panel discussion took place earlier this year at the Brooklyn Historical Society (Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society) Ostensibly progressive workspaces now have their Bias 101 and Diversity 101-type workshops, but they tend to be adjacent to a status-quo work culture. They don’t exactly rock the boat. “If we talk about diversity,” said Melaku, “We need to be able to talk about racism and what it means in that space. We should be uncomfortable.” Wilson recalled a work situation where using the word micro-aggression was making the white higher-ups uncomfortable, and it was only when the sarcastic suggestion of the word “micro-inequities” was brought forward that the white men (of a certain generation, she specified) felt comfortable, as that new word would invite more people into the conversation, she said. “It’s an aggression to have to name an aggression in a way that makes you feel comfortable,” Wilson deadpanned. “There’s focus on the perpetrators of harm–did they mean to be racist and sexist?,” Southerland observed, noting that intentions are not what it’s all about. “The hurt person’s perspective is largely ignored.” And in the case of a diverse space? “You find that people of color and women of color are not only bearing the brunt of the harm, but end up comforting the folks that are doing the harming,” he continued. “Part of the challenge is to have folks who are in position of power take that mantle and do the work themselves. Don’t put the onus on the black person.” The circumstance with the highest likelihood for change? “When money is affected,” said Melaku grimly, like when a client demands diversity–and the corporation that won’t deliver ends up losing the client. “When people are losing money because of certain things, then things will change.” Keeping Receipts Is Paramount In all, despite the way workplaces make efforts to be “woke,” the onus of speaking up and holding people accountable is being put on black people. “Whatever I say I have to triple-check because people come for me,” said Melaku. The same goes for documenting racist behavior. It’s important, the panelists all agreed, to keep a log to document certain behavioral patterns. The reason: unless the perpetrator uses the most overtly racist terms, it’s hard to build a case of discrimination. The same goes for emotional labor, the speakers agreed. Employees should track how often they find themselves doing the unpaid labor of being the educator/therapist of white folks who act badly out of ignorance. This is also true when it comes to owning up to one’s own mistakes. “There have been things I've said on Twitter that I'm now not proud of, and I have left those things up because I don't believe that by deleting such a tweet, I’m not actually doing anything except kind of like cleansing my ego,” said Wilson. “I want to actually leave it up that though I learned, I tripped, I got called out for it. And now we move forward with accountability from the community.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | June 15, 2020

Mimi Hayes | June 12, 2020

Giving Employees a Hand When They Need it Most

When disaster strikes, will your employees be able to handle the unexpected expenses, even relatively small ones? Many probably cannot, as research by the Federal Reserve has shown. In light of this, employers who don’t want their workers’ lives to be upended by natural disasters and other emergencies have increasingly turned to a relatively new kind of employee benefit: employee relief funds, which give out cash grants to help workers get through their crises. Events including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina provided the inspiration to develop such benefits, a need now underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic and the increase in extreme-weather events. A From Day One webinar last week explored how companies can launch employee relief funds (ERFs), how they work, and how they’ve had an outsized impact in helping workers and their families. Highlights of the conversation: “Our mission at Truist is to inspire and build better lives and communities,” said Lynette Bell, president of the Truist Foundation, the charitable arm of Charlotte-based Truist Financial Corp. “That applies to those 50,000 employees. We want to ensure that they have the opportunity to thrive.” In partnership with E4E Relief, Truist has raised funds, some donated by employees, to help workers in distress pay for essentials like food and emergency home repairs. Leading with Compassion A key component of creating safety nets for employees during emergencies is compassion in the face of the unexpected, says Holly Welch Stubbing, CEO of E4E Relief. “We were committed very early on creating a mantra around compassion, readiness and excellence, trying to treat people well because they are in the most difficult moment–maybe in some cases–in their lives,” she told moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. By helping employees in a jam, companies can benefit in terms of goodwill, building a sense of unity and purpose in the workforce and the communities they reside in. “Corporate America, their greatest asset is their people,” said Stubbing. When those people have a flooded basement because of a hurricane, or a loss of income from a furlough, they will long appreciate that their employer had their back. “Things happen to us as we live every day,” said Bell. “We want to make sure that when those catastrophic or unexpected things happen in life, this organization is there to support them.” How Does It Work Exactly? Companies looking to provide such a benefit for their employees often turn to non-profit partners like E4E to administer the funds, which are set up according to tax codes that allow the relief money to be distributed on a tax-free basis. Working in a partnership, the companies and nonprofits are able to assess needs and design programs to fit the companies and individuals, sometimes focused on a particular situation. One such example is the Brave of Heart Fund for families of frontline health-care workers who have lost their lives battling the coronavirus. A key feature of such funds is that workers take part in the funding. At Truist, employees can donate to relief funds directly and the company may donate an additional $4 for every $1 an employee donated. “So what you're creating there, hopefully, if it's run well, is a virtuous cycle, where programs are funded in large part by employees themselves, to help their fellow employees and their peers. And then grants are awarded to those same employees in a charitable way with the best tax impacts possible,” said Stubbing. Rallying the Right Team In leading the creation of such programs, an emphasis should be put on diversity and the inclusion of new perspectives, our panelists said. “I think we've gotten smarter about asking the right questions up front and knowing who to bring to the table earlier rather than later,” said Stubbing. “I think when we first started we were afraid to do that, to be honest, because we were just a charity, but it's really important that we get the right players early on.” Our webinar speakers, from left, clockwise: Holly Welch Stubbing of E4E Relief, Lynette Bell of Truist Foundation, and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (Image by From Day One) How long does the setup process take? “Maybe there's been a [factory] that got entirely wiped out by a hurricane and they want to do something now, now, now,” said Stubbing. However, “there is a balance between quality and efficiency and I think companies that put leadership like Lynette in place understand that balance and they understand that you have to have both things at the same time. Those are the best people to work with,” Stubbing said of Bell’s role at Truist. Leadership can come from unexpected places as well. Bell mentioned engaging with community leaders, nonprofits and those with the finger on the pulse of communities at the center of crises. When these leaders are engaged and on board, the fundraising response has been overwhelming, she said. When tornadoes hit Tennessee this spring, one team raised $370,000 in a relief fund for those whose homes were destroyed. “And guess what? That was during the time of our 4-1 match,” said Bell. “Those employees really rallied into that.” The Importance of Stories When it comes to helping employees within your organization, a simple way to build morale in tough times is through sharing success stories, our panelists said. “The first week of us unveiling the Truist Cares initiative for COVID, an employee's husband got laid off right away, and their mortgage payment was due,” said Bell. Their relief fund was able to help this employee quickly. “It felt easy and seamless to them. They got their money five days later and paid their mortgage.” E4E Relief shares uplifting stories like this on its website as well, highlighting ways that employees have bounced back after natural disasters including earthquakes and hurricanes. More is surely on the way. “The predictions are that it's going to be a very active season with four major hurricanes this year,” said Stubbing. “They're predicting 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and four of those to be major hurricanes. And that gives you a 69% chance that a major hurricane will hit the US coastline.” Rallying employees to donate to these funds not only gives them a stake in their own safety nets, but empowers them to help their peers as well. Said Stubbing: “While companies are wrestling with their own revenue and their own financial challenges, you still see them trying to find ways to fund [relief efforts] in conjunction with all of the other things that they're trying to do for the employees.” Editor’s note: You can watch a playback of the webinar here and check out upcoming events on our website. Mimi Hayes is a New York-based author, comedian, and assistant director of content at From Day One. You can read her work at mimihayes.com, check out her podcast "Mimi and The Brain," or find her first book, a comedic memoir about her traumatic brain injury on Amazon.